Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  CHAPTER 14

  THE PHYSICAL FALLACY

  BY THE TIME her book came out, Jane Butzner Jacobs of Scranton, Pennsylvania, had lived in New York for twenty-seven years, virtually all of it in Greenwich Village. Her jobs had typically taken her up to Midtown. Her familiarity with East Harlem was of recent vintage. Of vast tracts of Brooklyn and the Bronx and the other outer boroughs, she was ignorant. Yet with publication of Death and Life, all her insights and impressions of New York, about how it worked and what it meant, her opinions and prejudices, would stand beside all those who’d ever tried to say something fresh about the city: E. B. White’s love letter to the city, Here Is New York, in 1948. Alfred Kazin’s Jewish Brownsville, in A Walker in the City, from the late 1940s. Joseph Mitchell’s cast of outlandish neighborhood characters in The New Yorker. Novels, essays, poetry: “How funny you are today New York / like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime / and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left.” Dark or bright, gritty or grand, the Manhattan skyline inimitable, the poorer quarters seen with affection, horror, or shame. The city squeezed into a character or elevated to a symbol, each a way to see New York. And now Jane’s own strong feelings for the city, long sublimated in her magazine articles, or surfacing only in table talk with friends, were to join the great conversation. With publication of her book, she would step from an almost entirely private life onto a larger public stage, to be seen, appraised, and judged.

  —

  January 1961. Jane was cutting it pretty close. She had all of a week before she was supposed to return to her job at Architectural Forum. “I want to get as much as I can done on clearing up points, rearranging some chapters, cutting excess adjectives, sentences & paragraphs,” she wrote Epstein’s assistant Nathan Glazer on the 24th, in the same letter in which she looked ahead to her martinis. She appreciated his upbeat response to an earlier submission, she said, “because I have a very hard time knowing how it is coming off, & vary from exhilaration to despair and dejection.”

  Soon after she’d finished it, she showed the manuscript to Elias Wilentz, longtime proprietor of that Beat nexus, the Eighth Street Bookshop. “It is truly a great, important and impressive book,” Wilentz wrote Epstein. It would sell well, he predicted, and not just to planners and architects; there was something big about it. “It should hit the same audience that bought Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd,” a surprise best seller about young people lost in a repressive society. Jane’s book would draw a broader audience yet, Wilentz was saying, “if it is promoted not as a technical work but as an exciting revelation of city life and what makes it tick.”

  Naturally, Chadbourne Gilpatric got an early copy, too, but his response, in a letter to Jane in March, was more measured than she might have liked. He judged it “thoughtful and thought-provoking, vividly and constructively concrete…powerful in its effect, and most timely.” But. But the chapter on parks “could be deleted entirely without much loss.” So could the one on traffic and cars. All told, the book’s 669 mimeographed pages could be reduced “by almost half.” That could hardly have cheered poor Jane, who’d sweated and strained over every one of them. Even his closing comment—that Jane had “many reasons to feel pleased with this contribution”—seems lukewarm and too careful.

  As a publishing venture, however, Jason Epstein was pleased as could be. By early June he could report that magazines were lining up to run excerpts from it: The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, Architectural Forum, The Reporter, and Mademoiselle. Here was the kind of kickoff every publisher dreamed of. In mid-September, prepublication copies went out to Murray Kempton, Max Lerner, J. Kenneth Galbraith, Oscar Lewis, Dwight Macdonald, Edmund Wilson, and Gore Vidal, all intellectual and cultural heavyweights of their day. Also getting an advance copy was Holly Whyte, who, in a fevered scrawl of a handwritten letter, wrote Jane in October, “Jane—TERRIFIC! You did it and I can’t wait to hear the [??] and yells and churlish comments of the fraternity. I’m only part way through it but I can see that it’s going to be one of the most remarkable books ever written about the city and probably the best in this century.” In parentheses, he added, “And it’s fun to read!”

  But all this, gratifying as most of it must have been, came from Jane’s own tribe, from a narrow, sympathetic inner circle. For the past three years, it had been just her, with Bob and the kids, and Jason, and Nat Glazer, and, near the end, a few others who’d gotten their hands on the manuscript, all friends of jane. But after a launch party in October and the book’s formal publication, and then across the next year—during which, as we’ll see, she was caught up in tumultuous fights on behalf of the West Village and against the Lower Manhattan Expressway—Jane and her book were at last rocketed into the big world.

  —

  “Hers is a huge, a fascinating, a dogmatically controversial book,” wrote Orville Prescott in the The New York Times, “and I am convinced, an important one.” He thought it was overlong, “but much of it snaps like a flag in the fresh wind of her new ideas and challenging statements.” That was November 3.

  Two days later, the New York Herald Tribune weighed in: “It is a considerable achievement to have written a book that will irresistibly overturn the preconceptions of generations of city-planners, as Mrs. Jacobs’s book will surely do.”

  On the 10th, Jane was featured in Time magazine, Death and Life described as a passionate, well-documented book that was already shaking up the planners. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, the writer conjured up his own Time-inflected Jacobsean city, down to “the shriek of children scooting in the streets, the clamor of crowded living; the neighborhood butcher’s, where the housewife can leave her door key…and the strangely silent Sunday morning sweet with the smell of freshly washed streets.”

  In Commonweal on December 22, Edward T. Chase led off his review, “How seldom one comes upon a new book of unmistakably seminal importance like this one…This is a dangerous book. Dangerous to vested interests: to all our city planners, to almost all our architects.”

  Declared The Wall Street Journal, “In another age, the author’s enormous intellectual temerity would have ensured her destruction as a witch.”

  Those who loved the book reached for superlatives. Edwin Weeks, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, wrote to Jane on January 29, 1962: “Reading it is like opening a window of January air in a room laid heavy with academic discussion…It is the best package of fresh, vigorous thinking that I have come across in a long, long time.”

  Almost overnight, Jane was a hot ticket. Everyone wanted her to write for them. Something on the new architecture in Midtown Manhattan? Partisan Review queried her. No, she replied. She got a telegram from The New York Times Book Review wondering whether she’d do a seven-hundred-word review of The Intellectual vs. the City: CAN SEND GALLEYS NOW FINISHED BOOK WILL FOLLOW PLEASE REPLY SOONEST. She replied that same day: No, she couldn’t do it. “Now that you have foiled the bulldozer invasion of the Village,” John Fischer wrote her from Harper’s, referring to a civic battle she’d led, “do you have the time and inclination for some writing? If so, I have a couple of ideas I would like to discuss with you.” On December 27, William F. Buckley, the young editor of National Review, wrote her, attaching the favorable review of Jane’s book it would soon carry, and wondering whether she’d do a piece on Lincoln Center for him. Sorry, she couldn’t; by now she was back at Forum, she explained, and “all my writing on cities or on architecture is committed to my own magazine.” Mostly, then, she was saying no. But surely it was nice being asked. The whole world of New York publishing had suddenly opened up to her—suddenly, that is, after twenty-seven years in New York.

  Early February found her at the Museum of Modern Art for a panel called “The Laws of the Asphalt Jungle,” a reference to the novel and noir movie of a few years before. Jane faced two of her longtime antagonists, Edmund Bacon from Philadelphia and Boston’s chief planner, Ed Logue, who was “as cautiously caustic as Bacon is cheery,” in the
words of Jane’s former colleague at Forum, Walter McQuade, who covered the event for The Nation. “Mrs. Jacobs is understandably a little tired of making speeches,” McQuade noted; she declined the rostrum, preferring to sit at a table by the side. But when it was her turn, he wrote, Jane “butchered both professional planners.” She dismissed a vaunted Bacon project as “dull and droopy.” She called Logue’s claim that no bulldozers were aimed at the North End simply false. As McQuade reported, she “soon had the audience laughing sardonically.”

  But Bacon and Logue came back at her. What, exactly, was Mrs. Jacobs for? Bacon wanted to know, earning “a wave of nervous clapping” in the auditorium. Logue castigated Jane for wrongly picturing his redevelopment proposal as an assault on the North End. Not so, he said; the proposal actually took in a much wider swath of Boston. Then he turned personal. The evening before, he’d ventured into the West Village himself and found it not at all the urban paradise Jane had portrayed. He saw few “eyes on the street,” most stores closed by 8 p.m., paper littering the street, buildings ugly and unkempt. If you wanted a model for the next urban America, this wasn’t it.

  But she’d not picked the Village as a model, or as anything exceptional at all, Jane shot back, but rather “because it was a good average area of no outstanding quality” that happened to embody her values of diversity and urbanity. That it was not a model was just the point.

  Valid riposte or not, notable now was that a few months after publication of Death and Life, Jane was not just firing arrows but was the target of them. Her “ballet of Hudson Street” was on its way to becoming a classic, yes—but now she could be fairly labeled, as she in fact was by one reviewer, “the enchanted ballerina of Hudson Street, with a chip on her shoulder.” Thrust into the larger world, she would have to live with the attention, misunderstanding, and hostility public figures face. Some critics made fun of her for loving Greenwich Village too much. Some leveled heavy, thoughtful intellectual artillery at her. Some took easy potshots. Some twisted her ideas out of shape. Some faulted her for being too dramatic or categorical. Some allowed that in Death and Life she’d made something fine and good, only to fault her for not making it finer and better.

  Early in 1962, Jane was on the road, visiting Pittsburgh, Miami, and Milwaukee, touring neighborhoods, giving interviews, batting out bons mots, recounting experiences she’d had with the host city while researching her book—and sometimes, as in Pittsburgh, getting into trouble with the hometown faithful.

  In late January, press releases announced Jane’s forthcoming arrival in Pittsburgh for a week of lectures and tours beginning in mid-February. She was to speak at luncheons, talk to students, sign copies of her book. “An invigorating week was anticipated,” community organizer James V. Cunningham wrote after it was over: “fresh ideas, stimulating discussion, bracing debate, constructive controversy, a shot-in-the-arm for the [city’s] renaissance effort.” Arriving at the airport “buoyed [and] confident,” Jane “was whisked off on a tour of the city.” To a medical center, to rehabbed row houses on the South Side, housing projects in the northern section of the city, neighborhood renewal projects in the East End.

  And what did Pittsburgh get for its hospitality? Well, reported Cunningham, “many a sniff and snort.” Middle-income apartments known as Spring Hill Gardens, the product of an earnest effort to integrate an all-white neighborhood, were, said Jane, “disorganized, as bad as can be, a highly suburban box development.” The Northview Heights public housing project was “bleak, miserable, and mean.” Another neighborhood plan she’d seen was “homogenized, dull, unimaginative,” certain to do nothing for the community but lead it downhill.

  These opinions did not unfailingly please her hosts. “The lady is unenlightened,” a Spring Hill Gardens resident was quoted as saying. “Why didn’t she come inside and see our attractive homes?” A local citizens’ renewal council came away “stunned, confused, and angry” at Jane’s charges. In an open letter to her in The Pittsburgh Press, the city housing administrator gave Jane a little of her own medicine. “You must have heard of the old adage that a half-truth is similar to a half-brick, because it can be hurled further.” Well, Jane’s book—he called it “a novel”—proved the point. Mrs. Jacobs called Northview Heights bleak? Well, of course—they hadn’t even landscaped it yet! She should return once they were finished, when pretty walks would “lead from home to home through lovely resident-maintained lawns and gardens, under shady trees, to pleasant playlots and community recreation rooms.” Besides, compared to “the crowded, narrow, dangerous, dirty, rodent- and bar-infested streets in Downtown New York—and the Greenwich Village area in particular, which you call more ideal—Northview Heights, to many thoughtful citizens, would seem a veritable paradise.” Jane didn’t get the social costs of disease, poverty, and crime—and never would “by star-gazing from the second floor window of a Greenwich Village flat.”

  The lectures she gave that week in Pittsburgh didn’t earn huzzahs, either. After one, “The Citizen in Urban Renewal: Participation or Manipulation,” the lobby bubbled over with disgruntled listeners. Sure, as Mrs. Jacobs said, you shouldn’t allow yourself to be manipulated by the city or anyone else. But that was a little thin. People wanted specifics. And two ex-Chicagoans were there to point out that the packinghouse neighborhoods in Chicago that Jane extolled were known to exclude black people.

  At lunch the next day, Jane backtracked, said she’d been misquoted about one neighborhood she’d brushed off. Maybe, she was asked, the neighborhood should hire an independent planning consultant? No, she replied, there wasn’t a decent planner in the whole country. They all got “the same bad training.”

  Well, said a Pittsburgh urban renewal leader once Jane was back in New York, local bookstores having sold out of her book, “it wasn’t a clean fight, but she made ’em mad and she made ’em think.”

  In time, a new round of reviews of Death and Life began coming out, not from newspapers now but from professional journals, including those of planners and architects. Some were buoyant: “I am filled with delighted admiration for her skill and courage,” wrote Eugene Raskin, professor of architecture at Columbia University. “The appearance of her book should be the occasion for the only urban function she fails to mention—dancing in the streets.” Some reviews, though, were downright wicked in a way I suspect Jane, were she not their target, might have appreciated. A reviewer for American City made Jane’s enthusiasm for Boston’s North End sound silly: “Here, apparently, is the full flowering of the American Way of Life,” where European tourists could come to learn about American democracy. “Let [Soviet premier Nikita] Khrushchev see the North End and he would immediately stop that nonsense that communism will bury us.” He also mocked a scene in Death and Life where a child falls through a glass storefront, severing an artery, but is rescued by concerned Villagers. For Jane, this was “eyes-on-the-street” in action. For the reviewer it was about that “mysterious, unidentified stranger [who] emerges from the circle of peering eyes” to save the child, then disappear.

  “What a dear, sweet character she isn’t,” Roger Starr once said of Jane. When Death and Life came out, this outspoken future New York City housing commissioner and editorial writer for The New York Times, whose views placed him squarely in the Robert Moses camp, reviewed it for a planning newsletter. He began with his own boyhood memories of an early Hollywood star named Grace Moore. Her films, as Starr remembered them, were set in idealized cities “noted for the quaintness and charm of their older buildings and for the absence of dirt, poverty, noxious fumes, and political or racial turmoil.” He’d long forgotten this Mooritania, as he called it, until he read Death and Life. “Jane Jacobs, I discovered, lives there. In her part of Mooritania, people dance instead of sing…but she describes her folksy urban place on Hudson Street (Manhattan) with such spirit and womanly verve that she has made a considerable number of readers believe it really exists.” How, in Jane’s vision, he asked more seriously, coul
d we “find our way back” to Mooritania? “We must forswear any serious interest in sunlight, clear air, quiet streets, open space, and give obeisance to the good fairies by bending the knee to no other gods before diversity, noise, and crowding.”

  Jane was getting beaten up. But fair is fair: her book’s vivid colors made it memorable, but also easy to lampoon.

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  Just as Jane was finishing the book, in December 1960, Jason Epstein had written her that Lewis Mumford’s The City in History was in galleys; “your book and his, when they are both published, will approach each other like two Japanese wrestlers.” Mumford won the first round; his book beat out Death and Life, also nominated, for the National Book Award. That, however, wasn’t the end of their bout.

  Since hearing Jane at Harvard, Mumford had been one of her most influential admirers, helping to get her taken seriously by those who mattered, including the Rockefeller Foundation. But five years later, toward the end of 1961, when he finally read the book he’d helped into the world, he was livid. She had called his The Culture of Cities “a morbid and biased catalog of [urban] ills. The great city was Megalopolis, Tyrannopolis, Nekropolis, a monstrosity, a tyranny, a living death. It must go.” Mumford, said Jane, was so far gone as to see well-off people who chose to live in high-density urban enclaves as inhabiting slums, but “too insensitive to know it or resent it.” The very afternoon he finished reading Death and Life, Mumford began composing a rebuttal. But then months passed, nothing yet appearing in print. “I held my fire…for a whole year,” he wrote a friend, “but when I got down to write I discovered that the paper burned.” He felt, wrote Donald L. Miller, Mumford’s biographer, that Jane “had gone at him with hate in her heart.”