Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Jane and other local residents showed up for one hearing in gas masks; how better to represent the soot, dirt, and filthy exhaust that would accompany the expressway?

  At a rally, she got a chance to tell the popular local television reporter Gabe Pressman, “The expressway would Los Angelize New York.” That got attention around New York City.

  She approached Lewis Mumford for help. His coruscating recent review of her book in The New Yorker was being used to discredit her and, by association, the anti-expressway cause. She got him on the line and, before he could object, briskly said, “This isn’t about The New Yorker.” The expressway was more important than wounded pride, his or hers. Would he write a letter of opposition that could be read at an upcoming hearing? Yes, certainly, Mumford replied. He did. It was good. It helped.

  On December 12, 1962, the city’s board of estimate unanimously rejected the latest plan for the expressway. Mayor Robert F. Wagner’s announcement touched off “an outburst of cheering, hugging and kissing.” It was “the best Christmas present the people could have gotten,” said the local politico Louis DeSalvio, Jane’s co-chair. On a newspaper account of the victory that she sent her mother in Virginia, Jane scribbled, “We won! Isn’t it marvelous!” The expressway had been defeated.

  —

  Of course, it had not been defeated; what they’d won was breathing room. The backers of the expressway would regroup. Like so many civic battles in which Jane participated, the great, sapping struggle went on and on, across the years. It wore you down, twisted up your life, made you angry; it made Jane angry—which she was a lot during the mid- and late 1960s.

  In July 1965, asked for permission to include her Fortune article in an urban renewal reader, Jane scrawled at the bottom of the original letter that no, she wouldn’t allow it. “Indeed, the idea dismays me greatly. To include that piece, in this context, quite falsifies my position and ideas concerning urban renewal. Please leave me out of the book.” In the end, she seems to have let Fortune say no for her, no doubt more temperately.

  A little earlier, Jane served on a Washington, D.C., panel devoted to “the city and the freeway.” Speaking just ahead of her was Harold Gray, who had worked in highway transportation, his capsule biography said, “throughout his adult life,” since 1934 with the National Highway Users Conference. Gray saw in the new interstates a transportation ideal of safe, nonstop driving, unimpeded by red lights and congestion, pulling traffic off local streets, giving jobs to construction workers, paid for by those they benefited, through vehicle and fuel taxes. “In America,” said Gray, “every mother’s son aspires to own, operate and tinker with his own automobile. Motor vehicles typify the American way of life.”

  “I’m going to be very ungracious,” said Jane when it was her turn. “I’m very angry. I couldn’t disagree more with the things I just heard Mr. Gray say.” Just one cliché after another. It was untrue that highway users paid the whole cost of highways. Who paid for the medical care of people mangled in accidents? And for the courts? And policemen ministering to traffic when they ought to have more important things to worry about? And air pollution? Gasoline taxes didn’t pay for any of that.

  Look at the Lower Manhattan Expressway: “In New York, where I live, there’s one highway that we’re fighting that is going to wipe out 10,000 jobs…about 6000 of which are held by Negroes and Puerto Ricans who have a hard time finding jobs.” Highways benefited cities? What about Newark, which had plenty of highways, but which could hardly be said to benefit from them? As for Gray’s notion that economic development depended on “more and more automobiles—all this is a terrible, terrible idea…a colonial idea”; she likened it to sad one-crop countries that fed the mother country coffee, oil, or peanuts but enjoyed no lasting benefit. “There’s no faster way of becoming a backward city or a backward country than that.” No, she’d say, using language reminiscent of The Economy of Cities (still far from finished), “you have to keep developing; you have to keep adding new things,” not cling to a single crop or product, certainly not to automobiles.

  The long struggle to protect the Village against sidewalk snippers, urban renewalists, and expressway builders had left Jane exquisitely sensitive, run through by a streak of dark, toxic anger. Used to be, she said now in Washington, you could debate pedestrians, cars, mass transit, whatever, you could talk “about ideas, philosophy, honest differences of opinion.” No longer. Highway advocates, said Jane, “are not doing it honestly any more. There’s a great deal of skullduggery; I think this highway program is probably the most corrupting thing we’ve had since Prohibition.” Later, looking to the many New York civic groups that backed LOMEX, Jane would assert that some of them—she cited by name the venerable Municipal Art Society—had grown “corrupted and decayed.”

  —

  After the tentative victory of 1962, the LOMEX fight did settle down for a while. But in time, the expressway found new champions in the New York State Department of Transportation and Governor Nelson Rockefeller. It faced new opponents, too, including artists and historic preservationists.

  Ranging along Broome Street and the area around it stood block after block of five- and six-story buildings, many going back to the mid-nineteenth century, their fancy façades made not from the usual brick, concrete, or stone but cast iron. For years they’d housed factories, their thick wooden floors bearing the weight of sewing machines, printing presses, and lathes. Built before electric lighting, they had broad banks of tall arched windows to admit light to otherwise dim interiors, high ceilings to accommodate tangles of steam-powered overhead drive belts.

  “Lofts,” they were called in New York. And now, with the decline of manufacturing in the city and their abandonment by industry, a new breed of New Yorkers took an interest in them. Artists and sculptors were drawn to their wide unobstructed bays, abundant natural light, and high ceilings with room for large canvases and sculpture. Ideal as studios, some artists took to living in them, too. This was illegal; zoning codes didn’t look kindly on people living in factories. But the artists did it anyway, and by the mid-1960s, championed by the sculptor Harry Jackson, a spirited depicter of cowboys, Pony Express riders, and other Old West icons, whose studio occupied one of the Broome Street lofts and whom Jane befriended, they made for a vocal new enemy of the expressway.

  Then there was Margot Gayle, an apostle of historic preservation, and a friend of Jane’s. The artists stood to lose their studios. But the irreplaceable cast iron–fronted buildings that housed them would be lost altogether. Jane, in white gloves and pearls, had unsuccessfully protested the 1963 razing of Penn Station, the calamity that had sparked the historic preservation movement. Avoiding a new calamity and saving the glorious old buildings of Broome, Mercer, and Grand streets meant stopping the expressway.

  On the evening of April 10, 1968, another hearing, a crucial one in the LOMEX saga, was being held in the auditorium of Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side: the expressway was back, this time being pushed by the New York State Department of Transportation. Jane was among several hundred people on hand. On the stage in front stood large, colorful depictions of the great project. John Toth, the department’s planning engineer, presided over the hearing from a table onstage. At one end of the same table sat a stenotypist, there to furnish the official record of the proceedings. This woman would figure centrally in the whole affair.

  Each speaker approached the microphone set up at the foot of the stage and, his or her back to the officials, addressed the audience; this arrangement Jane took to signify a lack of real interest on the part of the officials, their minds already made up. Supporters of the expressway were soon being shouted down with questions from the floor. Time limits were being imposed without rhyme or reason. It was “bedlam,” in Jane’s telling. “The chairman gave the impression of indulging the disorder, like someone whose mission was to allow people to let off steam, rather than like someone conducting a serious public hearing.” After a recess, many pe
ople went home, but perhaps a hundred stayed. “The incredible shenanigans then resumed.”

  At one point someone shouted for Jane to speak; someone else passed a microphone to her. “I turned to the audience, as all speakers did, and said that we were only talking to ourselves.” The officials were making no pretense of listening to them. They were just “errand boys” anyway, who needed to be sent “back to their bosses” with word that the people didn’t want the expressway. And to convey this message with a force beyond words, Jane suggested that they march, those who wished to, onto the stage in protest.

  “You can’t come up here,” Toth said to Jane. “Go back, get off the stage.”

  “We are going to march right across the stage and down the other side,” she replied.

  “Arrest this woman,” Toth told an officer on duty.

  Amid the ruckus, the stenotypist, a seemingly gentle soul, became flustered. She got up, clutching her stenotype machine to her bosom with one hand and, in Jane’s recollection, waving away the intrusive tumult around her with the other. It was a brand-new machine, she was heard to say, her personal property. She felt protective of it. She felt threatened. “As she danced around like a one armed prizefighter,” Jane wrote, the machine’s paper tape began to “unroll like a long streamer of confetti,” spreading out over the stage. “People began picking it up from the floor and tossing it in the air as if they were dancers…It was so surrealistic.”

  But that tape, its stenotype symbols parading down its length like ancient hieroglyphics, was the only record of the hearing, or so it abruptly struck Jane. A hearing required an official record. Without it, well, it hadn’t really occurred. “Listen to this!” she’d remember calling out to the crowd. “There is no record! There is no hearing! We are through with this phony, fink hearing!”

  On her way out, a police captain waylaid her and, at Toth’s behest, arrested her, hauling her off in a squad car to the precinct house.

  Later, at the courthouse for a subsequent hearing in connection with the affair, Jane was asked to identify herself.

  “I’m the prisoner,” she replied.

  A police officer tapped her on the shoulder. “Don’t say that, dear. Say, I’m the accused.”

  Back in December, Jane had been arrested at an antiwar protest along with that most high-profile of social critics, Susan Sontag. A photo taken of them that day at the Criminal Court Building in Lower Manhattan showed Sontag, twenty-eight, looking stylish as ever, jeans tucked into calf-high leather boots. “Flanking her,” a close student of this photo, William Bole, would write, was a “woman who doesn’t seem to belong in the picture. That’s Jacobs with her silver bangs, wearing a wool coat that might have been fashionable a decade earlier during the Eisenhower administration, and thick, round, black eyeglasses.” Jane had plunked herself down on the sidewalk in front of the Whitehall induction center, where draftees were absorbed into the army. She pled guilty to a minor charge and was released.

  So now, the day after her arrest at Seward Park, Jane wrote her eighty-nine-year-old mother, “Well, here I have been arrested again! I’m afraid you will have a jailbird daughter, or anyway one whose conduct is disorderly.”

  Jane’s conduct, of course, had always been a bit disorderly, if cheerfully so: levity, not shame or regret, spiced her letter to Mrs. Butzner. But the Seward Park incident proved no laughing matter. At a later hearing, Jane would recall, “the prosecutor made such a case of what a monster I was,” the judge seemed to buy into it, and for the first time she worried about what might yet befall her. She left for home that afternoon “feeling pretty depressed about it. Scared, too. When I got home, the children were all in school and my husband was at work. I went inside and I sat down gloomily at the dining table, feeling pretty hopeless. I could practically hear those jail doors slamming behind me.”

  Then, Ned came home, threw his books on the table, listened to how things had gone in court, sat down, and said to his mother, “You know, for a woman of fifty-three, you lead a very exciting life.”

  Jane brightened. “All of a sudden I felt about a thousand percent better.”

  In the end, several months later, the charges were plea-bargained down to a single count of disorderly conduct. Consigning the expressway to oblivion would take a little longer; but the events playing out at Seward Park that evening—the trappings of democracy questioned, the workings of government descending into tumult and protest—could stand for America all through the troubled late 1960s.

  Even by November 1966, when Jane served on a panel at the New School devoted to “The Social Uses of Power,” it was plain the times had taken a toll on her equanimity, leaving her angrier, more cynical. “In this America of 1966, I tell you, the only way you learn about power is to learn by doing. You learn by being frustrated, mostly, and finding out where the frustrations are coming from.” She told of her mother teaching her as a child, “ ‘When a boy gets a stick in his hand, his brains run out the other end of it.’ Power,” Jane continued, “is a stick in the hand,” and America held it. “As a nation, our brains are running out the other end.”

  Back in 1962, James Felt complained that Jane and her West Village cronies acted as if public officials could not be trusted to say what they meant, or do what they said they’d do. That was before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, when such a stance was still uncommon. But the intervening six years had wrought a sea change in attitudes toward authority. The trust was gone. Lies and corruption seemed everywhere in the American air. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. prompted angry riots in cities around the country. Two days before the Seward Park hearing, the president’s younger brother Robert had been shot and killed in Los Angeles. Nothing made sense anymore. Black and white stood apart. Government and the people, young and old, scarcely spoke the same language. American society sat on cracked and shaky pillars. Just a few years before, when Jane was invited to the White House, the country might still be thought to act in ethical, or at least lawful, ways. Now, though, as the poison of Vietnam seeped through American society—with its body counts and burning villages, with the despised “Establishment” in their white shirts and skinny ties sending young men to die in Southeast Asia—the social bonds of the country were left twisted and frayed. At this time, and in these circumstances, speaking truth to power and getting arrested would for Jane and many of her friends be seen as necessary, noble, even a badge of honor.

  In April 1967, Jane and Mary, by then twelve, and Bob, a flower in his lapel, attended a peace march at United Nations Plaza in New York. Jane publicly signed on with other prominent figures to hold back the fraction of her federal taxes that financed the war. She and her family signed petitions, attended vigils and rallies, against the powers-that-be in New York, against the hated war. One time during this period, near Christmas, Jane went shopping at Macy’s for long winter underwear for Bob and the boys. “Is it for hunting or fishing?” the sporting-goods salesman asked. “ ‘It’s for picketing,’ I said, smiling sweetly.”

  In October 1967, a huge antiwar demonstration took place in Washington, D.C. A hundred thousand protesters massed on the Mall at the Lincoln Memorial and from there walked across Memorial Bridge, over the Potomac, to the Pentagon, where the orders for waging the war originated. Revolution was in the air; for some, that idea was so much social blather, for others utterly serious and urgent. But when the size and scope of the demonstration became clear, the government mobilized, ranging armed troops around the Pentagon building itself.

  For many massed outside the Pentagon it was—to slip into the language of the day—a “radicalizing experience,” a crystallizing moment that left you convinced that well-meaning appeals to reform and moderation were not enough, that the System was corrupt through and through, that something larger, more committed, or more final was required. Jane was at the Pentagon that day. She confronted lines of armed soldiers—there were said to be 2,500 of them—arrayed in helmets and gas masks. “They lo
oked like some horrible insect, the whole bunch of them together, not human beings at all.” The soldiers pushed back against the demonstrators, arresting more than six hundred of them. “I was outraged that they should be marching on me, on me, an American!”

  At a peace march at United Nations Plaza in New York, April 15, 1967: Mary, Jane, and Bob Credit 24

  A few days back from the Pentagon, Jane got a telegram from an editor at The New York Times.

  CAN YOU CONTRIBUTE 500 WORDS TO SYMPOSIUM NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE WILL PUBLISH ON CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE?…DOMESTIC CRITICS OF U.S. VIETNAM POLICY INCREASINGLY ADVOCATE ABANDONING QUOTE MERE QUOTE DISSENT FOR RESISTANCE—SPECIFICALLY, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE.

  What did she have to say about this? She had plenty to say. “Vietnam demands disobedience,” she wrote. America had all but lost the war and, having done so, now engaged “in an enterprise sicker and uglier than war itself: an enterprise of slaughtering, starving, destroying and uprooting,” to no end but to postpone the acknowledgment of failure.

  The war, she went on, “was an enterprise that feeds directly and insatiably upon the bodies of our own young men.”

  —

  Eight months later—two months after her arrest at Seward Park—Jane’s twenty-two-year-old niece, Jane Butzner, brother Jim’s daughter, was getting married. She had grown up in a suburb of Philadelphia, Woodbury, New Jersey, attended the local high school, graduating in 1964. Later, as a student at Adelphi College in Garden City, Long Island, she’d sometimes call Aunt Jane, ask whether she could come in on the train and visit. “She always had a bed for me to sleep in,” she’d remember. “Sometimes I’d bring my friends.” Young Jane Butzner had been in and out of the Hudson Street house all her life. She was close to Jimmy and Ned. She was close to Aunt Jane. And now she was getting married.