Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  So Jane got on the phone.

  The battle would play out over almost a year. Jane’s days and those of her friends grew thick with calls to make, letters to solicit or write, hearings to attend, legal papers to file, presentations to prepare, petitions to draw up, rallies to organize, church basement penny sales to orchestrate, puppet “citizens’ committees” to expose. The fight became so frenetic, Jane would report, “that we just disconnected the doorbell and left the door open at night so we could work and people could come and go.” These were the days of the fabled West Village Martini, gin and a few drops of vermouth in any handy glass, an olive or a pickled onion, an ice cube, and then, by Jane’s recipe, “you put your finger in it, and go swish, swish, swish”; no time for niceties. The battle for the West Village, Jane’s son Ned recalls, “totally consumed the lives of my parents and their neighbours.” But in the beginning, everything happened all at once—had to, because the city had left only two days before a board of estimate hearing intended to set the whole process in motion. When Jane and thirty of her neighbors trooped downtown to see the commissioner of housing and redevelopment, they succeeded in postponing the hearing for a month.

  This photo of a West Village strategy session, from about 1961, was taken for an article about Jane that never appeared. That’s Jane’s son Ned at far left. Credit 21

  Three days after the postponement, on February 26, three hundred people crowded into the St. Luke’s School auditorium, a few blocks from Jane’s house, and set up the Committee to Save the West Village. They elected Jane, who in the wake of the sidewalk battle had something of a reputation, as one of two co-chairpersons. “The aim of the committee,” Jane was quoted as saying, “is to kill this project entirely because if it goes through it can mean only the destruction of the community.” She and the other Villagers were angry: the rationale for designating the West Village as suitable for urban renewal was simple—that it was a slum. And they knew it wasn’t.

  But what if it was? That is, if the West Village were really the sort of hopeless mess that federal urban renewal laws and the whole spirit of modernism had in mind to wipe clean and start over with, then tearing it down and replacing it with new housing, as the city planned to do, might be a good thing. The West Village fight can be seen as a succession of public hearings and presentations, charges and countercharges, set against a backdrop of the sheer day-to-day work of waging civic war. But in the end it came down to just what the West Village really was: A slum unworthy of life, to be put out of its misery and made into something better? Or a community to be preserved much as it was?

  The facts themselves were there for anyone to see, there on the streets and in the homes of the West Village; the threatened area ran from West Eleventh Street down past Christopher to Morton Street, back from the Hudson River piers east to Washington, Greenwich, and, finally, Hudson Street. About eighteen hundred people lived in those blocks—home owners, renters, longshoremen, teachers. Thousands more from outside worked in the neighborhood’s warehouses, factories, retail stores, and other small businesses. Its urban palette ranged from blackened brick and rutted concrete to cobblestone and oil-slicked asphalt. West Village houses were almost never like the iconic ones kindergarten children crayon in, with front door, windows, chimney, and lawn. Rather, they were new or gussied-up apartment buildings, firetrap tenements, the occasional frame house going back to the early nineteenth century, stunningly rehabbed row houses, and shabby single-room-occupancy hotels near the piers. There were parking lots and warehouses, St. Veronica’s Church and a Western Electric research laboratory. All jumbled together within an area of less than a twentieth of a square mile. The question was, how to see all that.

  How to see cities, of course, was what Jane’s book, just then on its way to publication, was all about. Every chapter offered alternative ways to see: tottering old buildings could be sources of anarchic creativity; new housing could mean a brutal wiping-clean of old, familiar social connections; a factory near your house need not be unwholesome, but instead a nexus of economic and social renewal. And now, just as Jane’s book would challenge conventional urban thinking, so did the battles of 1961 playing out in her neighborhood. Oversimplify just a bit and you could dub the yearlong drama Death or Life: The West Village. Jane’s committee printed up index-card-sized handbills that read, simply, “SAVE THE WEST VILLAGE.” Save it from what? Save it from extinction, from its transformation into the sort of place in which its residents either wouldn’t be able, or wouldn’t want, to live. The neighborhood was just fine the way it was.

  But no, not true, that wasn’t it either: Jane and her neighbors didn’t see the neighborhood as just fine the way it was. They weren’t blind, could hardly miss its failings, the raucous truck traffic, the decaying warehouses. Cobbled streets could sing of charm and nostalgia, but they also warbled of the worn and the decrepit. Compared to today, there were few trees, the streets were more littered and dirty, the façades of tenements and industrial lofts bore scant sign of today’s proud infusions of new paint, new windows, and new money. There wasn’t much money in the West Village, hadn’t been for years, and it showed. “We are 100% for improvement and we know our neighborhood can stand some,” an early Committee to Save the West Village newsletter emphasized. They did want to see new middle-income housing, welcomed the “opportunity to work with officials of the city’s conservation program to make our neighborhood a still happier place to live.” Like, say, a stretch of new park beside the river? Other improvements would come from “building up what we have instead of destroying the existing neighborhood. Our best efforts would be aimed at saving and improving, not destroying.” They already had so much: low crime, little overcrowding, much liveliness, even an old farmhouse or two, lovingly restored, that went back practically to colonial times.

  When, in May, the department of city planning’s newsletter made the case for urban renewal, it acknowledged that the West Village included some decent housing and showed signs of rehabilitation. But it emphasized the “blighting influence” of an elevated New York Central freight line spur that ran to an abandoned terminal along its west side. It bemoaned the “indiscriminate mixture of warehousing, truck terminals, garages and loft buildings” along Washington Street, the many tenements and nonresidential structures that were “run down and deteriorated.”

  They weren’t making things up. A few years later, when she moved into an apartment at the corner of Horatio and Washington streets, a bit north of the contested blocks, longtime Villager Patricia Fieldsteel would remember the West Village as a

  less-than-desirable area, tucked away…in a faraway inaccessible pocket bordered by the Meat Market and the shipping docks, massive crumbling carapaces that had leeched themselves to the Lower West Side, obliterating the river from view. Across the piers, from West to Greenwich streets, was a dank warren of small factories, meat packers, printing plants and light industry. Enormous trucks blocked the streets, spewing fumes into already fetid air, blackened by free-flowing soot from unregulated building incinerators. There were no trees, no gardens, no parks.

  What later became a row of fine restored townhouses along Jane Street was then still “broken up into seven- and ten-family tenements, or boarding houses renting out single-occupancy rooms to single, often ‘wayward’ men.”

  For the city planning department, it was the neighborhood’s “mixture of land uses,” including bad housing, heavy commercial traffic, and the freight line, that left the neighborhood blighted. No matter that just such a mixture—residential, commercial, and industrial all together—was what Jane said could make for a healthy, interesting, vital area. No, insisted the planners, it was just that which generated blight, all but made it a slum. How could a neighborhood exhibiting such a disparate mess of uses, which the planning wisdom of half a century, reaching back to Ebenezer Howard and beyond, had ordained as ill-befitting a modern city, be a good, healthy, respectable way to live? That was one essential question.

>   Of course, the other essential question was, Who was to say?

  This was not long after the end of World War II, when trust in generals, government officials, scientists, and experts was not wholly unknown, before the Vietnam War sowed doubt about “the best and the brightest” and authority in general. The default position was still to trust the people who knew their technical disciplines and possessed knowledge most people didn’t. But already Jane didn’t buy it. She had seen the work of the planners across America and how, presumably with the best of intentions, they had done harm. Academically uncredentialed herself, with an outlaw streak going back to her school days and an abiding faith in her own vision, she and the rest of her committee were inclined not to trust the experts, but to see in them corruption, incuriosity, and ignorance. When, early the following year, Jane reflected on what they’d learned from the West Village war, she painted a picture of behind-the-scenes skullduggery and incompetence on the part of the authorities. No, not the vaunted “experts” but only the residents themselves could properly decide a neighborhood’s future. A few weeks after the battle was joined, the columnist John Crosby wrote an essay for the New York Herald Tribune with the apt and challenging title “Who Says What Is a Slum?” And no, it wasn’t necessarily the blinkered experts. What Crosby called “the psychological beauties of a neighborhood, where people live together in their own harmonies, is far more precious than the paint job on the houses.” Score one for Jane and her friends.

  From their offices down on Lafayette Street, the city planners were saying it just couldn’t be—that so topsy-turvy a mix of new and old, residential and grittily industrial, charming and unlovely, necessarily made for a slum. To prove the contrary, Jane and her neighbors invited journalists and others to visit West Villagers in their homes. However awful the neighborhood was supposed to be, went the strategy, it wouldn’t square with what you’d see right in front of your nose. A building at 661 Washington Street? Well, yes, a bit run-down—yet with clean hallways, tidy apartments. The borough president came through in March and, according to a New York Times reporter, was “impressed by the generally high standards of the living quarters he saw within outwardly shabby buildings,” and “by the intensity of feeling among tenants who were clearly not slum dwellers.”

  “During the West Village neighborhood fight, we had a penny sale at St. Luke’s Church,” Jane wrote of this photo. “Penny sales were not part of the Anglican tradition, but they were a part of the Catholic tradition in the neighborhood, so they ran the sale and St. Luke’s gave the space. This was the first ecumenical thing I know of that had ever occurred in the area. It was a great success.” Credit 22

  During March, the West Village committee surveyed all fourteen blocks in the threatened area, systematically reporting on renovations made to homes in recent years: A new roof at 739 Greenwich in 1951, new wiring in 1953, new bathrooms in 1956. At Jane’s neighbors’ at 561 Hudson, new plumbing and oil burner, windows repaired, new paint inside and out, new kitchen fixtures. Over on West Eleventh, a whole row of houses completely renovated. At 115 Perry, the halls painted the previous year, along with new pipes, plumbing, and windows. Page after page it went on like this. As for West Village businesses, 140 of them, they included a uniform maker, a dance studio, a bookstore, a cabinet maker, a motor scooter shop, a clothing store, a locksmith, a tax consultant, bars, sculptors, artists, printers, importers. They employed 1,950 men and women. If the cheek-by-jowl quality of homes and businesses in the West Village’s twentieth of a square mile was supposed to be so bad, virtually the definition of blight, it didn’t come out that way in the survey.

  In late April, the committee distributed a letter to the planning commission by two members of the Municipal Art Society’s Historic Architecture Committee. “The 14-block area of West Greenwich Village that has been proposed for urban renewal,” these experts led off, “is fundamentally as attractive as other portions of Greenwich Village, and in some ways more unusual in much of its architecture,” some of which dated to the early 1800s, when a section of it was a river landing. They referred to its “waterfront town architecture”; pointed up “a rare group of early workaday structures” on Greenwich and West Eleventh; Greek Revival interiors on Charles Street; some bright, many-windowed tenements that showed off a “surprising exuberance of decorative masonry treatment.” This was 1961, before the demolition of Penn Station had sparked the historic preservation movement, but the writers were anticipating what today is called “adaptive re-use”: some “inherently messy or unattractive [uses], such as paper baling, exist like hermit crabs in buildings which might quite easily be put to other uses—and if the natural history of the structures is not cut short by urban renewal,” they added, “undoubtedly will be.”

  Much the same, different in detail but identical in principle, could have been said of East Harlem before the projects went up, or of Boston’s West End before it was razed. This time it was being said before the damage was done.

  Bruno Zevi, a distinguished Italian architect, historian, and former Village resident, author of an influential book called Towards an Organic Architecture, weighed in: “I have no romantic attitude toward slums,” but no part of Greenwich Village, he declared, was a slum. Cities, he went on, had a “natural texture” that needed respect; to tamper with it was to destroy it.

  In a community such as the west Village, where residential and industrial uses are mixed, one can never know if the community has created its own pattern and architecture, or if the architecture creates the community. Where the result is admirable, as it is in the west Village—that is, where integration is complete and viable—it should not be questioned. Yet I understand that your city planners have stated that they will segregate residential and non-residential uses. What can be considered bad about industry if it does not pollute the air and soil of the community?

  Save the West Village’s campaign was a relentlessly negative one—by design. It said No. It asked for nothing but a reversal of the city’s plans. It sought no compromise.

  The West Village was no slum, went its drumbeat of a message. Don’t mess with it.

  No slum; block its designation as one.

  No slum; don’t let urban renewal get its mitts on it.

  This tack, Jane would explain, had its roots in their group’s efforts to bring influential outsiders to the neighborhood. One was a federal housing official whose tour of the West Village surprised him with its range of incomes and convinced him it was not a slum. Along the way he bestowed on Jane what became a central tenet of their strategy—a “secret” she’d reveal numerous times over the years: “Never ever tell anyone in state or city government what you want for improvements because then you’re considered a ‘participating citizen.’ Then they can say they have citizen participation and do whatever they want. He told us not to be afraid of being considered ‘merely negative.’ ” And that, to the endless annoyance of city officials, was exactly what they were: first overturn that damning slum designation, went the idea. Only then come back with positive and constructive plans—which, as we’ll see, is just what Citizen Jane and her friends later did.

  “We’ve had to become experts in everything from how to run torchlight parades to how to analyze typewriter type and collect legal evidence,” Jane wrote while in the thick of the fight. At one point they sent an audio engineer around town to record sound levels; of course, he found the West Village quieter, presumably more peaceful, than some of New York’s tonier districts. Pierre Tonachel, a young lawyer enlisted early in the fight, remembers Jane saying of their opponents, “You have to make them feel they’re being nibbled to death by ducks.” Fresh out of Cornell, Tonachel was living in a nineteenth-century house on a busy block of Bethune Street not far from Jane’s place when he was introduced to her. Inside of fifteen minutes, he concluded that he stood in the presence of some odd breed of genius. She was smart, but much more. She always knew what she was talking about. She possessed capacious warmth ye
t, faced with duplicity or stupidity, could express withering contempt. “She didn’t suffer fools gladly,” Tonachel says. “She got impatient with drivel.” Under Jane’s leadership, it seemed to him, the West Village war was being waged not by some ragtag community militia but by real pros; everything was more professional than it had any right to be. Even “the quality of the paperwork” the committee put out, he marvels, “was stunning; Jane inspired that.”

  Another veteran of the West Village, Nate Silver, who met Jane in November 1961, would conjure up a bad movie of those years, down to “an action-packed montage of calendar pages flipping,” people marching with placards, fund-raising parties, “now a medium shot of Jane Jacobs speaking at a public hearing in the balustraded Old-Bailey-style municipal council chamber of New York and the shot should take in Italian laps with babies, black faces, defensive-looking city officials.”