Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  To work at Forum during these heady midcentury years was to breathe in this intoxicating new modernist spirit. And, why not? What could be more natural, more seemingly inevitable? The slums Ed Bacon had presumably erased in Philadelphia meant a better world. So did Lincoln Center. So did housing projects going up in the cities of America. They were good, better than what they replaced. How else to see things? Since when was all that was shabby and old better than what was coming up new? Why, it was practically a contradiction in terms. Was any old horse-and-wagon better suited to us today, more desirable, than a new automobile? Then in what impossible, upside-down universe would you not want to tear down an aging slum of nineteenth-century tenements and put up a new apartment complex designed to make life easier, airier, and brighter? Under what topsy-turvy logic would you not want to leave behind the fetid streets of the old neighborhood for a new world of leafy green? These questions had such obvious answers they were silly even to ask.

  And yet they were something like the questions Jane was asking. She was suggesting that modernist planning was not in all ways, certainly, and maybe not even in most ways, good for Philadelphia and East Harlem, that it hurt them; that the prevailing thinking of her day didn’t work. She argued with her colleagues, but, she would admit, “I didn’t bring them around to my way of thinking.” Not right away, anyhow. “The editors of my magazine, of Architectural Forum, believed in all this urban renewal stuff. And I saw who their heroes were.” Heroes like Ed Logue, urban renewal czar of New Haven, Connecticut, who, to listen to Jane, thought that “the best thing that could happen to San Francisco would be another earthquake and fire.” Her editors liked Logue and his vision of cities wiped clean and rebuilt from scratch.

  Peter Blake, who worked at Forum all through the 1950s and later became its editor, would observe that Jane Jacobs’s message was “shattering to those of us brought up on various neat and seductive dogmas and diagrams of the Modern Movement.” Dogmas. Like a religion.

  But Jane had lost her faith, and was saying so to anyone who’d listen.

  —

  One Saturday evening in February 1958, Doug Haskell attended a party with architects and other creative people. There he talked with a man named Chadbourne Gilpatric.

  Gilpatric had a great job. His title at the Rockefeller Foundation was “associate director of humanities and social sciences,” but really what he did was talk with smart, accomplished people about the things that mattered most to them and give some of them money. A Harvard graduate remembered by a classmate as “a philosophy student of flashing charm and audacity,” he socialized, lunched, traveled, brought people into the office, talked, and listened, forever on the prowl for projects worthy and interesting. Then he’d write up memos in his professional diary, which ultimately filled book after book. And from time to time they led to grants of tens of thousands of dollars that changed people’s lives. Gilpatric must have been very popular.

  Among Gilpatric’s own special interests was urban design, which he felt was unstudied with anything like the critical and reflective focus it needed. American cities were a mess. Barracks built during the war to house navy-yard workers had become housing warrens for the poor; slum clearance projects failed to eliminate slums; and on and on. These were many of the same issues, of course, that had led Holly Whyte into his Fortune series. Now Gilpatric was feeling his way into what the Rockefeller could do to bring light to these dark, unwieldy problems.

  Chadbourne Gilpatric of the Rockefeller Foundation Credit 15

  At the party, Haskell, too, deplored the almost unseemly lack of critical thinking about urban design, but added, as Gilpatric recorded, that “one of the few able and imaginative people concerned with this domain is Jane Jacobs, on his staff.” She had just completed a big piece for Fortune. “She might be a person worth talking to soon.”

  By this point, in late winter of 1958, Jane figured large at Forum, her ideas, like them or not, seeping into the intellectual air of the office. Back in November, Haskell had written to his top staff about how “Jane Jacobs has been talking about an approach to city pattern which I think we should discuss.” Her approach disdained large-scale land acquisition, planning, and bureaucracy. It said no to the superblock, the greenbelt, and the satellite town—all staples of postwar thinking. In doing so, Jane was “dauntlessly going in the face of some 75 years of tradition in city planning.” Haskell felt her ideas merited a serious look; perhaps they’d want to give her “a big hunk of space for exposition and debate. I can imagine it would make many an existing planner furious at first, just as my own temptation was to be furious.”

  On April 25, fresh from what someone at Forum had termed “Jane’s blockbuster on the superblock” in Fortune and the hosannas it had inspired, Jane wrote Haskell with a suggestion for Forum’s January 1959 issue. How about an article—a sizable chunk of the issue, she made it sound—devoted to “What Is the City?”

  What is it really made of, how does it really work, what has worked well in it in the past and what has not, how has the postwar rebuilding of it, both public and private as well as a mixture of the two, been working out and what does this tell us—and, from everything we can learn and put down about what the big city is, and does, what are the implications for its future planning?

  I think there is no more important subject for us to do, if not in January, sometime soon.

  “Wow!” Haskell wrote back three days later. But: “Could we not put this one down to more modest dimensions?”

  Well, no, it would turn out, we couldn’t: What Jane had to say about cities might be many things, but of modest dimension it was not.

  Years later she would tell how she tried to interest Forum in a four-article series about city streets. As Gilpatric later summarized a version of this idea, or an evolution of it, one of the pieces would be devoted to how self-policing by street users minimized crime; a second was on neighborhood scale; a third on inter-group mixing; a fourth on the implications of the street for urban planning. Before writing even a word, simply in its declared focus, Jane was already running counter to the prevailing idea of her time, that “the street was an evil place, the street should be expunged in favor of superblocks and underground and above-ground things.” Haskell respected Jane, had spoken glowingly of her to Gilpatric. But as for her colleagues generally at Forum, Jane would say, they were “kind of appalled that I wanted to do this.”

  Still, she’d add, “I would eventually have persuaded them to do those four articles.”

  Maybe yes, maybe no. But in the end she didn’t have to persuade her colleagues because, as she went on to say, “in the meantime some [other] people got interested in these ideas.” And soon she wasn’t writing four articles for Forum, she was writing The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

  —

  It was April 20, 1958, a few days before she’d broached her “What Is the City?” idea to Haskell. Jane was giving a talk, devoted to New York’s future, as part of a dinner panel at the New School for Social Research, an alternative university in the Village. She lambasted several of her sworn enemies, such as Lincoln Center—though now with a depth and detail missing from her Fortune article. And, of course, Robert Moses, New York’s master planner, who was trying to run a highway through Greenwich Village.

  But there was something new here, too. Her talk played out not alone in dark and muted colors, but in bright ones, expressing a dream and a hope for city life. Consider, she said, the interdependence of a great city, its networks of mutual support and—this in an almost hallucinogenic jazz riff—its bizarre, unexpected minglings:

  This criss-cross of supporting relationships means, for instance, that a Russian tearoom and last year’s minks and a place to rent English sports cars bloom well near Carnegie Hall, or that on the same block the Advanced Metaphysicians and the Dynamic Speakers and the Associates of Camp Moonbeam have all discovered they can fit sympathetically into the studios that do well for music too. It means that the
Puerto Rican Orientation Club of East Harlem finds a place it can actually afford in a beat-up tenement basement—an unprepossessing place but a place of its own, beholden to no one, and thus it can flourish. This criss-cross network means that the textile companies of Worth Street move uptown from a quiet, uncrowded place into the maelstrom of the garment district because they see a higher logic in being closer to their customers.

  New York was a mixed-up mess of a place, that was its glory. But let no one think there was an end to it. There never would be. Jane told a story we’ve heard before, of how when she first came to New York, at age eighteen, she’d worked for a clock manufacturer she believed would one day fit out the whole world with clocks; after a week or so, she realized it would never happen, it was an unending job. The same went for rebuilding a city. It was “tempting to want to fix it in such a way that things will get finished and stay put and that’s that…But New York,” she said, “is like the clock business; it is never going to get finished. This should not really be discouraging to anybody over the age of eighteen.”

  There was real energy to her talk, and love—love for the city. Lewis Mumford, The New Yorker’s haughty architecture critic, was there to appreciate it. Her talk, he wrote her in a letter on May 3, “gave me the deepest satisfaction.” It asserted ideas few planners “even dimly understand.” Her analysis of the ways cities worked “is sociologically of the first order.” Her takedown “of the vast bungle called Lincoln Center is devastatingly just.”

  Lewis Mumford was a fan!

  “None of the millions being squandered by the Ford Foundation for ‘urban research’ will produce anything that has a minute fraction of your insight and common sense.” He offered a few practical suggestions for where she might publish her writing, but for Jane this was probably the least useful part of his letter. “Keep hammering,” he told her. “Your worst opponents are the old fogies who imagine that Le Corbusier is the last word in urbanism.”

  As we’ve seen, Jane rarely suffered any great want of confidence. But coming off the Fortune article and the letter from Mumford, which she probably received around May 5, she could hardly have felt on professionally firmer ground, when, on May 9, she met with Chadbourne Gilpatric.

  Gilpatric had just returned from Philadelphia, where, as part of his efforts to bring urban design under the scrutiny and guidance of the Rockefeller Foundation, he’d visited the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Urban Research. He came back with a raft of interview notes, suggestions, books to read, and ideas about playgrounds, parks, gardens, and cities, page after page of them. Now, two days later, he was meeting with Jane, Doug Haskell’s “person worth talking to.”

  So the two of them talked. They talked about the Charles Center project in Baltimore and why she thought it better than most other redevelopment projects. She approved of Ian McHarg’s ideas for a series of books on civic design. She put in a good word for Ian Nairn, whom Fortune had brought to the United States for two weeks, urged that the Rockefeller give opportunities to first-rate architectural critics like Grady Clay, down in Louisville, whose work she much admired, or Nathan Glazer, who’d just written a perceptive piece for Forum on “The Great City and the City Planners.”

  Then, finally, the conversation swung around to what she wanted to do. “Mrs. Jacobs herself,” Gilpatric recorded, wanted to take three months to pursue something like the city streets project she’d discussed with Forum, which might run parts of it but probably couldn’t give her unbroken time to research and write it. So, “Mrs. J wonders” whether the Rockefeller would consider a grant, administered by the New School, to let her, and a researcher with whom she’d worked on the Fortune article, take leave to work on it.

  Gilpatric told her that “this might well be a project of interest to the RF.”

  A month later, the two of them met again. Now Jane was talking about eight or nine months, not three, and a book rather than a series of articles. “In this conversation as before,” Gilpatric wrote, “Mrs. J fairly bubbled with interesting ideas about how to interpret human needs in modern city life.” They agreed that Jane would write him soon, laying out what she hoped to do in the book. For now, though, it came down to “ ‘what is the city’ or ‘what should the city be for people’ ”; the first, of course, was the distinctly immodest subject she’d suggested to Haskell two months earlier. Jane thought $10,000—worth perhaps $80,000 or $90,000 today—would let her do it.

  Ten days later, Gilpatric had her proposal in hand. Jane would look into “five factors of the city”: streets, parks, scale, mixtures of people, and urban focal centers important out of all proportion to their size, like public squares. She would emphasize New York, especially East Harlem and Greenwich Village. She would aim for the “general interested citizen,” not the specialist. She appreciated that nine months was a tight deadline, but felt she did her best work under pressure.

  “I’m afraid this sounds very abstract,” Jane apologized at one point. She was right; it did. Maybe she had come back with her proposal too soon, hadn’t thought it through enough. In any case, when she talked with Gilpatric on the phone two weeks later, he told her the Rockefeller was, yes, interested, but that “questions about the scope and content of her work remained.” She, in turn, admitted dissatisfaction with what she’d submitted earlier. As Gilpatric set it down, she promised to “soon send in a clearer statement of the ‘nub’ of her study.”

  A few days later, he had it. And this time there was fire to it, and an ambition she made no effort to tamp down.

  Two mental images, she began, dominated people’s views of the city:

  One is the image of the city in trouble, an inhuman mass of masonry, a chaos of happenstance growth, a place starved of the simple decencies and amenities of life, beset with so many accumulated problems it makes your head swim. The other powerful image is that of the rebuilt city, the antithesis of all that the unplanned city represents, a carefully planned panorama of projects and green spaces, a place where functions are sorted out instead of jumbled together, a place of light, air, sunshine, dignity and order for all.

  You can guess where this was going: “Both of these conceptions are disastrously superficial.”

  Here, she wrote, was the sort of sloppy thinking that led you into crude abstraction, that overlooked how a city really worked, and from which emerged “hindrances and blocks to intelligent observation and action.” She proposed to break through these calcified ideas. What she wished to do, she declared, “is to create for the reader another image of the city,” one drawn not from the imagination, hers or anyone else’s, but from real life, more compelling because truer. She was pushing far beyond those mechanical-sounding “five factors of the city” that had bogged down her first letter. And now she just came out and said it, unabashedly: she wanted her book to “open the reader’s eyes to a different way of looking at the city.”

  The two letters to Gilpatric together expressed Jane’s thinking. But they were business documents, too, sometimes explicitly so, talking dollars and cents. Toward the end of the first letter, Jane laid out how she expected to manage financially while writing the book—eight months living on the Rockefeller grant, plus an “advance which I hope to get from an interested publisher” for the final month. Gilpatric knew by now that this “interested” publisher was no mere hope or possibility. His name was Jason Epstein.

  A Boston native and Columbia University graduate, Epstein, at age thirty, was already something of a publishing wunderkind as originator of the “quality paperback.” Paperback books went back to the 1930s and before, but in the 1950s they were invariably known for their cheap paper and their affinity for bodice-rippers and adventure yarns. At the other end of publishing were handsomely produced hardcover books, like those Epstein’s own house, Doubleday, produced. Into this gap stepped Epstein’s Anchor Books, the first “quality paperback” imprint—good books, good paper, intermediate prices. In the spring of 1958, Epstein had heard from Nathan
Glazer about Jane’s article in Fortune and soon the whole series was a book, The Exploding Metropolis, first as Doubleday hardcover, then as Anchor paperback.

  Whyte and Glazer both urged Jane to talk to Epstein about a book of her own based on ideas she’d expressed in “Downtown Is for People.” She did so, and, as Gilpatric recorded in a June 26, 1958, memo, Epstein “expressed enthusiastic interest.” He offered her an advance of $1,500—modest, certainly, but more than she had expected.

  Jason Epstein, Jane’s editor at Random House from 1958 on and a friend for the rest of her life Credit 16

  Things were heating up. The philanthropic gears were turning. On July 7, Gilpatric wrote Jane, thanking her for the “clearer and better composed picture of the book you want to write.”

  On July 13, Jane responded to Gilpatric’s request for a professional biography with a single-page document, together with a one-page addendum listing the city-themed articles she’d written for Forum.

  On July 23, Forum formally granted her a leave of absence to write the book.

  On July 29, Gilpatric wrote Lewis Mumford, asking for his frank assessment of Jane’s project. Three days later, he heard back. “I first came across her at a conference a few years ago,” he wrote, referring to her Harvard talk.

  She made a brief address so pointed and challenging and witty, so merciless to the accepted clichés and so packed with fresh ideas that I felt like cheering; and did in fact cheer when called upon to make a few remarks at the end of the conference. Her direct, first-hand method of attack, and her common-sense judgments are worth whole filing cases of what is sometimes too respectfully called research.