Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Indeed, each time she was through battling one civic opponent or another, it was not as if she sought out the next dragon to slay; rather, like Cincinnatus, the statesman who relinquished the scepter of leadership after defeating each challenge to Rome, Jane returned to the work she’d been forced to give up during the crisis of the moment. Now, once again, she’d mark off hours away from her family, instruct her husband and children to let no one in to see her. And there, amid her books and notes and typewriter, she’d resume the close reading, the hard thinking, the endless laboring over words and ideas, that made her one of the premier intellectual figures of the twentieth century.

  —

  After Death and Life, Jane wrote many other books, which got respectful hearings, significant readerships, critical hosannas, and had their own fans. She wrote particularly of economics, specifically about what makes for economically healthy cities and regions; these, a little idiosyncratic, have brought no consensus within the larger economics community as to whether, as some say, they represent real genius, or are quirkily irrelevant. Other books headed off in wholly uncharted directions. She edited a book about her great-aunt and her adventures in Alaska. She wrote a children’s book. She wrote more philosophical works, structured as Platonic dialogues.

  You could say these books were all on different “subjects,” based on different bodies of fact, their author flitting from one to the other. But you could also look at them as bearing on a single overarching subject: Jane told the story of how one day when she was a child, sitting with her father on the front porch of her house in Scranton, their conversation wandered to the oak tree in their yard. “What is its purpose?” asked her father. It was a rhetorical question, of course. He was going somewhere with it, its answer embodying something like a philosophy. The tree’s purpose? What purpose did it need, really? It was alive. “I made of the answer,” Jane would recall, “that the purpose of life is to live.” She said as much to her father. “Yes,” he said, “that tree has a great push to live—any healthy, living thing does.”

  It’s natural to view The Death and Life of Great American Cities, as a book about cities, but it might better be seen as a book about death and life. The same really goes for the entirety of her work, as a chorus and conversation about life in glowing contrast to decay and death. Referring to Death and Life, she’d say she was never particularly interested in pushing one particular ideal city. Rather, “I just wanted to know how to keep the life” in it going, “which in my mind is the purpose of life.” The epigraph to the book includes a quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: “Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.” An article she wrote during World War II about jobs opening up for women fairly hums with the happy clatter of machines and industrial vibrancy. Jane watched her father restore sick people to health. She was brought up on accounts of her uncle Billy’s lusty energy, of her great-aunt’s charge into the Alaskan bush. She was distraught at the decline of Scranton, and at how a hamlet in backwoods North Carolina she visited as a teenager had declined over the years. What impressed her most about the life of great cities was not just their diversity, but their energy. It was as if, all through her own life, she sought the conditions men and women needed to make good and vital lives.

  When she was wrapped up in the Girl Scouts as a young teenager, Jane belonged “to what my friends and I thought was the finest Girl Scout troop in Scranton, Pennsylvania.” But it got too popular, too big, and the powers-that-be decided to establish a second troop, meeting in the same church, only at a different time. Jane stayed with the original troop, but soon experienced it as “boring and lackadaisical.” So one evening, she and a friend dropped in on the other troop. “What a contrast!” she’d remember thinking; it was all enthusiasm, older girls helping the younger ones, the whole “jumping with life.” Life—measure of all things. Life—roots reaching for water, leaves reaching for the sun, cities exploding with vitality, businesses booming, economies flourishing, ideas aborning. Read enough of Jane Jacobs and you see these same themes and images running like a river all through her work. No need to understand why cities decline, she counseled, only why they prosper: “The most elementary point is the most startling. There are no causes of stagnation. There are no causes of poverty. There are only causes of growth.”

  But living things never stayed as they were. Jane’s was a vision that resisted any hint of stasis, even of beauty remaining beautiful. “Think for a minute,” she wrote, “what life would be like if all we had to do was to maintain things as they already are, living passively off the creativity of the past. In such a utopia, life would be intolerably boring. Sheer maintenance and well-worn routines are drags, especially if there is no relief from them.” To settle for easy, unchanging day-to-dayness as a civic or social virtue was to her unthinkable. “The only way that dynamic systems can stay alive is constant self-renewal,” said Jane. “That goes for a person, a city, a species, a biomass, whatever.” Bob Dylan said it, not Jane, but she could have: He who’s “not busy being born is busy dying.”

  Jane’s ideal cities and civilizations were only those that could rival the freshness and vitality of her inner world.

  —

  Jane wrote most of the books not in New York, where she lived from age eighteen into her fifties, but in Toronto, Canada, to which she moved with her family in 1968. There she lived the last thirty-eight years of her life. At the time of her death, in 2006, wrote Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociologist, “Toronto grieved and remembered their Jane,” upbraiding the New York–centeredness of some of the obituaries. Jane became a Canadian citizen, and Canadians made Jacobs one of their own. She wasn’t long in Toronto before she, her husband, and her children were protesting the kinds of assaults to her new city and to common sense that she had faced back in New York. In no time she was thrust into the intellectual and political life of her city, involved in its civic discussion, friend to mayors; in her old age, people still beat a path to her door, wanting to absorb something of her wisdom.

  “Wisdom,” of course, is a fraught, old-fashioned word, but that’s how many came to see her, as a font of wisdom; one book devoted to her, a compilation of scholarly articles, is titled The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs. Once Death and Life and her second book, The Economy of Cities, had made her into a major public figure, she was often left to balance her writing time with a veritable procession of interviewers, scholars, economists, academics, politicians, planners, sometimes even schoolkids on class trips, there to meet with this famous old lady, wanting a piece of her. Strange fruit for a woman who’d had real trouble getting through high school.

  Jane Jacobs was astonishingly well read, an intellectual by any definition you cared to use, a deep and determined thinker, but she got there by a decidedly unorthodox path. At age twenty-two, when many of her high school classmates were already college graduates, she started taking courses in Columbia University’s continuing studies program. Two years later, she edited a book that grew out of one of her courses, and got it published by Columbia University Press. Yet she never got a college degree, never earned credits beyond those of a sophomore.

  Back in Scranton, Jane would write, she’d gone to public school, where she’d “learned a great deal from the teachers in the first and second grades. Thereafter I think I mostly taught myself.” One of her teachers, the story goes, asserted that towns and villages always grew up around waterfalls. Young Jane raised her hand: Scranton hadn’t. And how was she so sure? Well, just look: their little city had a modest river running through it, but no waterfalls had played any role in its growth, so there you go. That’s how she was: she looked, she read, she thought. With some preternatural gift of intellectual independence, she figured things out for herself, and said them.

  At the height of the McCarthy years, Jane replied to an “interrogatory” implicitly questioning her loyalty with a response, barren of defensiveness, that in its b
uoyant brand of Jacobsean patriotism surely must have shamed her questioners. Her first major book toppled the canonical wisdom of a whole profession. She successfully battled some of the most powerful figures in New York. At the peak of her fame and influence she picked up and left New York and started all over again in Canada.

  Now, here’s the problem: Jane seemed to possess this independence, or eccentricity, or fearlessness, or whatever it was, right from the start. (From the very start? Like, in her genes? Good luck teasing that one out.) Certainly there was something that left her immune to the pat nostrums handed down by teachers, elders, peers, and credentialed experts, that left her comfortable challenging, questioning, thinking for herself, following her own star. If this book aims to highlight any subject outside that of Jane Jacobs herself, it is that of the independent mind in conflict with received wisdom.

  —

  Everything Jane Jacobs did, both before she entered the public eye at the age of forty-five and afterward, for the rest of her life, she did between preparing meals, caring for her children, assembling Easter baskets, and tending her garden. It was only a few hours into my first spell of research in the Jane Jacobs archives at Boston College that I sensed that something was, um, different about my new biographical subject. I’d spent the day among the artifacts and correspondence of a person whose remarkable gifts of insight and intelligence came out in all she did, in every letter she wrote, every book she hammered out, every public meeting at which she spoke. But it all played out against the backdrop of her life as girl, woman, wife, and mother. Jane was no housewife; but hers was not a man’s life, either. The “women’s work” she managed while writing Death and Life, The Economy of Cities, and her other books made her for me, the author of several biographies of “great men,” something new to reckon with.

  In capsule biographies and news accounts, Jane is not routinely described as a feminist; at least, that’s not the first thing we think of her. And she didn’t speak any of the various languages of feminism or address specifically feminist issues. And yet, how not think of her as a feminist? She does periodically show up on Women’s History Month reading lists, women’s history blogs, and the like. She has been listed among “300 Women Who Changed the World,” along with Rachel Carson and Betty Friedan, contemporary thinkers whose seminal works appeared around the same time as Death and Life and who similarly helped shape the age in which we live. When questioned by government authorities about her union activities, Jane described her particular interest as the “equalization of pay between men and women for similar work.” This was in 1949. A few years later, she wrote proudly of a relative who, “believing in women’s rights and women’s brains,” set up her own printing press to publish her work “without a masculine nom de plume.”

  In The Seasons of a Man’s Life, Daniel Levinson wrote of characteristic arcs and patterns running through men’s working lives that were peculiarly similar whether they were laborers, authors, or scientists. Women, it has by now often been observed, are different, any otherwise “natural” arcs and patterns apt to be distorted by marriage, childbirth, family raising, and household running, or sometimes just the prospect of them. Once in the 1960s, New York mayor John Lindsay called Jane in the middle of the day. Her daughter Mary, about ten at the time, answered the phone, and advised the mayor that her mother “would not be available for conversation before 4 p.m.”; the story would probably not have been told at all, ever, were Jane a man. She was not insulated by wealth or circumstances from most of the 101 distractions of everyday domestic life; like so many accomplished women, she did all she did by carving out space and time from among them. Inescapably, her life as a woman, navigating the shoals of domesticity, balancing, juggling, responding to the needs of others, largely unbuffered by the little props and perks that often support the professional lives of men, are part of this story, too.

  Certainly it’s not the case that there was no “trajectory” to Jane’s career. She’d been on a trajectory, all right, but it wasn’t the recognizably vaulting intellectual and professional arc that elite universities look for in their tenured faculty, or that literary and arts agents look for in their top young clients. It was a distinctly modest one—graduation from high school, a succession of low-paying secretarial jobs, a first decent white-collar job at age twenty-seven, ten years in the federal bureaucracy, then back to the private sphere as one of a dozen others like her at a mid-level professional magazine. The trajectory of someone we would have no cause to remember, who would live out a mostly unmemorable career, loved by family and respected by colleagues but otherwise making no great impact on the world. She did not, in the Jane Austen sense, “marry well”—though she did in the most important sense, of marrying someone by intellect and temperament supremely suited to her, whom she would love, respect, and enjoy all her life. She was not particularly ambitious. She’d never been singled out by an influential mentor as an up-and-comer and launched into the upper reaches of a national community. She hadn’t had one of those early, explosive career successes at twenty-two or twenty-seven that propelled her into the ranks of the must-be-noticed. She had remained hidden, unknown, a married woman, mother of three, with a job she liked, living over a former candy store a few blocks from the warehouses and docks down by the Hudson River, who commuted to her job in Midtown Manhattan by bicycle.

  And that should have been that.

  Except that one day in 1956, four years into the last regular job she would ever hold, her boss asked her to stand in for him at a conference. Go up there and give a talk, would you, Jane? He couldn’t go; he was going to be in Europe. No, she said, she didn’t like to get up and talk in front of people. Please, he said, he needed her to. All right, she replied, but only if she could say whatever she wanted.

  She did, which changed her life and, in time, the world.

  The first part of this book tells of the curious, tangled path by which she got to that point.

  The second, of what happened when she did.

  The third, of the new life she made for herself afterward, in a new land.

  PART I

  An Uncredentialed Woman

  1916–1954

  CHAPTER 1

  A GENEROUS PLACE TO LIVE

  ON WINTER DAYS when she was a child, Jane’s grandmother told her, they’d skate on the canal, along twenty miles of it frozen solid near their house. Back in the 1850s, before the railroad finally won out against it, the canal was how you got clean-burning anthracite coal from the mines of central Pennsylvania to big-city markets. It would be loaded on shallow-draft boats, maybe fifteen tons of it at a time, then towed down the canal that ran alongside the North Branch of the Susquehanna River, by mules on the adjacent towpath. A dollar a ton, you could figure, from Wilkes-Barre, in the heart of anthracite country, to Philadelphia. Making the boats, and repairing them, was its own little industry. And since the 1830s a key center of it was Espy, a town of a few hundred drawn out along the north bank of the canal, home to lock tenders and canal maintenance workers, as well as a tannery, a pottery, and a brickyard. From early spring, when the ice melted, until late fall, according to a 1936 memoir, the locals “set the tempo of their lives to the tireless plodding hoof beats of the mules.” Boys in town looked with envy at those their own age driving the mules or else lolling on the decks of passing boats.

  Espy, tucked away in mountainous ridge country that on topographic maps looks crumpled and crinkled, declined as the nineteenth century wore on. But it still carried some traffic in 1893 when Jane’s grandmother, Jennie Breece Robison, and her husband, James Boyd Robison, bought a house on the north side of the main road running beside the canal. Both were central Pennsylvania natives of familiar Scots, Northern Irish, and English stock. They had four sons (another died when young) and four daughters. One of them was Bess Mary, or Bessie, born in 1879. She would become the mother of Jane Jacobs and live for 101 years.

  Bess’s father, Boyd, Jane’s grandfather, was the son of a loc
al merchant. Born in the adjacent, more substantial town of Bloomsburg, he attended Lafayette College and later fit in some legal studies. After the attack on Fort Sumter that launched the Civil War, he enlisted almost immediately, and was wounded in the hand at the Second Battle of Bull Run. “For purpose of labor,” he wrote home, “my finger is just as useless as if it were cut off.” In a second stint of service, in 1864, now an officer, Boyd was captured by Confederate guerillas and held in Libby Prison, a brick tobacco warehouse in Richmond into which Union officers, a thousand of them at a time, were infamously crowded. After the war, he returned to Bloomsburg, set up a law practice, and married Jennie Breece, a schoolteacher. For a few years he moved his young family to a place in the country, Esther Furnace Farm, a few miles outside of town. Then it was back to Bloomsburg, involvement in local politics, and, finally, the fine house in Espy. In the years Bessie was growing up, Captain J. Boyd Robison—lawyer, landowner, war veteran, member of the Presbyterian church, former candidate for Congress on the Greenback ticket, Knight Templar of the Masons—was a notable public figure.

  In 1895, Bessie, sixteen, enrolled in the teacher’s college in Bloomsburg, about two miles up the road from the family home in Espy, perhaps close enough, in those years before the trolley went in, for her to walk to school; there were dorms on campus, but she didn’t live in one. Bloomsburg, population seven thousand, was where her father had grown up and where he maintained his legal practice. Its town center of two- and three-story brick commercial buildings along Main Street, plus a sprinkling of late Victorian Romanesque civic structures, together lent it an air of gentility and solidity evident even today.