You can hear Jane’s revulsion groaning up from the page. Whatever it had in its favor, division of labor did not embody or explain economic health.
What did was Jane’s heroic mantra of “one sort of work leads to another,” which she developed and enriched through numerous examples: Sandpaper leads to masking tape, Scotch tape, and sound-recording magnetic tape. A hospital’s outpatient department grows into a new home care department. Police officers, building on their own “old work,” demand bribes from illegal enterprises, organizing to collect and dole out the take; criminal, certainly, but this, too, was new work. “New goods and services, whether criminal or benign, do not come out of thin air. New work arises upon existing work.”
Everything in The Economy of Cities conjured up innovators, entrepreneurs, small-scale genius bursting forth, never settling into ruts, a bazaar of little companies forever taking skills, trades, and expertise they already possessed and putting them to new use. Here was vitality triumphant, embodied in new products and ideas. The enemy was stagnation, ineptitude, minds on automatic pilot, economic death.
Much in the book was provocative—and not alone Jane’s precept that, as Jason Epstein put it, economic life “does not begin in a garden but in a city,” as in Jane’s New Obsidian. Some months before publication, Epstein sent copies to outside experts, not for three-sentence blurbs but, with due prudence, to see what credentialed authorities had to say about some of Jane’s outlandish claims. One went to the Columbia University economist Robert Lekachman, who wrote back, “As always, Jane Jacobs is a pleasure to read. The ideas are fresh and the opinions are firm. Now whether she has produced a whole new theory or not, I am less certain.” Some of it, he said, wasn’t really so new, having been “foreshadowed” by economists like Colin Clark and Joseph Schumpeter. What he thought “important and different” about the book was “the boldness of [her] claim that innovation, growth, and progress can come only from small, almost casual beginnings.”
The University of Chicago anthropologist Robert McCormick Adams was harsher. He applauded some of what he read in The Economy of Cities, and said he was glad Epstein was going to publish it. But he didn’t buy all her arguments. “I think she both oversystematizes and overgeneralizes, under the mistaken impression that the very comprehensiveness of her attack is a point in its favor.” Academics, he worried, might not lash out at the book at all but simply ignore it, issuing only “bland disclaimers that anything in her work is relevant to them.” Then, turning to New Obsidian, he gave it four pages of detailed criticism, citing both the particulars of her arguments and the scant scholarly superstructure underlying them. He concluded on a friendlier note, observing that “an argumentative—and stimulating—work provokes an argument. Jacobs is surely tough-minded…enough as an author not to let any of this seriously undermine her basic conception…You are surely knowledgeable and tough-minded enough as a publisher to know a good thing when you see it.”
Asked in 1970 which of her opinions she deemed most unconventional, Jane allowed that it was her cities-before-agriculture idea. “But I think it will have become conventional opinion 20 years from now.” It didn’t, and hasn’t. At a Boston College conference devoted to Jane’s ideas in 1987, Carroll Keeley briefly disposed of cities-first as still “an open issue,” suggesting that in any case it would “permanently nuance one’s idea of the primacy of agriculture into a much more sophisticated” model. If we peek ahead we see that scholars continue to quarrel over it today. One defense of cities-first, by Peter J. Taylor, a British geographer, came out in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research in 2012. His attention to it, following that of others similarly sympathetic, infuriated a trio of American archaeologists led by Michael E. Smith of Arizona State University. Jacobs’s argument was all but nonsense, they wrote in a long refutation of it, “Jane Jacobs’ ‘Cities First’ Model and Archaeological Reality.” It appeared in 2014, in the same journal that had carried Taylor’s article. For them, there was an unbridgeably wide chronological gap, thousands of years, between the first agriculture and the first cities. They weren’t challenging Jacobs’s overall contribution, they said, just this one in particular: “We cannot…envision any scenario in which we [would need to] debate the chronological priority of cities over agricultural origins.” Others, of course, would say it all comes down to just what you mean by “city.”
But all that, as inconclusive as it remains, came much later. When it was published in May 1969, The Economy of Cities often stirred reviewers to their rhetorical best, as if aping Jane herself. “Bless Jane Jacobs,” a Time review led off. “Lively, lucid, blunt, original, she triumphs by being mostly wrong.”
For the New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing under the wholly apt headline “The Death and Life of Economies,” the new book was “astonishing…It blows cobwebs from the mind, and challenges assumptions one hadn’t even realized one had made. It should prove of major importance.”
In The Village Voice, Michael Harrington, whose recent The Other America had done much to alert the country to its forgotten poor, described himself as “provoked, stimulated, and charmed by her insights almost as much as I disagree with her basic theory and conclusions.” All told, the book was “bad economics and good values.”
In The Hudson Review, Roger Sale seemed as intrigued by how the book worked on him as by what it actually said: its impact was “mysterious, in a way that makes you want to look around, to reflect on what you know of elsewhere, to read the Yellow Pages and the U.S. Census and see it all different, as if for the first time…It’s like having a whole new world to think about.” And then (as first quoted in the Introduction), he said one of the truer things to be said of her: “There are ways to disagree with Jane Jacobs, but not as many as you might think, because on her own terms she is almost invariably right and the real questions arise when you start to consider what she has left out.”
Pointing to some of what she’d left out was, again, Herbert Gans, who had seized on what he saw as the “physical fallacy” in Death and Life. “In her new book,” he began his New Republic review, “Mrs. Jacobs continues the search for vitality, this time to discover what makes urban economies live or die.” Again she’d written “an exciting book…But once more, I find her analysis skewed.” Jane had largely ignored the role of big corporations, or simply written them off as exemplars of stagnation. Getting too much credit, on the other hand, was the innovative entrepreneur. “Sometimes the book reads like a tract on behalf of 19th-century rugged individualism.”
As in Death and Life, wrote Gans, “Mrs. Jacobs places a higher value on vitality than on well-being. But…imagine a one-or-two-industry city producing ‘old work’ for which demand is stable and permanent, paying high wages and taxes.” Think tires in Akron, or country music in Nashville. That might make for scant vitality but much community well-being. Single-industry towns might lack the diversity and economic oomph of great cities, but at least while they prospered many residents managed to lead contented lives. And wasn’t a good life…a good life? Gans, who since he’d written of Boston’s West End had written a long, ambitious study of tract-house contentment in Levittown, New York, seemed to see around and within ranges of American life for which Jane had little sympathy. For Jane, boredom was bad, stagnation was bad, always and forever, both a kind of death.
Still, Gans rounded out his long review, “What Mrs. Jacobs has done in this book and in her earlier one is to begin to formulate a badly needed urban myth for our now almost entirely urbanized society. In the long run, this may well be her most important contribution.”
After Lehmann-Haupt’s review in The New York Times, an archaeologist, Patricia Daly, wrote Jane, faulting her on some of her points, mostly about ancient Çatal Hüyük, what it really meant to be a city, and several technical issues. At one point in her lengthy reply, Jane had this to say:
Anthropologists make a terrible mistake in looking at the most stagnant (that i
s, the most primitive) economies now in existence in the world, and attempting to draw conclusions from these concerning prehistoric processes of development. That can’t work; one simply cannot extrapolate from stagnation.
There was little to learn from stagnation and decline, she was saying. The lessons were all in life and health.
—
“Back when I came to Toronto in 1968,” Jane would report, “there was not a single outdoor café…In fact you couldn’t sit in your own back yard and legally take a drink of alcohol. Or on your front porch…Because a child might see it…That was the thing. I’m not making that up.”
At the time, Toronto was a city of about 2 million people, 350 miles from Montreal, 500 from Quebec City, 250 from Detroit. It was a famously sleepy town for much of its history, certainly up to 1968, lying in the shadow of older, more cosmopolitan, French-influenced Montreal; and maybe even, for that matter, of Buffalo, New York. If you wanted a night on the town, you’d hear it said, drive a hundred miles around the western lip of Lake Ontario to Buffalo, with its beautiful Olmsted parks and hint of urban bustle.
In its Great Lakes–flavored English stolidity, Toronto might have seemed to a midwesterner from the U.S. comfortably familiar, laid out on roughly orthogonal lines, unprepossessing, flat. Of course, it wasn’t flat, not really, but furrowed, right down into the city, by dozens of what Torontonians called “ravines,” shallow valleys left over from the glaciers that gave it topographical richness, sylvan streambeds, bits of untended forest, even seeming wilderness. New Yorkers might see Toronto as the end of the world, but even in his brief 1967 visit, Bob found in it redemptive features. The city was growing, beginning the surge in population and influence that would let it soon overtake Montreal as Canada’s premier city. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, English-speaking Montrealers, scared off by the political tumult in Quebec, began moving to Toronto, tens of thousands of them, laden with money and talent. Energetic, increasingly Asian newcomers, 75,000 of them a year, were moving in, too. A new city hall had gone up a couple of years before Jane’s arrival—“two boomerangs over half a grapefruit,” as someone called Viljo Revell’s striking modernist structure—that was neither universally loved nor reviled; but certainly, as Robert Fulford wrote in Accidental City, “it transformed Toronto by cracking open the city’s prejudices about how buildings should look; the public idea of what was acceptable in architecture seemed to change overnight.” Toronto’s gray was blossoming into color.
By the time Jane arrived, hints of pink, blooming health were enlivening Toronto’s doughy face, just when most American cities were in decline, hemorrhaging population. Canadian banks, Jane would hazard as one reason, had never “redlined” neighborhoods into destruction. Racial ghettos were almost unknown. Though Canada’s local and provincial authorities could still do damage, at least the federal government wasn’t pushing highways through cities. Finally, Canada’s version of urban renewal had intruded less, and destroyed less. These virtues of omission, Jane would point out, were enough to make Toronto more hopeful than most of its American counterparts. The city had fine old neighborhoods, a decent subway system, three daily papers, a top university. It was the provincial capital. Its localities bore English place-names like York and Scarborough, Glencairn and Runnymede. Its old Kensington Market district could remind you of New York’s Lower East Side, with crowded streets and tiny shops, live chickens in cages, a welter of foreign languages, a bit decrepit, yet charming, more like Hudson Street back in the 1940s. House hunting soon after they got to Toronto, the Jacobses did tour Kensington Market but couldn’t find just the right place among its thin residential offerings. “It looked a little desolate,” Jim recalls, “but so what, it didn’t feel desolate.”
It must have been late in their second year in Toronto that they began to look for a more permanent home; the Spadina Road house was being sold, so they had to move. And besides, it was way too small. They wound up a few blocks away, near the western end of the same neighborhood, the Annex (for its annexation by the city back in 1887).
The Annex was a rectangle of real estate sitting just north of the University of Toronto across Bloor Street, two miles from city hall, marked by large brick and sandstone houses arrayed along tree-lined streets; some of its Victorian mansions went back to the 1880s. Bobbi Speck, the woman who’d helped draw Jane into the Stop Spadina fight, recalled the Annex of the late 1960s as mostly absentee owned, the Depression having broken up many old houses into apartments. But it was busy, with lots of foot traffic, safe, kids out on the street at all hours, and, as one resident would recall, spectacularly diverse:
We had one or two of the original inhabitants going back to 1903, 1905 or their descendants. We had a large Eastern European community. We had Holocaust survivors. We had a genuine Nazi. This is on one block. We had communists. We had rooming houses. Chinese rooming houses…We had drug drops. We had unsavory people. We had three brothels. They were part of the community, actually. My son played with the son of the madam. And then there were young professionals like us who were renovating. It was a completely mixed community.
Here in the Annex, at 69 Albany Avenue, the Jacobses found a home.
“We think we have bought a house, four blocks from here,” Jane wrote Jason Epstein in July 1970. “I hope so. It has space enough in it for a room for me just to work in!” It was a three-story, semidetached, redbrick affair dating to about 1910, built for the University of Toronto dinosaur expert, William Arthur Park. Two large rooms on the third floor; Jane and Bob’s bedroom second floor front, Jane’s office in the rear; dining room, living room, and kitchen on the first. Albany Avenue was no broad “avenue” at all, but a modest street, with room enough for a single lane of traffic and two of parking. The houses lining it were packed close, narrow spaces between them, making for mostly uninterrupted street frontage. Each had a little garden out front, a more extensive yard reaching out back. Jane’s daybook recorded their planned move: they were to measure rooms on August 1st, close on September 10th, get the phone installed on November 13th, move in on the 21st, clean out Spadina Road the next day.
“We are going to have more room,” Jane wrote her young planner friend, David Gurin, not long after the move. “I say ‘going to’ because at present the first floor, where we demolished walls, is kind of a half-plastered welter.” Bob was putting his design mark on the place, opening up the ground floor, kitchen shelves facing the living room, a lawn glider covered in imitation leather the new living room couch. Son Jim remembered it, for all its quirks, as “a very elegant-looking place.” Some months after the move, Jane wrote her mother, “The carpenter yesterday finished a balcony—or as they say here, a veranda,” on a roof extension at the back of the house above Jane’s work room, practically in the treetops. “We are still in a mess,” Jane wrote Epstein early the following year. “The painters are at work; what a relief after the plasterers. Hey, this is going to be a nifty place.” In time, the house would be covered by thick vines. Towering maples would rise from the front yard.
Of course, with Jane it was never just the house itself that mattered, but the street. And not just the street, either, but its ties to the rest of the neighborhood and the city. From Albany Avenue, Jane was a couple of minutes’ walk to the subway, the Bathurst station on Bloor Street, where trains pulling out every three or four minutes brought her, with transfers to the Yonge Street line, virtually anywhere downtown. Bloor Street’s array of shops and businesses changed over the years. Early on it was mostly local, studded with grocers and butcher shops, little clothing stores, a yarn shop. Jane would take her “bundle buggy,” a small shopping cart, to pick up provisions, sometimes take the subway down to the city’s old St. Lawrence Market. In time, as the Annex gentrified, Bloor Street became a shopping destination for outsiders and students, the more neighborhood-oriented shops thinning out.
Jane would live on Albany Avenue for the rest of her life—for the first quarter century or so with Bob
and then, for ten years more, alone.
The house gloried in that first flurry of Bob’s design wittiness. But with the passage of time, it settled into its old age just as he and Jane did, grown familiar and friendly, if inevitably a bit shabby, with its stained-glass windows, African sculpture, oil portrait of Jane’s great-aunt, a clothes-and-wire scarecrow over the staircase, endless shelves of books. The children, settling into their own lives, were frequently in and out. When Jane’s brothers and sister and their families visited, they stayed with Jane and Bob at 69 Albany Avenue, or across the street with their friends Toshiko and Sid at 74, or down the street with son Jim and his wife, Pat, at 31.
Jane became a fixture of the neighborhood. She’d sit out on the front porch watching children rattle and whiz down the sidewalk on their skateboards. She’d sell jam at the neighborhood’s fall fair. She could be seen walking chummily along with Bob; sometimes they held hands. At neighborhood meetings she might show up without having registered to speak beforehand, but someone always would give her his time; as one neighbor said, “You can’t say no to Jane Jacobs.” Another neighbor told of having a sick tree removed from in front of his house, only to encounter Jane on the street, angry, labeling him a “white painter,” the local term for those who’d buy a house, slap on a coat of white paint, and sell it for a quick profit. Later, it seems, after digging around in the root bed and discovering the tree was really dead, she apologized.
Another Annex neighbor, Katherine Gildner, told of the time Jane rescued her. She was a doctoral student and young mother, up near dawn that day in the local park, a toddler in tow and infant twins in the stroller, and having a hard time of it: “You know, you’re feeding one, the other’s screaming, right?” And the older kid is carrying on, “Mommy, Mommy, I want to show you my hockey cards.” Her husband was out of town, she was on her own, exhausted, having trouble keeping it together. Then, an older woman approached her. “She didn’t say, ‘Would you like some help?’ Because I’m the type who would say, ‘No, I’m fine, thank you very much.’ ” Instead, she just stopped, picked up a [baby] bottle, picked up one of the twins, and started feeding him, meanwhile talking softly with the toddler about his hockey cards:
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