Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  The world had reached no settled verdict on Jane’s book; it represented too sharp a break with the past. But unlike most books published in 1961, or any year, it was not going to be forgotten.

  CHAPTER 15

  WEST VILLAGE WARRIOR

  I. STREET FIGHTER

  In 1963, two years after publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Kramer wrote about Jane Jacobs in The Village Voice:

  People who have seen her in action at the Board of Estimate or down on Broome Street rarely forget that clomping, sandaled stride and that straight gray hair flying every which way around a sharp, quizzical face. And she can magnetize a populace into action as well as any of her archetypes…She has turned her causes into hot-potato issues, and is lately the terror of every politico in town. She has mustered public support and sympathy to the extent that now even the mayor bends to a Jacobs decree or completely loses face.

  If we didn’t know any better and recalled her only as a writer, Kramer’s account of Jane Jacobs as public figure might seem unrecognizable. But since 1955, Jane had drifted into new work for which she would become as well known as for her books. It wasn’t paying work. It was not of her choosing. But, despite herself, she had become a community activist. So significant were the string of battles in which she played a major hand, and so effective was she at leading them, that together they make for an alternative portrait of her, like a photo snapped from a surprising angle, that complements, or even competes with, that formed by her life as a writer.

  What did Jane do? She helped ensure that today children splash in the fountain at Washington Square Park untroubled by the roar of traffic; that the broad sidewalks around her house were not ignominiously narrowed; that the West Village avoided the heavy hand of urban renewal. She addressed some of the neighborhood’s housing problems through a project architecturally more at home in the nineteenth century than the twentieth and helped actually get it built. And she blocked an enormous expressway that would have all but sliced off the tip of Lower Manhattan and changed the face of the city forever and for the worse. Probably only the last of these civic battles would figure in any general history of New York City. The others, to anyone who didn’t live in the Village, might today seem trifling or remote; we live here and now, not there and then. But it was just Jane’s fierce focus on the intimate, the nearby, and the small that was her most lasting contribution to the culture of civic activism: not just the Big Picture counted, but your street, your house. In each of these confrontations with civic authority, powerful public figures failed to get what they wanted; their aims were thwarted, their say-so challenged,. Tides of traffic, demolition, and faceless new construction didn’t (back then) wash over Greenwich Village. And because they didn’t, the species of urban life Jane Jacobs championed was better preserved.

  It might seem self-evident that the aims of her activism were of a piece with what she preached in Death and Life. For example, she had illuminated the abuses of urban renewal and the ravaging of old neighborhoods in East Harlem; what, then, could be more natural than to oppose the same malignant forces in the West Village? Moreover, her exploits on the civic front lines exhibit the same orneriness, the same sweet outlaw streak, that runs through Death and Life. We discover in Jane, as activist, scant dissonance between actions and ideas. We find little to parse or rationalize away.

  True enough, yet not wholly true.

  For in fighting city hall, Jane was confronted with new, quite different parts of herself with which, at first, she could not have been entirely familiar or comfortable. Jane the scrappy street fighter—sitting through public meetings of mind-numbing tedium, head resting in hands, looking out through her black-framed glasses, rising to make public statements, launching into vituperative debate, working through friends and enemies alike, making backroom deals—needed different skills than did Jane the writer. Dispatching your children onto the streets to gather signatures required quite a different mental stance than blue-penciling a recalcitrant paragraph.

  To her friends from those West Village years of the 1950s and 1960s, she was master strategist, the brains, wit, and spirit behind their most inspired victories. But some, like Claire Tankel, who, with her husband, Stanley, worked with Jane in those days, could recall her as needlessly abrasive. One time, a press release they’d drafted came out too long. Jane hectored Tankel’s husband about it, almost reducing him to tears: “If you write a press release you’ve got to do it this way, this way, and this way. You didn’t write it right.” Tankel was not alone to remember her like this. Jane could irritate and annoy, though mostly it was her foes who bore the brunt of it. Later, Jane would be asked whether the civic activism that occupied her during those years came naturally to her. No, she replied. “I wanted to be learning things and writing. I resented that I had to stop and devote myself to fighting what was basically an absurdity that had been foisted on me and my neighbours.”

  II. MR. AND MRS. MACHIAVELLI

  As a child growing up in the Village, the author Roberta Brandes Gratz remembers Washington Square Park as “the focus of every activity from regular chess games to political speeches to guitar fests around the steps of ‘the circle,’ a massive fountain with spacious steps useful for seating. My grandfather and his cronies met on a park bench. My contemporaries met in the playground.”

  Beginning in 1952, this urban oasis was threatened by a scheme to funnel the traffic coming down Fifth Avenue from the north through the park in a wide sweeping arc to West Broadway (today’s La Guardia Place) at the south end. A Chicago-born actress and mother of four named Shirley Hayes was the first, most adamant force against the park roadway. In 1955, as we’ve seen, Jane did her bit, in a letter to city officials protesting it.

  In 1958, the threat remained and Villagers came together in the Joint Emergency Committee to Close Washington Square to Traffic. That, Jane would acknowledge, might seem “to outsiders like a cumbersome kind of name…Why couldn’t you have something catchier?” But it was just this targeted specificity that defined their strategy. The park was their sole concern. They had no interest in uniting the fractious political views in the Village under one banner; that would have been impossible anyway. They had but one sharply defined object.

  In Jane’s telling, the winning strategy for this last battle of a long civic war emerged one night when she and Bob were in bed. She’d fallen off to sleep. But Bob was still up, troubled by the endless park imbroglio. When, abruptly, he hit upon it, he woke her up to tell about it, and it wasn’t pretty. These were the days of tightly controlled machine politics, and Bill Passannante, a protégé of the patronage- and favor-dispensing Tammany political machine of Carmine DeSapio, was up for reelection as assemblyman. DeSapio, who lived in the Village, was “the personification of a boss, you know, the backroom boss,” Norman Redlich, one of Jane’s allies, would remember. “Whatever he told you he would do, he would do.” And he could do pretty much as he pleased, by simply picking up the phone. Passannante’s challenger was Whitney North Seymour Jr., a white knight in the Jacobs circle, who’d favored closing the park to traffic all along and who, as Jane would admit, “had every reason to expect” their support in the upcoming election. He wouldn’t get it. He’d never get it. Because “he was not in power. The people who were in power were DeSapio’s machine.” Whatever Seymour’s virtues, Bob’s Machiavellian scheme sacrificed him to their larger aim.

  As Jane told the story, they went to DeSapio, saying, If anyone can get the park closed to traffic, you can. “We expect you do it, and if you don’t do it we’re going to consider you rascals and throw you out,” by coming out for Seymour and working for him. To demonstrate their muscle, the mothers’ group put together an almost instant rally. Overnight, posters went up around the neighborhood. Inexplicably, many of them appeared on walls, lampposts, and storefronts just a little lower, closer to the ground, than you might expect. It seems that Jane’s and other neighborhood children, armed with paste pots, ha
d been enlisted to put them up. “We had all these little elves,” Jane said later, smiling at the memory, “all these kids putting the posters up.” And collecting signatures, too—some 35,000 of them. It was a performance whose significance was not lost on DeSapio—who, as a New York Times obituary of Hayes would put it, simply “passed the word that he wanted them out,” meaning the cars.

  Seymour was outraged. But DeSapio, sworn the support of the mothers’ group in the election, and set to be hailed as their hero, was as good as his word; the stanchions went up and the park was cut off to cars and buses. The traffic jams ominously predicted by the city failed to materialize. The experiment was pronounced a success, and the park was liberated; it has remained so to this day. On June 26, 1958, the Daily Mirror immortalized one early success in the struggle with a photo of Jane’s daughter—three-year-old Mary, round-faced, blond-tressed, and adorable—with another child holding aloft a ceremonial ribbon; the moment merited not a ribbon-cutting ceremony but, as a symbolic bar to traffic, a ribbon-tying ceremony.

  “Rather tough political pressure,” Jane would term their successful strategy, her language veering uncharact​eristically toward euphemism. But, as she’d frame it at another time, “[w]hat we were inventing was issue-oriented politics,” focused not on individuals or parties, but on the daily life of one’s community.

  Behind the threat to Washington Square Park, of course, was Robert Moses, the city’s master builder, who had pushed plans for moving traffic through the Village since the 1930s. Moses erected housing projects, spanned rivers with tunnels and bridges, built expressways, created public beaches, threw up world’s fairs. He seemed to care little how he did it, nor worry much about the tens of thousands of people displaced by his urban pawn-pushing. In an article for Architectural Forum in 1942, ten years before Jane Jacobs joined its staff, Moses wrote a long, admiring article about Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the fabled late-nineteenth-century planner of Paris. “All new work,” he quoted Haussmann’s retort to his critics, “makes an unfavorable impression because it is a change that upsets settled ways of life. But this first impression is fleeting; it soon gives way to a juster and more generous appreciation.” The article was profusely illustrated with maps, drawings, and photographs of Paris, many of them tellingly paired with promenades and parkways Moses had pushed through New York.

  Robert Moses Credit 20

  Moses was never mayor, never governor, never held elected office, but wielded power through banal-sounding positions like parks commissioner and chair of the mayor’s anti-slum committee. Behind the scenes, however, he had his hands on everything. He blustered and bludgeoned. He delighted in putting his opponents in their place; he referred to one group of them as “partisans, enthusiasts, crackpots, fanatics, or other horned cattle.” He was a bully; what other word could you use? Jane would say years later that Moses “did more harm to New York City than any other hundred men you can imagine put together. One of his favorite sayings was, ‘You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs,’ and the omelet was the common good, and the eggs were the people who were broken.” Viewed more charitably, Moses got things done; he was effective—if by now, during his late sixties and early seventies, when he clashed with Citizen Jane and her friends, less so. His defeat at Washington Square would come to be seen as a mark of his slackening power.

  That battle, and his subsequent rout at the hands of Jane and her allies over the Lower Manhattan Expressway, would leave the two of them, in the minds of many, indissolubly linked—as they are in the titles of at least two recent books—Anthony Flint’s Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City; and The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, by Roberta Brandes Gratz. In fact, Jane may have met Moses only once, at a meeting of the city’s board of estimate. “There is nobody against this,” Jane has Moses bellowing, incredulous at the defeat of his park roadway, “NOBODY, NOBODY, NOBODY, but a bunch of, a bunch of MOTHERS!”—whereupon he stomped out. But if face-to-face encounters between the two of them were few, their pairing does seem inevitable and apt: two memorable figures, tied to diametrically opposing visions of New York. Moses, the man of plans, maps, and models, the reshuffling of whole urban landscapes, the destruction of neighborhoods, wielder of the marionette strings of power; Jane Jacobs, all by herself in her writing studio, lured onto the urban battlefield only by existential challenges to her home, protective of her streets and sidewalks against the dark forces of unbridled power.

  Grist for an opera? At this writing, there’s one in the making.

  III. SAVE OUR SIDEWALKS

  One evening in 1960 while Jane was putting him to bed, son Jimmy said to her: We’re going to lose our tree. He meant the tree the family had planted on Hudson Street in front of their house in 1956, almost the only one on the block. No, said Jane, the tree was doing fine, no need to worry. Yes, there is, insisted Jimmy. “They’re going to cut off our sidewalks and the tree is on that part of it.”

  Coming home from school, Jimmy had seen men marking up the sidewalk in paint and chalk. He had gone up to them and asked about their work. Jane had seen them, too, but couldn’t get a straight answer about what they were up to: Oh, just a routine survey. But, as Jane proudly noted when she told the story later, eleven-year-old Jimmy was really interested in what they were doing. “And they saw that and told him—showed him—this brave, inquiring little boy, how surveying was done.” Along the way, of course, they spilled the beans: the plan, courtesy of the Manhattan borough president’s office, was to lop off five-foot strips of sidewalk on both sides of Hudson Street, to create another lane for cars.

  In 1960, as now, “the sidewalks of New York” of the old song were nothing like the skinny cement strips of most suburban subdivisions, with barely enough room for a single pedestrian, much less an amiably chattering group of friends. In Death and Life, as we have seen, Jane gave over three chapters to the “uses of sidewalks” in all their variety. The last of them, devoted to “assimilating children,” offered a typology of sidewalks by width: thirty-foot sidewalks could “accommodate virtually any demand of incidental play put upon them”; twenty-footers, like those on Hudson Street, precluded rope jumping but left room for almost anything else. To Jane, sidewalks were the very basis of city life. And now, as “part of a mindless, routinized city program of vehicular road widening,” as she’d describe it in Death and Life, the city wanted to emasculate theirs.

  Next morning, Jane wrote a petition and, children in tow, marched off to the local printer to have it run off. Forget it, the printer told her; he had too many restaurant menus to set in type and print up; it would be weeks before he could get to it. “That’ll be too late,” said Jane, the sidewalks would be gone by then. “Which sidewalks?” he said; of course, they included the one right outside his store. An hour later Jane had her petitions. Jimmy began taking them around. Ned and little Mary, bundled up in hats and hoods and heavy coats, gathered signatures in front of the house. They sat at a little table, under a sign tacked to the front door that looked like this:

  SAVE

  THE

  SIDEWALKS

  ON HUDSON STREET

  Local parochial schools sent petitions home with their children. Jane approached influential Village figures she’d met in the park fight, especially the well-connected Tony Dapolito, a baker by trade, who’d go down in Village lore as its honorary mayor. Jane was among a delegation that made their plea before the borough president, but, Dapolito told Bob Jacobs later, the outcome had been decided before they went in to see him. The sidewalk-snipping scheme was stopped in its tracks.

  Early on, Jane would recall, some of her neighbors had concluded that, petitions and signatures notwithstanding, they’d lose: “You can’t fight city hall.” But the realization that they could fight city hall, and win, would serve them well next time around.

  IV. NIBBLED TO DEATH BY DUCKS

 
In February 1961, a month after submitting the manuscript for Death and Life, Jane opened the newspaper to learn that part of the West Village had been named an urban renewal area. Its slums were coming down, The New York Times declared. New housing was going up. “I knew at once what that meant,” Jane would recount—“that we were going to be designated to be wiped out.” The designated fourteen-block stretch ran from Hudson Street to the Hudson River. It included her own block. It included her own house. Any sweet, peaceful interlude she might have anticipated for the months leading to her book’s publication was abruptly cut short.

  The stakes were much bigger than a few stunted sidewalks; yet this early in the story it all seemed to come down to $300,000. This was the amount, according to the city’s housing and redevelopment board, successor to Robert Moses’s slum clearance board, that would go into a planning study for West Village urban renewal. Even back in 1961, $300,000 wasn’t that much. But to Jane, this little pot of money was just the first step toward bulldozing her neighborhood into anonymity, unaffordability, or both. This “advance of planning funds,” which the board of estimate had formally to request from the feds, would set in motion events Jane had seen play out time and again, signaling that urban renewal, in all its malignancy, was on the way: amid the uncertainty, businesses pull back on their investments; landlords stop maintaining their properties; residents move out. The result? A downward spiral of deterioration that accelerates neighborhood decline. Just before the announcement in the paper, a woman named Elizabeth Squire was offered $50,000 for her house; a few days later, after the announcement, but before she’d thought to accept it, the offer was rescinded. Let that pot of planning-study money go through, Jane was certain, and such painful stories would recur daily.