Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Moving to Washington, of course, was nothing that Jane, her ties firmly to New York, with two kids, busy fixing up the house on Hudson Street, was about to do. So, effective May 2, 1952, she resigned. She was, at this point, a GS-13, fairly high in the U.S. civil service system, making $8,360 per year—something like $90,000 or $100,000 today. In writing to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about Jane’s case on June 20, 1952, Hiram Bingham, the then chair of the Loyalty Review Board, simply checked a box: “Resigned or otherwise separated from Federal service prior to decision on loyalty.”

  —

  When she left Amerika, she’d write, Jane was drawn to two magazines for her next job. One was Natural History, the magazine of the American Museum of Natural History, which went back to 1900, the whole natural world furnishing its subject matter. But it, too, was located in Washington, D.C., so that was out. The other candidate was Architectural Forum, a Time-Life publication that elbowed its way to the attention of American architects every month with oversized 250-page issues stuffed with accounts of new buildings coming down the pipeline, think pieces about the state of architecture, with lots of text but even more with photos and drawings, and, of course, pages of ads for stainless steel and masonry, aluminum curtain walls and folding doors. Amerika had used a number of Forum illustrations for its articles; Jane herself may have borrowed them from its editors. Bob read the magazine. Jane admired it. She was a good fit for it, her several ambitious articles on architecture and housing at Amerika strengthening her credentials. And it was likely to pay better, too. She did a trial run with the magazine, and by September was on the masthead as a Forum “associate,” one of its dozen or so staff writers. From the beginning, she was left with a good feeling about her new employer. Forum had recently lost two editors, one whose beat was hospitals and schools, the other private homes. “They asked me—instead of automatically slotting me—which I would be more interested in. I said hospitals and schools, and they said fine.” It was mutual respect from the beginning.

  But now Jane had a new language to learn: recalling her first days at Forum, Jane would later tell how, in the evenings, once the kids were in bed, Bob taught her to read blueprints. Which sounds cozy and straightforward enough, but probably wasn’t. Drawings, arranged in a hierarchy of set sizes, thick with symbols, cross-hatching, dimensions, and dotted lines, were the universal language of architectural practice. Through them, you presented ideas for individual buildings or whole projects—that is, sold them—and then conveyed detailed instructions for how they were to be built. They ranged from easy-to-read floor plans to intricate workings-out of window openings, or the complex junctures between floors and walls; site plans, elevations, and cross-sections; isometric projections and two-point perspectives, where lines leading off into the distance converge to a vanishing point. Each had its own purpose, each its own conventions. Ease with them normally came only with years of architectural education and practice. If you were writing about a new building for Forum, it didn’t mean the building had gone up and you’d toured it from top to bottom; it meant that it wasn’t up, you’d reviewed the drawings for it, and you had to imagine it. “I was utterly baffled at first,” Jane would write, “being supposed to make sense out of great, indigestible rolls of working drawings and plans. My husband came to my rescue and every night for months”—months—“he gave me lessons in reading drawings, learning what to watch for as unusual,” bestowing upon her new eyes.

  Jane’s first piece for Forum, about a mixed maternity and general hospital in Lima, Peru, appeared in June 1952, before she was scarcely loose from Amerika and not yet employed by Forum; this was her trial run. Though she asserted that “its planted entrance court and many patios are leisurely and welcoming,” Jane had never seen them, never visited Lima, basing her account on interviews with the architects, and on plans, drawings, and models. But that was enough for her to be able to write that moving through the complex “is as pat and deceptively simple as a double crostic.” Or this—that in Peru, childbirth was seen “as an exciting, wholesome event which has nothing to do with illness and should be kept strictly apart from arrangements for sick people.”

  In succeeding months, she wrote a succession of articles on her assigned beat, and off it. She wrote a long article on the hospital architect Isadore Rosenfield, and, in March 1953, a piece about shopping centers—air-conditioning them, anchor stores designed to pull in customers, what downtowns could learn from them—all full of bright energy and enthusiasm. Later that year, she did a piece on what was then a new phenomenon—self-service, not just in supermarkets but for clothing, perfume, or building supplies, and how stores needed to be redesigned with new fixtures, racks, and shelving systems. “Self-selection,” as self-service was still called, “speeds things up for the fast-tempo customer and so increases turnover. It lets the dilly-dallier happily dilly-dally on his own. It gives the salesman a chance to concentrate on the power-tool or baby-carriage customers instead of the 25-cent screw-driver and dozen-diaper shoppers.”

  (Jane’s initial beat, hospitals, ultimately became her husband’s architectural specialty. Through her articles, by one account, he came to see “that hospitals presented design problems of such wondrous complexity that an architect might happily give a whole career to them,” which is what he did. By 1953, he was working with Joseph “Munio” Neufeld on the Hadassah-Hebrew University Hospital in Jerusalem, the first of some two dozen hospitals overfilling his long career.)

  As she scoped out subjects for future articles, recommended which buildings and which architects warranted editorial treatment, Jane seems almost from the beginning to have been taken seriously around the office. On August 25, 1953, less than a year after she first joined Forum, the longtime editor Douglas Haskell wrote his own boss, the publisher Perry Prentice, about what he imagined as a major editorial project for the magazine. In the distant reaches of British Columbia, the aluminum producer Alcoa of Canada was creating a new community. It would house, besides its manufacturing plant, forty thousand people. Kitimat, it was to be called. A bold project on a gargantuan scale, and one deserving commensurate treatment in Forum: “Every way you turn, this is a completely thought out town,” wrote Haskell, worth maybe fifty pages in the magazine. One of the architects involved in the project himself wanted to write it. But Haskell saw the many interwoven aspects of the subject—architectural, geographic, economic, human—as extraordinarily challenging. And as he looked around at his staff, he wrote Prentice, “it seems to be the only writer we can assign to this is Jane Jacobs. She alone will have the capacity of giving it the human touch while digging into the details.”

  Jane, on a routine assignment for Architectural Forum, October 26, 1956, not long past her fortieth birthday Credit 9

  It didn’t work out that way; the article was scaled back to twenty pages, appearing about a year later, and Jane didn’t get to write it. But still, it was striking how soon, and how completely, Jane had won Haskell’s trust. Perhaps feeding off it, Jane grew increasingly free to express her opinions, often in strong language, about the many buildings and projects she reviewed. Of a prefabricated school, she wrote Haskell in 1955, “I heartily dislike the looks and the general tone of this school. It looks cheesesparing and niggling and no fun and no aiming high, and there is something wormy and pathetic about its little attempts at applied amenities.” Of a shopping center in Yonkers, New York, she wrote him that it was “a spectacularly bad example of shopping center planning,” then spent the next three pages, in close single-spaced text, explaining why: the two department stores were too far apart; the overall design only accentuated its forbidding length. “It is a monotonous succession of triangular planting beds (and ugly bituminous paving) with no variations, no enticement.” The center’s excellent site and large surrounding population might make it a success, but, if so, no thanks to its design.

  With Jane’s rhetoric always came fact, evidence. Back at Amerika her performance reviews had practically always c
ome in at Excellent. For all the excesses of her personality, her need and determination to express, she inspired trust.

  She was doing a good job.

  But is there something a little watery and wanting in so homely an assertion?

  In early 1955, Jane was thirty-eight years old. She was happily married, a mother of two, pregnant with a third. She had a house of her own. She had risen in the world, had achieved much of what she’d wanted in coming to New York; she was a writer paid well for her work. She had all the knowledge, experience, initiative, and talent she would ever need to do what she was going to do in the big world. But she had not yet done it; she wasn’t one of those artists, thinkers, and precocious talents—mostly men, in a man’s world, propped up by men’s privileges—who, by age thirty-eight, had already made their mark. Hers was a more gradually unfolding story.

  If you read her articles in Amerika, or in Forum during her first years there, you find little hint of the themes percolating up in The Death and Life of Great American Cities—except, that is, for her interest in the subject itself: cities. But her impatience with existing architectural and planning practice? Her rejection of the status quo? These are nowhere to be found. At least as she expressed them in the pages of Forum, and before that in Amerika, hers are conventional sensibilities. She attacks nothing, submits to what is, embraces the new suburban shopping centers. She accepts the postwar world without cavil or complaint.

  Later, she’d say that in a way she hadn’t been doing a good job at Forum—that as she’d listened to planners and architects, she’d too readily accepted what they had to say; did not question whether their lovely renderings and pretty models perhaps lacked something, or were misguided, or were just plain wrong. And that until she came to see it that way, she was wrong.

  If we had to pin down a moment when that began to change, when Jane Jacobs began to see in a new way the streets and cities, buildings, plans, and architectural visions she had been writing about, it would probably be sometime in early 1955, in Philadelphia.

  PART II

  In the Big World

  1954–1968

  CHAPTER 9

  DISENCHANTMENT

  PHILADELPHIA, Jane wrote in a story about the city’s redevelopment in July 1955, was perhaps the only American city really grappling with the stark contrasts of urban life. She saw “an atmosphere of hope” there, in the initiative of private citizenry “thriving in the little and the large.” She marveled at the sheer scope of the city’s efforts, scattered over more than a dozen sites and ten thousand acres. She wrote of sunken gardens; of a food distribution center that would eliminate squatters’ shacks and burning dumps; of the architect Louis Kahn’s “clever and practical devices” for improving a poor district called Mill Creek. She lauded an “embrace of the new” that in Philadelphia “has by some miracle not meant the usual rejection of whatever is old.”

  At intervals, Jane quoted the city’s planning commission director, the already legendary Edmund Bacon, on his way to the cover of Time for his leadership of the city’s redevelopment programs. A native Philadelphian, forty-five, born of a staunchly conservative publishing family, Bacon was a graduate of Cornell’s school of architecture. He’d used an inheritance from his grandfather to travel the world, had wound up in Beijing, won a fellowship to study city planning at the University of Michigan, worked as a planner in Flint. By 1949, he was back in Philadelphia, pushing his ideas through the local bureaucracy, determined to clear away the debris of the city’s industrial past and create gleaming new modernist vistas; the city had not seen a major new office building go up in almost twenty years. Bacon, it could seem, was not just Philadelphia’s master planner, but America’s.

  Not everyone liked him. “Arrogant, arch, pompous, and wrong,” an architect who knew him later, Alan Littlewood of Toronto, would blithely call him. To Bacon’s enemies, an article in Harper’s would say, “he had risen too fast, succeeded too soon…‘Lord Bacon,’ they called him across the Schuylkill, at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Fine Arts, disliking his arrogance, theatrical manner and impresario air.” Yet many appreciated that “he had accomplished more than any other town planner in the United States.” And, of course, it was Bacon—thin, ascetic looking, driven—who had helped fill Jane’s head with visions of Philadelphia’s future and supplied the sketches, plans, photos, and maps she’d expertly folded into a coherent narrative heralding a city on the move.

  And yet it’s not clear how much—or even, just possibly, whether—Jane visited Philadelphia to research her story. A certain remove from the city runs through her ten-page article, which is subtitled “A Progress Report” but reads more like a preview. Early on, she laments of American cities generally that the urban deserts within them “have grown and still they are growing, the awful endless blocks, the endless miles of drabness and chaos.” Yet she is moved to the brink of poetry by the thought of all “the work that went into this mess,” the energy just below the surface, curdled into urban grit, which says “as much about the power and doggedness of life as the leaves of the forest in spring.” Later pages, stocked with illustrations of the new Independence Mall, Penn Center, and Mill Center, tell of “what is happening” in Philadelphia, or “will be happening,” or what “is going up,” of projects “under construction,” or “nearing completion.” But not much of the real, under-the-skin city emerges.

  At some point, certainly, Jane did visit Philadelphia. There she joined Bacon for a tour, letting him show off to her all he was proudest of. He was, of course, practiced at such showmanship, at one point treating Jane to a kind of before-and-after exercise in urban redevelopment. First they walked along a down-and-out street in a black neighborhood destined later for the Bacon treatment. It was crowded with people, people spilling out onto the sidewalk, sitting on stoops, running errands, leaning out of windows. Here was Before Street. Then it was off to After Street, the beneficiary of Bacon’s vision—bulldozed, the unsavory mess of the old city swept away, a fine project replacing it, all pretty and new. Jane, Bacon urged her, stand right here, look down this street, look what we’ve done here.

  She did. And certainly she could appreciate the vista Bacon offered her; Yes, it’s very nice. But there was something missing: people. Especially so in contrast to that first street, which Jane recalled as lively and cheerful. Here, amid the new and rehabbed housing, what did she see? She saw one little boy—she’d remember him all her life—kicking a tire. Just him, alone on the deserted street.

  Ed, she said, nobody’s here. Now, why is that? Where are the people? Why is no one here?

  The way Jane told the story, Bacon didn’t offer a Yes, but…by way of explanation. He didn’t say, Well, in a few years, as the neighborhood matures, we’ll see…He offered no explanation at all. To Jane, he just wasn’t interested in her question, which irritated the hell out of her. She was puzzled, he wasn’t, and that was itself noteworthy. But more, for Jane the two streets seemed to point up some opposing lesson, or value, or idea, from that of Bacon—some sharply different sense of what mattered in a city and what did not, a divergent way of seeing. For Bacon, the new street exemplified all that was best in the new world that planners like him were making. For Jane, Bacon’s perspective was narrowly aesthetic, a question mostly of how it looked; to her, the new street represented not entirely a gain over the old, maybe no gain at all, but a loss, one that mocked Bacon’s plans and drawings and the glittering future they promised. “Not only did he and the people he directed not know how to make an interesting or a humane street,” she’d say, “but they didn’t even notice such things and didn’t care.” In time, scholars managed to find a measure of common ground between Bacon and Jacobs. But just now, they stood at the same spot, viewed the same streets, and saw them through different eyes.

  Perhaps Bacon’s Philadelphia diverged too far from the one Jane had heard about from her parents, who’d met and courted there; or the Philadelphia she’d seen herself in the 193
0s visiting sister Betty at school; or on trips down from New York for Iron Age in the 1940s; or from some pure Platonic vision of City that had become part of her after twenty years in New York. Whatever the reason, the vehemence and frequency with which she’d later bring up the Bacon incident suggest no cool dissonance of values. Jane was angry—angry, it seems, at having been duped.

  Jane’s recollections of her early years at Forum hint at a still youthful naïveté on which she’d look back ruefully. She’d visited Philadelphia, she’d say,

  and found out what they had in mind and what they were planning to do and how it was going to look according to the drawings, what great things it was going to accomplish…I came back and wrote enthusiastic articles about this, and subsequently about other [cities], and all was well. I was in very cozy with the planners and project builders. I suppose my readers…well, I must ask them to forgive me now, whoever they were.

  For what she saw now in Philadelphia was that the new projects didn’t look the way they were supposed to look and, more important, didn’t work the way they were supposed to work. Not if the boy kicking the tire down the street was any indication. Not if projects she’d heard glowingly described, or had even written about, were turning out as they did: “They weren’t delightful, they weren’t fine, and they were obviously never going to work right,” she wrote the Louisville writer Grady Clay in 1959. “Harrison Plaza and Mill Creek in Philadelphia were great shocks to me.”

  “The artists’ drawings always looked so seductive,” she’d all but shake her head in recalling. Yes, drawings specified the thickness of concrete walls and how air-handling systems were to be laid out. But they also showed off. They represented aesthetic vistas, how buildings, projects, and cities were to work. They showed people using them, trees and walkways, visions of the good life—often in bird’s-eye views that left the viewer with a sense of promise and parade at the urban prospect before her. And, of course, they were the work of architects and planners with a cultivated sense of design, drama, and spectacle. What Jane found in Philadelphia was that these visions didn’t match the city she met on the ground—not, at least, in ways that mattered to her.