Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  What helped them adapt was the Spadina fight, into which they were thrust soon after their arrival. Pronounced spah-DY-nah and named for a local estate, Spadina wasn’t just the street where they lived (a “road” north of Bloor Street, an “avenue” south), but, for provincial traffic engineers going back to the 1940s, a future expressway. The campaign to block its construction split Toronto for more than three years. “Where local politicians stood on the Spadina Expressway,” wrote John Sewell, a friend and collaborator of Jane’s for most of her time in Toronto, “was the defining issue of the day. Two opposing visions of the city had rarely been presented in such a powerful, volatile and bitter way.” Jane was drawn into the controversy through another transplanted American, Bobbi Speck.

  Speck had moved from New York in 1966 and was living in the neighborhood known as the Annex when one day she read of an expressway, already being built, that was to barrel down from the northern suburbs in wide swaths of asphalt, in tunnels and trenches, and ultimately right down Spadina Road, to mate up with planned crosstown expressways. “We are not experts, but we know a monster when we see one,” Speck would say of the Spadina. Teaming up with another young mother, they formed a Committee of Concerned Citizens. When Speck spoke up at a public meeting, the local papers covered it, and soon her phone was ringing nonstop. She became virtually shackled to the phone, her career as a freelance editor derailed.

  At one meeting, she’d recall, a woman “with this familiar New York voice” spoke up forcibly about tactics and strategies to defeat the Spadina. Speck thought, “This woman is incredible! She has everything down pat! Her thoughts came out in paragraph form, and put our instincts into broader context.” “I hope you’ll get involved,” said Speck, going up to her after the meeting.

  “That’s why I’m here, dearie,” said Jane Jacobs.

  The Spadina was supposed to slash down through the heart of the city from Highway 401, which had been built in the early 1950s as a modest intercity highway but would morph into a commuter artery at some points eighteen lanes wide. “Those who lived in the suburbs had difficulty understanding why anyone would want to save older neighborhoods,” wrote John Sewell, in his book The Shape of the City. “Suburbanites thought it entirely reasonable that the existing city be demolished to make way for the new city,” which required highways to link their suburban homes to the downtown towers where they worked. “City residents didn’t quite see it that way.”

  Opposition had already stiffened by the time Jane got involved; no one, least of all she, would claim she alone was responsible for the expressway’s defeat. But by early 1969, still new in town, she was already a voice in a civic debate that would extend over the next two years. “My understanding,” said Speck many years later, “was that she had not yet unpacked.” Early that year, Jane was featured in a Canadian television program about urban design. At one point, we see her stride across University Avenue, uncharact​eristically regal, in a dark matching winter outfit, skirt to just above the knees, and heels. “Toronto’s a very refreshing city to come to from the States,” she says. But “probably the biggest single menace to Toronto is the Spadina Expressway. The minute you take an expressway into—not up to, but into—the dense part of the city,” then you start doing damage, exchanging parks for parking lots, narrowing sidewalks, deadening street life.

  Later that year, Jane wrote a blistering attack in The Globe and Mail, “A City Getting Hooked on the Expressway Drug.” In it, she looked in seeming wonder at how Canadians, faced with direct evidence for how American cities like Boston, Buffalo, and Los Angeles had bungled so much, could possibly consider following their example. As a transplant from New York, she was often asked whether she found Toronto exciting enough for herself. “I find it almost too exciting. The suspense is scary. Here is the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options.” Maybe Toronto would go down the road of its wrongheaded American cousins, but still she was grateful to have at least “enjoyed this great city before its destruction.”

  The whole Jacobs family got involved—though not, Jane insisted to an interviewer later, because they wanted to. “I did not, and neither did the rest of my family, react with joy when we heard we had another expressway to fight.” Here, she lapsed into a juvenile voice: “Oh, we can do it here, we did it in a bigger city. No, no,” it wasn’t like that. Still, plunge into the fight they did.

  On New Year’s Day 1970 a group of “minstrels,” as a news account had it the next day, protested the Spadina at the mayor’s New Year’s Day “levee,” a Canadian word, a Canadian tradition, where an officeholder hosts a celebratory open house, this one at a new performing arts center. But as soon as the singers, who called themselves the Provocative Street Players and whose chief writer and singer was Ned Jacobs, began to belt out the first chorus of “The Bad Trip,” they were shut down. A newspaper showed long-haired Ned, wearing a paisley outfit Jim had made for him for Christmas, being peacefully, but firmly, ushered off the premises by a guard. The chorus went like this:

  And it’s a bad trip, yeah it’s a bad trip—

  That Spadina Expressway

  While the highway boys are playing with their toys

  The people are the ones who pay.

  Among other foes of the Spadina Expressway was Marshall McLuhan, who suggested to Jane that they collaborate on a movie about it. “You and I can do the script.”

  “But I don’t know a thing about scriptwriting,” she said. No worries, he didn’t either. They’d do it together.

  The two of them convened at his University of Toronto office, where McLuhan called in his secretary to record everything they said. After an hour of throwing around ideas, they were finished. “Got it all down?” McLuhan asked his secretary. “Well, that’s it,” he said, turning to Jane. “We’ve got the script.”

  Jane was horrified. They had no script at all, just a collection of variants of “Hey, what about this?” When she finally saw the transcript, that’s all it was, words and ideas jumping around, “without beginning or end,” the flimsiest of threads holding it together. “This did not bother McLuhan,” she said, “but it did bother me.”

  Yet miraculously, they wound up with a fourteen-minute film called The Burning Would (apologies to James Joyce), thick with noisy construction scenes, jackhammers, and demolition derbies, awful screeching sounds, ruthless destruction, all set against the peaceful humanity the expressway would erase—a burbling brook, a little boy playing with his plastic pail in a spot of greenery. Nothing subtle here, voice-over scarcely required, yet oddly effective. “I couldn’t have been more astonished,” Jane recalled. McLuhan had really worked it over. “There was a shape to it” now. “It had music. It did have a thread, and raised a lot of important issues.” In Toronto, The Burning Would made its mark against the Spadina, and ended up being shown all over the U.S. and Canada, too. “It’s a mystery to me,” Jane reminisced, “that something tangible, coherent and constructive could come out of that mess.”

  In Jane’s daybook that year, for January 14, she noted “Expressway meeting at Convocation Hall,” the great domed ceremonial auditorium at the University of Toronto, and beside it, simply: “Speak.”

  “Do Spadina brief,” she reminded herself for March 25.

  “Get copies of Spadina brief,” for the 27th.

  “The Spadina fight is coming to a head,” Jane wrote Jason Epstein on March 29. “People here are so innocent, which is nice but also exasperating. I have privately made up a strategy that would shock them, I fear, but will just try it on my own.”

  “It started quietly enough,” The Toronto Telegram reported the day after the key April 6 hearing. For seven hours the Metro transportation committee moved smoothly through sixteen speakers at the opening session of hearings into the William Allen (Spadina) Expressway. “Then urban expert Jane Jacobs shattered the lull.”

  My name is Jane Jacobs. I reside at 58 Spadina Road, Toronto. I am the author of severa
l works on cities and I first involved myself in the Spadina Expressway controversy with the hope that such knowledge as I may have about cities and their dynamics would prove helpful.

  At this point, setting aside her measured, ladylike tone, Jane went on to attack not just the expressway itself but its backers. She impugned their honesty, called the hearing a “charade.” She charged that the planners behind it lacked integrity, choosing data “selectively and even contradictorily to prove a case rather than to illuminate realities.” One account described Jane that day as “a gray-haired lady with grown children and a very pleasant smile, and she comes on with a soft, clear voice that has just a trace of acid in it, a voice as cool as non-alcoholic cider.”

  They tried to cut her off, to which Jane replied, “If a citizen cannot speak of a politician’s official capacity without being charged with being personal, we might as well have robots in these jobs.”

  She was charged with being a rabble-rouser. One councillor asked her how, voicing such attacks, she could expect a sympathetic response from them. “I’m not asking you to be sympathetic with me,” she said. “I don’t give a damn.”

  Another councillor shot back, “You don’t give a damn about anything.”

  In the end, this board, and all the others that needed to give their assent to the expressway, did so. But it was too late; the ground had shifted under them, public opinion turning against the road. Even with the project seemingly cleared by every board and council, the provincial governor, Bill Davis, quashed it, famously declaring to the Ontario legislature, “If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop.”

  For the Jacobs family, there was a hidden payoff to their work over the two years: it helped them acclimate to their home. “I think the 1969–70 Spadina Expressway fight was a blessing for all of us,” Ned Jacobs would say. “We met many interesting people and got involved in Toronto civic life, which made us feel less like exiles.”

  It had been no gradual transition. It was more like they’d jumped into a cold, northern lake, the whole Jacobs clan, each of them swimming and paddling like crazy, trying to keep warm, making new lives for themselves. “When we came,” Jane would later tell an interviewer, “we made up our minds we were not exiles, we were immigrants. It was a great adventure for us.” The house on Spadina Road always bustled. They had new friends, new jobs, new activities. They’d drop by en masse at Cineforum, a former porn house, now an art movie center on Bloor Street, to see Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers movies. Jane would rummage through the offerings of Bloor Street fruit and vegetable merchants, just as she had back in the Village. She’d dig into her two or three daily newspapers, along with The New York Review of Books, Scientific American, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, Esquire, and some of the Toronto underground papers, reading always.

  —

  “What’s it like there?” the Jacobses had started to hear back from friends in New York once the plea bargain on the steno-tape incident had been hammered out and they began getting the word out to their friends about their new home in Canada. Are there igloos in the street? To their New York friends, Canada mainly meant those feared winter weather advisories, the ones warning of “a massive cold front coming down from Canada.” Jane didn’t like the dark of winter—she loved the sun, fairly charting its progress all winter long—but didn’t mind the cold. Toronto, she decided, was just like the U.S., only with an extra February and no July.

  CHAPTER 19

  SETTLING IN

  AMONG BELONGINGS crowded into the VW bus the Jacobs family drove to Toronto were Jane’s typewriter and the manuscript of the book she’d worked on through much of the 1960s, no doubt extracted from the freezer chest in their Hudson Street basement where she safeguarded it. On Spadina Road, a sheet of plywood, legs screwed into it, served for a desk. That, together with a file cabinet, and she was in business. It wasn’t more than a week on Spadina Road, figures Jim Jacobs, before she was at work on the remaining editorial chores for The Economy of Cities. Its acknowledgments page was dated August 1968, two months after their arrival. The book was published the following May.

  —

  “I will [tell] the story as I go along of small cities no less than of great,” Jane quoted the fifth century BCE Greek historian Herodotus in the book’s epigraph. “Most of those which were great once are small today; and those which in my own lifetime have grown to greatness were small enough in the old days.” The rise and fall, death and life, of cities and economies—this is what she had been thinking about for much of her adult life. And in The Economy of Cities, she had answers: for one, cities prospered by creating new work out of old. Doing the same old thing didn’t cut it. Maybe you had a big, productive coal mine or sprawling steel mill to show off, but digging coal or churning out steel ingots year after year led nowhere but to stagnation and decline. Cities withered when they stopped generating new work—as she saw occurring, even then, in the car monoculture that was Detroit.

  Like Death and Life, the new book had a way of insinuating itself into a reader’s mind with what she had to say—with what she dared say. For starters, as we saw earlier, she asserted that cities predated agriculture, not the other way around—that agriculture was the product of nascent cities that had grown up around earlier hunter-gatherer settlements; this was the idea she’d illustrated with her imagined early city, New Obsidian. Yet as arresting as that was, it was but prologue to her more abiding question: Why did one city or country blossom into ruddy growth while another stagnated?

  Ideas ran all through The Economy of Cities—big ideas, little ideas, import replacement, and captive division of labor, diversification, and differentiation. But mostly, Jane illustrated them through story, anecdote, and example. Consider Los Angeles: in the years just after World War II, the city saw a loss of 150,000 jobs in aircraft manufacturing and 70,000 in shipbuilding, along with a steep decline in Hollywood filmmaking. Yet impossibly, it boasted a big increase in jobs overall, its economy exploding after the war. What could explain so counterintuitive a result? Los Angeles, Jane argued, was successfully replacing “imports,” by which she meant not just foreign imports from Mexico, say, but everything Los Angeles needed to bring in from outside. Angelinos were producing much more of these imports, then turning around and selling them to the world.

  The new enterprises started in corners of old loft buildings, in Quonset huts and in backyard garages. But they multiplied swiftly…And many grew rapidly. They poured forth furnaces, sliding doors, mechanical saws, shoes, bathing suits, underwear, china, furniture, cameras, hand tools, hospital equipment, scientific instruments, engineering services and hundreds of other things. One-eighth of all the new businesses started in the United States during the latter half of the 1940s were started in Los Angeles.

  Not all replaced imports, but many did. A young engineer formerly working in the materials lab at Douglas Aircraft started making sliding glass doors for local housebuilders. Succeeding locally, he was soon the largest manufacturer of them in the United States.

  Jane memorably compared and contrasted the English cities of Manchester and Birmingham. In the 1840s, as she told the story, Manchester, the great textiles city, seemed the city of the future. Friedrich Engels, who lived there then, indicted it for the degradation of the men and women who worked in its ranks of smoke-belching factories; “Cottonopolis,” some called it, the world’s first truly industrialized city. Birmingham was nothing so dramatic. It made saddles and harnesses, shoe buckles, buttons, glass, and, later, guns, jewelry, and everything in between. Nothing on the scale of Manchester, nothing to imprint itself on the mind of the world the way Manchester did. But, Jane delivered the verdict, “Manchester was not the city of the future and Birmingham was.” Once others had learned to spin and weave cotton, Manchester was bound for decline. Multi-skilled Birmingham, on t
he other hand, crucible of trial and error, adapted and grew. “Its fragmented and inefficient little industries kept adding new work, and splitting off new organizations,” some of which, in time, grew large themselves.

  Maidenform, the bra manufacturer, wasn’t always big, either. Ida Rosenthal, a New York City dressmaker dissatisfied with how her dresses hung on her customers, designed an early brassiere (though not, as Jane suggests, the first brassiere), which she gave to customers with each new dress. We know how that worked out. Dressmaking, in Jane’s terminology, was “old work.” Brassieres were “new work.” Here was the true wellspring of economic health, one most often billowing up from the small in scale, particularly in the bustling precincts of big, diverse cities, where experts and entrepreneurs, the creative and the ambitious, were thrown together in unpredictable, mutually beneficial, ways.

  And what of that icon of efficiency and economy, the division of labor, exemplified in the famous pin factory described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations? Well, Jane didn’t buy it. “Division of labor, in itself, creates nothing. It is only a way of organizing work that has already been created.” Besides, it was a fixture of stagnant economies, too,

  where men and women spend their entire working lives at very specialized tasks: tapping rubber trees, or herding goats, or loading bananas, or twisting fibers, or dancing in temples, or mining salt, or crushing ore, or carrying baskets of dirt for public works, or cultivating corn and beans.