Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Finally, Mumford let loose. He’d hoped to take three long articles to mount his attack, but his editors at The New Yorker prevailed on him to limit it to one and tone it down a bit. Tone it down? “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies for Urban Cancer” began on page 148 of the December 1, 1962, issue, amid Christmas-season ads for panettone and gin, went on for page after page, columns of text flanked by ads all through the fullness of the magazine, for eight thousand words; read it out loud and you’d be at it for an hour.

  Mumford started out reasonably enough. He offered some history, told of Jane’s emergence at Harvard, gave her her due. Then he reached the book itself: “From a mind so big with fresh insights and pertinent ideas, one naturally expected a book of equally large dimensions.” And yes, Jane Jacobs, that “shrewd critic of dehumanized housing and faulty design,” was still there. But joining her now was “a more dubious character who has patched together out of the bits and pieces of her personal observation nothing less than a universal theory” of big cities. Much of it rested on “faulty data, inadequate evidence, and startling miscomprehensions of views contrary to hers.”

  Lewis Mumford, at first Jane’s enthusiastic champion, later her vituperative critic Credit 19

  She sentimentally overvalued Greenwich Village. She overlooked the endless square miles of nearly identical houses spread across New York’s outer boroughs that lacked the diversity she valued in the Village. How to credit her ideas when they were contradicted at every turn? A single walk through Harlem ought to have been enough to correct her pet notions, since most of her urban ideals were fulfilled there. The same went for eighteenth-century London, which likewise satisfied them yet was a “nest of violence and delinquency.”

  Mumford, who wore his city roots proudly—“like a chestful of combat ribbons,” writes his biographer—was infuriated that Jacobs dared try to wrest from him the more-urban-than-thou mantle. “I speak as a born and bred New Yorker,” Mumford wrote. He’d lived in all sorts of neighborhoods and all sorts of housing, which he proceeded to list, right there in the review, down to a “two-room flat over a lunchroom” in Brooklyn Heights, “with the odor of stale fat filtering through the windows.” No, he hadn’t much liked that, though the area had laundries, florists, and groceries enough to qualify for the Jacobsean urban pantheon.

  For most of the decade before 1936, Mumford had lived in an out-of-the-way corner of New York City known as Sunnyside Gardens, in Queens. This was a community of starkly simple two- and three-story row houses, set off from the surrounding street grid, reached by greenery-lined walkways, making for a superblock all its own. While different in detail, it couldn’t help but remind you, even down to its name, of all the suburban garden apartment developments that would come later—leafy, graceless, and squat. At the time, though, it made for an ambitious experiment, a piece of Garden City in the spirit of Ebenezer Howard just a subway ride from Manhattan. It was Jane’s portrayal of the Garden City movement—crude, distorted, and almost comical, in Mumford’s view—that was one reason her book incensed him so. Now, in The New Yorker, he noted his time in Sunnyside Gardens. It was “not utopia,” he allowed, “but better than any existing New York neighborhood, even Mrs. Jacobs’ backwater in Greenwich Village.”

  In her distaste for planned communities like Sunnyside, it seemed to him, Jane abhorred any wisp of order. No wonder she opposed those gifted pioneer planners, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, who bestowed on Sunnyside its harmonious homogeneity. In holding up diversity and dynamism as supreme good her thinking was sadly myopic.

  Her simple formula does not suggest that her eyes have ever been hurt by ugliness, sordor, confusion, or her ears offended by the roar of trucks smashing through a once quiet residential neighborhood, or her nose assaulted by the chronic odors of ill-ventilated, unsunned housing.

  Jane Jacobs simply couldn’t see the ecological disaster the modern city had become. And that was “something worse than oversight,” Mumford declared; “it is willful blindness.”

  When his review appeared, an acquaintance at The New Yorker reassured Jane, “Your book seems to have driven Mumford into schizophrenia—Father Mum’s Sweet and Sour Pickles. I haven’t checked his critique with your book but my impression is that I’m on your side more than his.” How did Jane herself feel when she saw Mumford’s piece? Years later, any wounds having had a chance to scar over, she told one interviewer, “I laughed at a lot of it. I have a fairly thick skin.” Jane knew her book “would make people angry, perhaps especially Mumford,” says Jim Jacobs. “I remember her saying so, with regret, before it was published. She certainly didn’t want to offend, but…she was realistic enough to expect tirades.”

  “Mumford was quite a sexist,” Jane would tell another interviewer. “He talked about my ‘schoolgirl silliness,’ and I was in my 40s!” Two decades her senior, Mumford did bear the baggage of his generation. But dip into the writings of the two of them and they are not, always and automatically, far apart. Neither had much use for Robert Moses, for example. Both realized how much cars harmed city life. And after all, wasn’t it what Mumford had heard straight from Jane herself at Harvard, and later at the New School, that had first won him to her side? “When two people are so close together in their thinking, and so eager for influence,” observes Mumford’s biographer, they’re apt to “magnify their differences to the point of outright caricature.” They were alike in another way, too. They had both come up as writers first. Both brought to their language a distinct rhetorical stamp. Both threw verbal brickbats, and aimed well.

  Among Jane’s intellectual antagonists, Herb Gans was different. He was a perfectly capable writer but a sociologist by trade, people and community his concern, and his review in Commentary in February 1962 raised a whole other range of objections to Jane’s book. “I’m not sure whether you’ll like the review,” he wrote Jane on January 19, with an advance copy of it, “I’d be surprised if you did—but I hope you will think it a fair one, which I have tried to make it. I agree with many of your observations, but not with your explanations—because you have not considered the sociological factors.”

  Gans, recall, was the University of Chicago–educated sociologist, eleven years younger than Jane, who’d gone into Boston’s West End to record its final days. He had reached some conclusions similar to hers, especially that working-class neighborhoods that looked a little ragtag were not necessarily slums. Jane had quoted from his work, appreciatively so. Gans was sure her book would be influential, he wrote her, and got his editor to assign him twice the usual space to review it.

  In notes Gans took while reading it, he got to the heart of Death and Life: “What is lively is what is good…If it is alive, it is working.” Here was Jane’s bedrock belief. Vitality and diversity trumped everything else. Of course, Gans knew, not everyone felt that way. Other satisfactions counted, too—harmony, natural beauty, order, quiet family life, for just a few—and these, Gans all but said, didn’t figure for much in Jane’s universe. “No child of enterprise or spirit will willingly stay in such a boring place after he reaches the age of six,” Jane wrote of Garden City–style developments in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, New York, and Baltimore that she deemed wanting. There was no room in her city, it could seem, for those lacking the personal qualities she prized.

  Just such blind spots, or narrowness of vision, were what most troubled Jane’s critics. “She doesn’t accept the existence or desirability of other styles of urbanity as well as her own and, therefore, falls into the same pattern of single-minded thinking that she loves to condemn,” noted one review in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners.

  Another, in the same issue, pictured Jane as scarcely able to believe that “anyone would choose a life style different from the one she has chosen. She imposes her tastes and values on the city more narrowly than any planner would dare to do.” Her views of parks, for example, were hopelessly narrow. Why didn’t she “risk a trip” in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, alon
g the Wissahickon Creek valley, and meet “people of all ages getting away from watchful eyes in the city. She would see children exploring the trails above the creek or feeding the swans.”

  Catherine Bauer Wurster, among those supporting Jane’s Rockefeller grant, called Death and Life “a brilliant personal diatribe,” perceptive and illuminating “within her narrow range of concern.” But—and it was a big but—she “simply disregards the entire gamut of middle class values related to home and family life.”

  Kevin Lynch, whom Jane had quoted admiringly in Death and Life, called hers “a brilliant and distorted book,” one holding out for “a very restricted kind of urban environment.” And, he went on, it “assumes that buildings and streets have a very singular power to change people’s lives.”

  This point would recur in objections to Death and Life. After a Saturday Evening Post excerpt from the book appeared in October 1961, the Boston planner Donald M. Graham suggested that Jane was forever “mixing apples with battleships, confusing the social environment with the physical environment.” They were two different things. Ironically, Jane had made a similar point in Death and Life: “There is no direct, simple relationship between good housing and good behavior.” Good shelter was good, period; you didn’t need to justify it on the grounds “that it will work social or family miracles”—a self-deception someone had called “salvation by bricks.”

  But it was just such self-deception that Herb Gans saw in her book now, too. Death and Life was grounded, he wrote, in three assumptions: that people want diversity; that diversity makes cities live and the lack of it makes them die; and that buildings, streets, and the like shape human behavior. “The last assumption…might be called the physical fallacy, and it leads [Jacobs] to ignore the social, cultural, and economic factors that contribute to vitality or dullness,” blinding her to the deeper roots of urban problems.

  The vibrant street life of some neighborhoods “stems not so much from their physical character as from the working-class culture of their inhabitants.” Gans was speaking of Boston’s North End, and of Italian and Irish sections of Greenwich Village. In such districts, “the home is reserved for the family,” with much social life taking place outdoors. Also, children were less kept home, and less closely supervised in their play generally, than middle-class kids, and so naturally more apt to be out on the street. Throw in a few café-haunting artists and bohemians, pepper the mix with tourists, and you were on your way toward the “highly visible kind of vitality” Jane celebrated. But it grew out of how particular people lived, not population density and the other factors Jane highlighted. Then, too, wasn’t “vitality” itself really in the eye of the beholder? Some neighborhoods might look less vital to a visitor but be quite as vital to those who lived in them. Here, in any case, were some of “the sociological factors” Gans felt that Jane had missed.

  A few days after Gans sent her a copy of the coming review, Jane wrote him a note decrying what she called its “old-hat stereotypes…about ethnic behavior and city life,” insisting that she’d carefully weighed the points he claimed she’d ignored. She thanked him anyway, for granting so much attention to her book, but apparently still came away wounded; Gans would report that “she broke off relations” with him for a time. After Jane died, Gans would suggest that as a middle-class resident of the largely working-class West Village, Jane romanticized it, coming away “blinded…to the economic insecurity and the resulting personal and social problems that some of her Hudson Street neighbors” experienced. An “innocent” from Scranton, Jane “missed the dark sides of life below the middle income.”

  Ellen Lurie, the young social worker who’d studied George Washington Houses for Union Settlement, and from whose work Jane drew, didn’t miss them. Some of her project residents, she’d reported, had been relocated from their homes in the old neighborhood, some moved from other projects. Still others were “volunteers,” who’d applied for a place there, like Mr. and Mrs. McLean and their two small children. He worked as a presser in a clothing factory. They had friends on the floor with whom they visited, played poker, watched TV. For George Washington Houses, all in all, theirs ranked as a success story.

  Then there were the Larkins, who’d lived in East Harlem all their lives, grown up with Negroes, Chinese, Jews, Germans, and Irish, but whose home at 101st Street and Third Avenue had been torn down four years before. They’d been moved temporarily to another project and now found themselves at Washington Houses, mostly with Puerto Ricans and blacks for neighbors. Their kids were constantly fighting. The project was no place for them.

  Among blacks who had moved from a middle-income Harlem project, the Wilsons liked their old neighborhood better. The stores were more convenient, the people seemed more intelligent. Their new neighbors, black and Puerto Rican alike, struck them as somehow lower class. The Wilsons were itching to get out as soon as possible.

  And Mrs. Acosta? Why, she loved George Washington Houses. Her husband played basketball at the local community center. They had lots of friends in the neighborhood. In Lurie’s words, she “wants to live here always.”

  After reading Death and Life, accounts like these somehow jar. Not for the facts they represent, or for any arguments they might bolster or undermine. It’s just that you don’t find much close attention to real people in Jane’s book. One can admire how Jane draws important truths from Lurie’s study; the trains of logic are there, certainly. But, viewed through a less obliging lens, it isn’t hard to see the ordinary people of East Harlem as less interesting to her than the insights she extracts from their lives.

  Just weeks before she submitted the final manuscript, Epstein had written to her with “a question to put before your argument: Negroes. Nat, I know, has asked you to comment on ethnic groups in general and I hope you will, but I think it’s urgent that you include, perhaps in an appendix, the Negro question, since so much of your argument depends on a solution to it.” Epstein’s reasoning was plain enough: some of the most atrocious slums were those of African Americans who’d emigrated up from the Jim Crow South. Surely a book presuming to address the problems of cities needed to address the especially urgent problems of black people in cities. Epstein appreciated that this would “take you outside your argument somewhat,” but still…

  Jane wrote back after Christmas saying that from the time she’d started her project, she’d thought about the issue; but no, it was “a poor idea for my book.” She had reasons for this, but couldn’t just then, in the throes of completing the manuscript, take time to explain. “In the meantime,” she added, “do not cherish a hope that I will change my mind because I am very convinced and firm about this.” He might, she suggested, want to talk to Ellen Lurie, who was thinking about writing a book about East Harlem.

  The next day—he’d probably not yet received her letter—Epstein wrote Jane once more. He “was more firmly convinced than ever that the Negro question must be one of the main obstacles to your proposals.” Certainly she needed to acknowledge it. “I don’t think that you can proceed as though the question didn’t exist.” A month later, Nat Glazer wrote her, mostly on another matter, but noting, “Jason is very worried about the fact you don’t talk about Negroes. I am convinced the character and background of the social groups making up a city contribute as much to the things you are interested in as any physical factors”—there it was, again, the physical fallacy—“and consequently I feel Jason has a point.” But maybe by then Glazer had figured that he and Epstein had lost the battle, for he added, “On the other hand, you can’t do everything.”

  In a chapter on “Unslumming and Slumming,” Jane wrote that “the discrimination which operates most drastically today is, of course, discrimination against Negroes. But it is an injustice with which all our major slum populations have had to contend to some degree.” And that was about it, so far as Epstein’s Negro question was concerned. She was not about to be waylaid by what seemed to her a distraction from the book’s main line of argume
nt. People occupying unique social and cultural niches—well, they were simply not her subject.

  Here, then, was what much criticism of Death and Life came down to: that what Jane focused on was brilliant; but that she was sometimes missing something, her focus too narrow; that the very blinders needed to avoid distraction by the inconsequential or irrelevant left her blind to other truths. Jane, in short, didn’t see what she didn’t see. And what she didn’t see, at least not with the same urgency others did, was the troubling impact on cities of race, class, and ethnicity.

  —

  A persistent feature of the critical response to Death and Life was a peculiar doubleness—voluble praise and severe misgivings set close, side by side, and hard to tease apart, like those ghost images seen on old TV sets. Think not of blandly “mixed reviews,” good and bad blended into a gray soup. No, more typically you’d have a reviewer busily pointing out the book’s failings—yet who, as if he couldn’t quite help it, or as if he’d be dishonest with himself not to acknowledge it, felt moved to comment on its passion, insight, and intelligence. A generally negative review in The Yale Law Journal castigated Death and Life for all manner of sins, yet concluded that Jane had “touched some sensitive chords and her point of view cannot be sloughed off.” A reviewer for the Antioch Review lamented Jane’s “inept introspective scholarship,” yet admitted that the book “proves one thing: Mrs. Jacobs has within her the capacity to produce a very great book, a very important book”; for him, Death and Life wasn’t it—yet Death and Life itself had made him think so! A reviewer for the Journal of the American Institute of Planners observed that in Jane’s analysis of Philadelphia’s rejuvenated Rittenhouse Square she “conveniently overlooks the massive dislocation of low-income Negroes by high-income whites.” Yet he anointed Death and Life as “a challenge to complacency and smugness,” to “every formula and slogan of city building.” Herbert Gans’s critiques embodied this doubleness, too. A Commentary reader marveled at his “remarkable appraisal” of Jane’s book—in which, having asserted that her assumptions were wrong and broadly faulting them, he could still call the work a “path-breaking achievement.”