Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Feminism, socialism, pacifism, Marxism, Freudianism, cubism, abstract expressionism: “Many major movements in American intellectual history began or were nurtured in the Village,” Ross Wetzsteon observed in Republic of Dreams, his paean to Greenwich Village as bohemian icon. The Village had been home to the birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, the poet E. E. Cummings, the playwright Eugene O’Neill, to hard drinkers, potheads, radicals, and troublemakers. All this was true. True from the perspective of 2002, when Wetzsteon’s book appeared, and scarcely less true in 1935, when Jane moved there. And yet, for now, irrelevant: years later, Jane was asked, “Did you hang out with any of the Greenwich Village bohemians of the day?” Her reply was straightforward and unembellished: “No.”

  The same year Jane landed there, Professor Ware came out with her study of Greenwich Village, which she revealed as bigger and richer than its stereotype as “New York’s Latin Quarter of ‘long-haired men and short-haired women,’ artists and pseudos.” As city neighborhoods go, it was large. Home to fifty thousand people, it extended roughly from Broadway to the Hudson River, from Fourteenth Street down to Houston Street or a little south, and encompassed numerous subdistricts. Villagers worked in warehouses and small factories on the west side, spoke Italian in broad swaths of the South Village once mainly Irish. They studied and taught at New York University. They were shopkeepers, bartenders, physicians, clerks, and office managers, and, yes, even artists and bohemians. Village residents attended Catholic schools and public schools. Protestants worshipped at no fewer than eight churches. One could blithely record the history of Greenwich Village, recount its growth over the years, the coming of its waves of immigrants, tell of the literary lights who, by the 1930s, had already called it home, describe its impact on American political and cultural life, and yet still come up short, missing something vital. For it was the Village’s infinite diversity more than its artsiness, or its political ardor, or its nineteenth-century streetfronts, or indeed any single strand winding through it, that Jane would embrace as her own and pronounce a virtue.

  As it was for many newcomers from the hinterlands, New York could intimidate. Soon after she’d arrived in town—maybe while yet in Brooklyn or later on Morton Street—Jane and Betty took to playing a game they’d dreamed up. It was called “Messages,” and went like this: They’d conjure up two people about as different as they could imagine—“say a headhunter in the Solomon Islands and a cobbler in Rock Island, Illinois,” to use Jane’s own example. Then each would try to figure how to get a message from one to the other: The headhunter talks to the village headman, who speaks to a copra-buying trader, who speaks to a visiting Australian naval officer…and so on to the Rock Island cobbler. Whoever came up with the shortest, reasonably plausible chain of messengers won. It was fun for a while, except that they found themselves relying too often on Eleanor Roosevelt as intermediary; “she knew the most unlikely people.” But looking back at their game, Jane seemed to understand how it had figured in their new lives. “I suppose,” she wrote, “we were trying, in a dim way, to get a grip on the great, bewildering world into which we had come from our cocoon.”

  With the passage of the years, however, Jane and Betty became seasoned New Yorkers and their great bewildering world became home. Sometimes Jane would go up to the roof of their building and just look down at the street, maybe at nothing much more than the garbage trucks making their rounds. “I would think, what a complicated, great place this is, and all these pieces of it that make it work.”

  —

  In October 1936, Jane, still just twenty, got a new job, in Hell’s Kitchen, whose lurid reputation went back to the Civil War but which these days was crowded with warehouses, garages, and factories. One of them was that of Scharf Brothers, a candymaker, located on a stretch of Fifty-first Street west of Tenth Avenue, not far from the Hudson piers. Jane would watch the production line fill chocolates with varieties of sweet goo. Her $22-a-week job was in the office, though, taking dictation, devising forms and charts, writing sales letters. She wrote to disgruntled customers, too: No, there must be some mistake. There simply couldn’t have been a snippet of steel wire in your chocolate, she’d type as her boss sat pin-ng-nging the little spring the customer had mailed in as evidence. But by May 1937 she was out of this job, too, following a burglary she would come to suspect had been engineered internally, to put the company out of its Depression misery.

  One Saturday evening in the fall or early winter of 1936, while Jane was visiting her parents in Scranton, her father sat her down and confided in her some of his own Depression miseries. Only seven years before, he had moved into his fine new offices in the Medical Arts Building. Then the market crashed. Now, many of his patients simply couldn’t pay. What with office rent, the salary of Miss Eldridge, his nurse, subscriptions to medical journals, and the like, it took $48 a day in fees just to break even. Most days, after dinner, he was back in the office, staying till nine. He kept office hours Sunday afternoons, too. He struggled.

  And the struggle, on top of a constitution weakened by childhood maladies, including a burst appendix—“It’s a mess in there,” he’d say—took its toll. Little more than a year after his sober-minded talk with Jane, Dr. Butzner was dead, of an intestinal obstruction, at age fifty-nine. The week before, he’d complained of not feeling well. He saw a doctor. He was admitted to the hospital, had an operation. He seemed to rally, but soon declined. “Miss Eldridge, is anybody else here?” he whispered near the end to his nursing assistant of fourteen years. All his children were beside him as he lay in an oxygen tent “dented by four little windows,” as a Scranton news account had it. “No long faces,” he told them. “If I get well, you don’t need them. If I don’t, long faces won’t help me.”

  He died two days before Christmas, 1937. The will he’d written a few months after his wedding day in 1909 was admitted to probate early the following year. His wealth was modest. He left everything to Bessie—medical equipment valued at about $300, his five-year-old Dodge sedan, and about $1,000 in cash; the house was already in Bessie’s name. A substantial life insurance policy cushioned the financial pain, leaving Jane, her siblings, and her widowed mother to absorb the emotional pain of their premature loss.

  In the months between her heart-to-heart with her father and his death, soon after leaving Scharf, Jane had gotten a $25-a-week job with a steel distributor, Peter A. Frasse, based in Lower Manhattan, a fifteen-minute walk from her apartment. At first, it was just more dictation, more typing. One time, she took a letter in shorthand, typed it up, got it signed, stuck it in an envelope, and, after work, was about to drop it in the mailbox when something stayed her hand: Thirty-eight curls of steel. That’s what she’d typed, but what was it supposed to mean? Then the truth dawned: in her boss’s old-timey New York accent, steel coils came out as curls. Next morning at the office, she retyped it, had it signed, and sent it on its way.

  After some months, Jane seemed poised for real success at the old New York company, whose roots in the city went back to 1816. A commemorative book Frasse published to mark its hundredth birthday showed off its executives and managers across the years, page after page of them—of course not a single woman. But now, was there the slightest crack in the glass ceiling? Jane had impressed at least one Frasse colleague as “a very intelligent person [who] could do the work of three girls,” the “type of person who could talk on any subject.” She was elevated to a newly created position, at $28 a week, that Jane would describe as “ ‘trouble shooting’ secretary.” Her job was “to step into any department which seemed to be bogging down and help devise ways for getting the work out faster.”

  This, however, was as far as Jane Butzner’s career as Junior Efficiency Expert took her. In September 1938 she resigned. More than five years after the end of her ignominious academic career at Central High, about the time some of her high school classmates were graduating from college, Jane went back to school, enrolling in the continuing education divisio
n at Columbia University. The last time she’d been in school, at Powell, she’d learned how the slightest of curlicues changed “very truly yours” to “yours very truly.” Now she was studying economic geography, psychology, geology, zoology, and constitutional law, and loving every minute of it.

  CHAPTER 5

  MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS

  WHAT MIGHT she have been if not a writer?

  It was 1994, Jane was in her seventies, and the editors of a Canadian magazine, Brick, as a way to celebrate their fiftieth issue, were asking writers they admired to answer that question. Jane replied promptly. Telling the puddingstone story we heard earlier, she went on to describe other geological pleasures in her life: Scranton’s anthracite, its slate sidewalks, the limestone that graced the exterior of the local library, the marble of the flooring inside. “All had their crunching, ancient stories,” she wrote, then slipped into the “delicious sing-song,” almost rhyming, of the classic geological periods: “Triassic, Jurassic…Paleocene, Eocene…” In short, she might have wound up a geologist.

  Or maybe, had she gone on with the studies she’d begun at Columbia University in 1938, a paleontologist. “When I finally got over my grudges against school and took some university classes—whatever I pleased; what a luxury—of course I fixed first upon geology, which led into paleontology, which led into zoology, which led into chemistry and embryology.”

  Her geology course met Tuesday and Friday evenings in Schermerhorn 401, on the Columbia campus in Morningside Heights, a long subway ride uptown from the West Village. The subject, of course, was rocks, their origin and structure, how they weathered, the action of glaciers, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Class hours for this and a second course Jane took the following semester were supplemented by Saturday-afternoon field trips. One of them was to Croton Point, a peninsula projecting into the Hudson River north of New York City. There, on a stretch of beach about fifty feet long, she was introduced to a geological anomaly called “clay dogs.” These were natural sculptures compacted into something like stone that Jane would remember for their wild shapes, from “subtle and simple curving forms to fantastic concoctions of more than Oriental splendor.”

  Unlike anything she had studied back in high school, her geology classes took; she got As in both. And this was pretty much the story of Jane’s return to school. Administratively, she wasn’t a student of Columbia College, the Ivy League school founded in 1754 that competed with Harvard and Princeton, but of Columbia’s “University Extension,” or school of general studies. Jane pored over the course catalog, picked whatever she wanted. Because she could, as it said right there in black and white: “All courses are open to both men and women. To students of adult age freedom is allowed as to selection of courses and study.” Jane surely loved that.

  Mostly, these were afternoon and evening classes, and thousands of New Yorkers took them. Jane had access to the university library in South Hall, open until 10 p.m. each weekday night, probably bought her books at the university bookstore at the corner of Broadway and 116th Street, next to the subway entrance. A student signing up for more than eight credits’ worth of classes needed to consult the office of the school’s director; Jane took fifteen her first semester, as she would through the next two years. The following year she took Development of Legal Institutions, which seems to have been the only course to give her trouble; an anthropology course under the name Prehistory of Europe; economics, zoology, more geography, and what was probably a grueling immersion in chemistry, with lectures Tuesday and Friday evenings, followed by hour-long recitations, plus a three-hour laboratory. Jane got an A+.

  Actually, this was not quite Jane’s first time back in the classroom since leaving Scranton. During the academic year 1935–36, while looking for work and writing for Vogue, she’d taken a few classes at New York University, blocks from her apartment, in magazine, feature, and editorial writing. But she’d never have much to say about them and they probably bore nothing like the intellectual heft of her Columbia courses, which left clear traces on her later thinking. Jane’s studies were full-time and demanding. But now, pursuing her own interests, she was an eager student.

  In the spring of 1940, Jane signed up for Vertebrate Zoology, another magnum course, like chemistry, with a big laboratory component. Its informally bound lab notebook consisted of notes put together by Columbia faculty to guide students through required dissections. One page featured intricate line drawings showing the “Urinogenital System of Elasmobranch,” the taxonomic category that includes the shark. Students were to label each anatomical feature—uterus, urinary papilla, dorsal aorta, and so on. From the neatness and clarity with which Jane did so, this may have been no soulless drudgery for her. The next focus of anatomical interest was the cat. On the back of one page, Jane made a detailed drawing showing the bones of the cat leg in all their interlocking detail: the great trochanter, the lesser trochanter, the patella, all the way up to the acetabulum and the ilium…

  When Jane got interested in something she got really interested. During this period, the story goes within the Jacobs and Butzner clans, Jane and Betty visited the Museum of Natural History, where they saw a cat skeleton on exhibit. Primed by the zoology lab she was taking, or had recently completed, Jane decided she wanted one for herself. So the sisters—this is one version of a story shrouded in the musty past—caught a stray cat, took a crosstown bus to the river, drowned it, brought it back to the apartment, skinned it, and tossed it into a big pot in the kitchen, ultimately reducing it to a mess of bones and soupy gore. Then, Jane recovered the bones, tied them together with wire, glued as necessary, and mounted her specimen in a wood box she would keep for many years. The skinning itself probably posed no terror, as her lab book, which used the rabbit as model, supplied a welcoming how-to: “The skin should be removed with scissors around the middle of the body. Two persons can quickly pull the skin over the head and tail, cutting it at the bases of the ears and snout, tail and anus…The entire operation…should not require more than three or four minutes.”

  That was Jane in Vertebrate Zoology.

  Here is Jane in American Constitutional Law…

  This two-course sequence, which she took during the fall and spring semesters of her first year, was taught Tuesday and Thursday mornings by a regular law school professor, Neil T. Dowling, a tall, dignified, fifty-three-year-old Alabamian with a bent for the Socratic method. It was said of him when he retired many years later that he had a gift for conveying “the inherent grandeur of the human effort represented by the Constitution”; that his aim always was “to create a feeling of involvement in an exhilarating inquiry.”

  With Jane Butzner, it seems, he succeeded.

  Jane was no lawyer and never aimed to become one. The course used Dowling’s own thick text, Cases on Constitutional Law, which featured debates bearing on the regulatory powers of government going back to before the Constitution. What motivated her to take it, and why she was permitted to—it was normally an elective reserved for second-year law students—is murky; by any standard, she was unqualified for it.

  But at some point, probably as part of a class project, Jane found herself rooting through old articles, editorials, and speeches citing ideas voiced at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Soon she was poring through notes of the Convention proceedings themselves, as recorded by James Madison and others during those momentous days. And these, in turn, exposed her to a whole panoply of suggestions that had not made their way into the Constitution—that were rejected, seen as foolish or wrongheaded, or in the end simply voted down.

  For example, the Constitution says legislative power is vested in a Senate and a House of Representatives. But Jane learned that William Paterson of New Jersey thought a single house would be quite enough and that Benjamin Franklin thought so, too. Of course, Rufus King of Massachusetts thought there ought to be three houses—“the second to check the first and to be proportionate to the population, the third to represent the states and have eq
ual suffrage.” The Constitution says Congress can overturn a presidential veto with a two-thirds vote. But someone back in 1787 argued that three-quarters would be better, more stabilizing, that “the danger to the public interest from the instability of laws is most to be guarded against.”

  Here is where Jane’s story takes an improbable turn: somehow, in all those failed suggestions, those ideas that went nowhere, those thoughtful, or not so thoughtful, challenges to all we today take as Constitutional Truth, Jane Butzner found the material for her first book. Jane was a first-year college student, barely out of high school. She was new to constitutional law. Yet two decades before The Death and Life of Great American Cities made her famous, Columbia University Press in 1941 issued, under Jane’s own name, Constitutional Chaff—Rejected Suggestions of the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

  It is easy to see in the very idea of the book hints of her contrariness, of a deep-lying anti-authoritarian sensibility; she herself seems to have been alive to it. “It seems like a faithless thing,” she wrote in the introduction, “to emphasize the differences of opinion, the plans which met disfavor.” But no, she made it clear, those errant, futile, or misguided arguments needed no apology. Some of them were quite ingenious. More striking to her yet was the grit and determination with which, through them, their proponents sought a common goal—“a government calculated for man’s, every man’s happiness.” Far from diminishing the achievement of the men of Philadelphia, she was saying, those “rejected suggestions” honored the American experiment.