Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Short blocks encouraged varied walking paths, the chance to encounter different people, businesses, activities—more choices, more corners for small shops, more liveliness; long, self-isolating blocks led to stagnation. “It is fluidity of use, and the mixing of paths, not homogeneity of architecture, that ties together city neighborhoods into pools of city use.”

  Ramshackle old buildings, with their low rents, encouraged new business start-ups and fledgling neighborhood institutions. “Among the most admirable and enjoyable sights to be found along the sidewalks of big cities are the ingenious adaptations of old quarters to new uses,” like the stable that becomes a house, the basement that becomes an immigrants’ club, the brewery that becomes a theater. “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings,” she wrote. “New ideas must use old buildings.”

  Finally, Jane devoted a chapter to how great cities depended on dense concentrations of people—not just downtown, but in residential neighborhoods. “The overcrowded slums of planning literature are teeming areas with a high density of dwellings. [But the seemingly] over-crowded slums of American real life are, more and more typically, dull areas with a low density of dwellings.” Witness Oakland, or Roxbury in Boston, or Detroit, with its “seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.”

  This sort of cartoonish summary of some of its key ideas is not the best way to appreciate Death and Life. Like other books almost unbearably rich with fresh ideas, it loses much in the translation to outline and overview, is left vulnerable to unthinking adulation or lazy distortion. Its memorable catchphrases, which have become fixtures in the literature of cities and planning, do help bring the book to mind: border vacuums; mixed primary uses; unslumming; cataclysmic money; eyes on the street. But once Death and Life became a kind of urban gospel, developers and others sometimes took to invoking them with scarcely a nod to what Jane actually meant. Then, too, the book’s aphoristic flavor makes it tempting to reduce it to the likes of study guide or catechism:

  • “In cities, liveliness and variety attract more liveliness; deadness and monotony repel life.”

  • “In orthodox city planning, neighborhood open spaces are venerated…much as savages venerate magical fetishes.”

  • “Why are there so often no people where the parks are and no parks where the people are?”

  • “Corruption grows more inventive, rather than less so, the longer it has an object to play with.”

  • “People are rightly suspicious of programs that give them nothing for something.”

  • “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

  To paraphrase Walt Whitman, Death and Life contains multitudes. It can be abridged and digested, but not without irremediable loss. Not just Jane’s artfulness but her loving attention to each facet of city-ness, detailed and nuanced (if occasionally tedious), made the book what it was.

  Even the likes of parking lots and windowless industrial frontages were eligible for that sort of treatment from her. Consider a later chapter, “The Curse of Border Vacuums,” Jane’s term for certain lifeless tracts deadening to the eye and destructive to pedestrian life. She showed how a railroad station could tie in to its surroundings, but not a railroad track; a single government building, but not normally a large government complex. In both cases, the former could unite and strengthen a city district while the latter tore it up. “Frequent borders, whether formed by arterial highways, institutions, projects, campuses, industrial parks, or any other massive uses of special land, can in this way tear a city to tatters.”

  Railroad tracks, of course, are the classic example of a border vacuum. “The other side of the tracks,” after all, is shorthand for a social border one side of which is poorer or slummier than the other. Jane didn’t mean social borders here but physical and functional ones. The “blight-proneness” of areas beside railroad tracks was sometimes explained by the noise and soot thrown off by passing trains. But that was a secondary factor—had to be, really, because you could see the same deadness adjacent to a highway, or hospital complex, or featureless parking lot, or high-rise housing project, or over-scaled college campus, or even a park ineptly integrated into the rest of the city. The root cause was not noise and soot; rather, border vacuums served as unlovely barriers to movement and interaction. The streets abutting them were the “end of the line,” attracting few pedestrians; it was discouraging or difficult to cross a broad highway or parking lot, much less a warehouse’s blank wall. They “fail to get a by-the-way circulation of people going beyond them in the direction of the border, because few are going to that Beyond.” With the adjoining streets shunned, the vitality of the whole area suffers.

  But it didn’t have to, said Jane. Borrowing a principle from Kevin Lynch, an MIT professor whose The Image of the City she much admired, a border could be made into a seam, “a line of exchange along which two areas are sewn together.” For example, waterfronts, blocked off from neighboring streets and often serving as border vacuums, “should be penetrated by small, and even casual, public openings calculated for glimpsing or watching work and water traffic.” She continued:

  Near where I live is an old open dock, the only one for miles, next to a huge Department of Sanitation incinerator and scow anchorage. The dock is used for eel fishing, sunbathing, kite flying, car tinkering, picnicking, bicycle riding, ice-cream and hot-dog vending, waving at passing boats, and general kibitzing…You could not find a happier place on a hot summer evening or a lazy summer Sunday. From time to time, a great slushing and clanking fills the air as a sanitation truck dumps its load into a waiting garbage scow. This is not pretty-pretty, but it is an event greatly enjoyed on the dock. It fascinates everybody.

  And so, a troublesome border metamorphoses into a “seam,” the city stitched whole.

  I cite at somewhat greater length Jane’s treatment of this one unattractive urban phenomenon—she devotes seventeen pages to border vacuums—to suggest something of her method. The book’s abiding worth lay not in her ideas alone but in the richness of insight, detail, and observation with which she developed each of them—often, as in the preceding passage, from her own life and experience.

  In arguing that cities need old buildings to nourish economically precarious businesses, Jane describes the shabby old building on Sheridan Square that housed her writing studio:

  The floor of the building in which this book is being written is occupied also by a health club with a gym, a firm of ecclesiastical decorators, an insurgent Democratic party reform club, a Liberal party political club, a music society, an accordionists’ association, a retired importer who sells maté by mail, a man who sells paper and who also takes care of shipping the maté, a dental laboratory, a studio for watercolor lessons, and a maker of costume jewelry.

  And then, as if to throw in her lot with her Sheridan Square friends, she adds, “There is no place for the likes of us in new construction.”

  —

  A little after her book came out, a Cleveland man wrote Jane for advice on how he might track down housing and crime statistics for New York housing projects. At the city housing authority, she wrote back, he could expect little help on crime statistics. “They are extremely touchy on this matter. They may even deny that they have such a thing.” At police precincts, they probably couldn’t break down the stats the way he’d want. Still, it was “possible to get a pretty good idea by going in person to police precincts” and interviewing officers; likewise, schoolteachers serving the project. “In short, you have to see many people and do a great deal of detective work.”

  In 1959, Ellen Perry, a recently divorced twenty-eight-year-old who had studied at the Harvard School of Design, was advised by a friend that a Mrs. Jacobs needed help in researching a book. Soon, she was fielding Jane’s requests, feeding facts back to her. On Chloetheil Smith, a modernist architect; on population density figures for Georgetown, in Washington, D.C.; on the union pay s
cale for elevator operators. The modest checks Perry received, for the equivalent of $100 or $200 in today’s money, came through Jane’s Rockefeller grant. “There is something more you could do now,” Jane wrote Perry in October 1959: She needed crime statistics on the ten or fifteen largest cities. And juvenile crime and delinquency rates, too, if Perry could get them. And something on what London was like before the automobile. Perry would report back to Jane with little executive summaries she recalls Jane appreciating. “The subjects she asked me to follow were those on which she had hunches but no firm numbers.” Sometimes, Jane would have Perry wander through neighborhoods, counting mom-and-pop stores, or people sitting out on stoops or hanging out of windows.

  Jane’s hard facts stood out sharply from the artful sketches and bird’s-eye vistas that were the stock-in-trade of design studios and planning departments. “People who are interested only in how a city ‘ought’ to look and uninterested in how it works will be disappointed by this book,” she wrote in its introduction. “To seek for the look of things as a primary purpose or as the main drama is apt to make nothing but trouble.” Here, her anger welling up, she told of a pretty patch of green in an East Harlem project. A social worker was “astonished” by how often, and with how much vehemence, it was derided, though no one could say just why. Then, finally, one tenant did:

  Nobody cared what we wanted when they built this place. They threw our houses down and pushed us here and pushed our friends somewhere else. We don’t have a place around here to get a cup of coffee or a newspaper even, or borrow fifty cents. Nobody cared what we need. But the big men come and look at that grass and say, “Isn’t it wonderful! Now the poor have everything.”

  “There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder,” wrote Jane in one of her most quoted passages, “and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and be served.”

  —

  Death and Life was not the work of a day. It was “much more difficult than I imagined it to be,” Jane would say. “I was filled with anxiety the whole time I was doing it,” occasionally tempted “to put everything into a garbage bag” and set it out for pickup. It was packed tight with ideas many of which traced back not to the few years of the book’s actual composition but, as we’ve seen, to 1955 and long before; some of Jane’s thinking harked back to her Columbia days. Set against the articles she wrote for Forum, the book was virtually unrecognizable, its flavor markedly different even from that of her 1958 Fortune article. For most of her career, an article meant a few days or weeks of work, then on to the next one. Now, in late 1960, she was concluding a project that dwarfed by a factor of twenty or thirty anything she’d done before. “This is the fourth draft of this damn chapter,” she wrote Jason Epstein on December 15, “and it probably needs a fifth and a sixth. I have forgotten how to write & this makes me very worried. Four more to go seems like forty more to go.” Just now, approaching the end, she was showing portions of the manuscript to Epstein, his assistant Nathan Glazer, and Chadbourne Gilpatric, each of whom responded with opinions, objections, and last-minute questions.

  One editorial interchange concerned her last chapter, “The Kind of Problem a City Is,” the very strangeness of its title calling attention to itself as a separate species, set apart from the rest of the book. Jane took as inspiration an essay (appearing in the same 1958 report of the Rockefeller Foundation that listed her original grant) by retiring vice president Warren Weaver, a mathematician who had helped develop the philosophical implications of Claude Shannon’s famous 1947 paper on information theory, a founding document of the digital age. Weaver’s focus was mostly on the biological sciences; Jane would apply his thinking to an intellectual regime, cities, which he’d probably never thought about at all. It seemed to her that Weaver’s breakdown of the types of problems with which scientists grapple summed up, “in an oblique way, virtually the intellectual history of city planning.”

  Weaver described, first, a class of simple scientific problems: you strike one billiard ball with another, at a particular spot, from a particular angle, and with a particular force, and you can predict in some detail what will happen. This was old-hat physics, explored before the twentieth century, relatively straightforward, mathematically navigable.

  A second category of problem was one of “disorganized complexity,” which you might find on a giant billiard table cluttered with not one, or fifteen, balls but millions of them; no way, even in principle, could you trace the path of any one ball amid all that clacking chaos. On the other hand, you could probably come up with useful averages and broad patterns; you could approach statistically and probabilistically, for great numbers of balls, what you couldn’t for any one of them. This approach was applicable to a welter of real-world problems, from life expectancy tables to thermodynamics.

  The study of living systems, Weaver observed, yielded to neither approach but rather fit a third category. “What makes an evening primrose open when it does? Why does salt water fail to satisfy thirst?” These, Weaver’s own examples, were more complex by far than plunking billiard balls together. But they were by no means “disorganized,” and weren’t much illuminated by statistics. Rather, they were problems of “organized complexity”—in Weaver’s words, marked by “a sizable number of factors which are interrelated into an organic whole.”

  Like, Jane now argued, a city.

  How to understand, she offered as example, a neighborhood park, with its slew of interacting forces? The physical design of the park itself figures in. So does its sheer size. So do its users, who they are, when they use it, the pattern of the surrounding streets, and much else. You might wind up with a fine, well-used park, happy and safe; or one that proved barren and dangerous, unappealing to adults and children alike. Either way, the outcome didn’t depend on any one single factor; it wasn’t one of Weaver’s simple problems. Nor could statistics, maybe some crude ratio of open space to local population, shed much light. Rather, the problem occupied Weaver’s third category, where, as with the evening primrose, numerous interrelated factors figured in. There was “nothing accidental or irrational about the ways in which these factors affect each other,” wrote Jane. But understanding it required close-in, almost microscopic study that resisted, as she wrote in relation to a related problem, “easier, all-purpose analyses, and…simpler, magical, all-purpose cures.”

  This was the kind of problem the city represented, the kind that the Ebenezer Howards and Le Corbusiers of the world didn’t see. For Howard, the city reduced to housing and jobs. For Le Corbusier, as Jane wrote, “his towers in the park were a celebration, in art, of the potency of statistics and the triumph of the mathematical average.” With statistical techniques, the relocation of people uprooted by the planners “could be dealt with intellectually like grains of sand, or electrons or billiard balls.” But so crude an approach fell woefully short of real understanding.

  Jane’s final chapter didn’t read much like the rest of the book. It read suspiciously like science. And Nathan Glazer, for one, was little sympathetic to it. “I am somewhat allergic to talking about science in situations where a general intelligence and sensitivity are demanded,” he wrote Jane. She’d made too much of Weaver’s distinctions. He saw little value in them. Stick to more concrete arguments, he advised her. Maybe, he allowed, his was “an over-personal reaction to abstract and theoretical points,” but still, he hoped Jane would reconsider.

  In retrospect, it shouldn’t be surprising that Jane turned now to science. Back at Columbia she’d relished her dips into biology, psychology, geology, and zoology. And what was her “method” generally in Death and Life but a careful, fine-grained seeing common to much of science? She emphasized less what cities were than how they worked; not the nature of a slum but how it got that way; process more than product. (In a note I found among her papers, she takes issue with a scholar’s assertion that “the task
of science is to lessen the pain of encountering the future by anticipating its problems.” No, it was not, she insisted. “The task of science is to understand how things work.”) She was not, of course, a scientist herself; she didn’t count galaxies or trace metabolic pathways for a living. But as a leading Jacobs scholar, the architectural historian Peter Laurence, would observe, even her earliest New York essays from the 1930s reveal a “deeper, protoscientific curiosity about the city’s underlying processes.” Death and Life, meanwhile, retained “the freshness and immutability of scientific principle.”

  We don’t know how much thought Jane gave Glazer’s suggestions. We do know that two days later, she fired back a reply: “I very strongly disagree with you about the last chapter.” For one thing, she wasn’t making analogies to science, as Glazer had implied, but was discussing “methods of thinking and analyzing that are common to science and various other kinds of thinking, not analogous.” No, “that last chapter may take a while to sink in, but if and when it does, it will change planning more than any other idea” in the book.

  The chapter stayed.

  Of course, at this point it little mattered. By now, any issues Glazer and Epstein were raising (and on which they mostly deferred to Jane) could be seen as narrow, even technical. For the manuscript, all 150,000 or so words of it, was now all but done; whatever tweaks it would require over the coming months, its nature was fixed. The Death and Life of Great American Cities was, Epstein weighed in, “the most exciting book on city planning that I have ever read—and one of the most exciting books on any subject I have ever seen. I’m delighted with it and proud of you and I eagerly await the manuscript in its final version.”