Back home, Jane wrote John and Pete of their adventures—of the obscure, out-of-the-way museums, the “treasure trove of Aunt Hannah’s correspondence” on microfilm they’d unearthed at a university library. “Mary Ann and I spent most of two days with it.” In the same letter, Jane outlined her ideas for the book’s complex structure, which she’d tried out earlier on Jason Epstein. It would have a foreword giving context; Hannah’s memoir itself; a section, “Puzzles, Tangles, and Clarifications,” about historical questions intriguing to Jane—like reindeer herds and Herman, the first Alaskan saint; an epilogue, on how the villages had fared since Hannah’s time; finally, a lengthy notes section. All told, these came to more than a hundred pages beyond the memoir itself, a third of the book. The result was an intricate palimpsest—Jane and Hannah, Hannah’s time and Jane’s, memoir and history, reportage and travelogue, each talking back and forth to one another across the years.
An early draft of the book’s epilogue tells how Afognak, part of the Kodiak Archipelago, where Hannah had worked from 1904 to 1906, was “demolished by the tidal wave that accompanied the terrible earthquake of 1964.” In Jane’s final edit, the earthquake is no longer “terrible”; earthquakes usually are. But A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska, as Jane titled it, proved much more than a routine exercise in editorial craft for her; it made for what she would call “probably the three happiest months of my working life. And when I did the research in Alaska I found myself wishing I had a whole extra life to live to be a historian,” to work with raw materials, original documents.
It was Hannah who, fording the Chinkelyes River in knee-high boots, had had her poor feet frozen blue-black; who’d met mountain men and native villagers, lived with them, taught their children. That was her experience. But now it was Jane’s experience, too—deliciously imagining Hannah’s life, retracing her steps, laboring over each word—and finally, depositing the whole story, neatly wrapped, on the threshold of the twenty-first century. It was Jane’s book, too, part of her life, layered in family: her childhood soaking up Hannah’s stories; as a young woman trying to find a home for the manuscript; her mother urging her to go back to it; Burgin’s interest triggering her own; brothers Jim and John helping in practical ways; the trip to Alaska with Bob, Ned, and Mary Ann; a life come full circle. “Every generation,” Jane would say of Hannah, “had their part in valuing her story.”
In Hannah’s story, enacted far from any city, Jane plainly found value, interest, and worth. To one acute reviewer of Schoolteacher, this was itself notable. In an essay in The New York Times Book Review, Paul Goldberger, the paper’s longtime architectural and urban critic, used the book to comment on Jane’s intellectual evolution. A frank admirer of her work, he nonetheless recalled the criticism that, as in Death and Life, “she has always tended to fall prey to the fallacy of physical determinism,” the overvaluing of a physical form. Yet now, chasing down Hannah’s life in the ragged, nondescript villages of rural Alaska, visiting them, taking them seriously, Jane was making an “implicit concession” to the contrary. “I have always wanted Jane Jacobs, iconoclastic, wide-ranging thinker that she is, to see the world in still broader terms, and with this book she truly has.” Hannah Breece, he suggested, would probably not have been happy in a Jacobsean big city, and Jane’s “willingness to see her as hero in spite of this both deepens and softens our view of Ms. Jacobs herself.”
To her adversaries, and maybe some of her friends, too, Jane could seem harshly outspoken, single-minded, even narrow-minded: What a dear, sweet grandmother she isn’t. Well, now Goldberger was seeing in Schoolteacher evidence of a softening. It was a lovely, touching take, and one hard not to see as true. Approaching eighty, Jane was looking back, reflecting on the past, not so angry as she’d sometimes been.
Besides, she was now a grandmother after all, and a loving one at that.
IV. INFIRMITIES OF AGE
On June 21, 1994, a few weeks before setting off for Alaska, Jane had written of her upcoming trip to John Branson, a historian at one of the Alaskan national parks. “I have my doubts about the trail to the falls,” she said, referring to a possible side trip.
I’m seventy-eight years old, and although in good health suffer some disadvantages of age, mainly difficulty in walking more than short distances and then slowly. My knees, a weakness Hannah also suffered when she had reached my age, catches up with us in our seventies, alas.
It would be a few years before Jane would blame her need to decline a speaking engagement in the Netherlands on “the infirmities of age.” But gradually, they had begun to accumulate, the inevitable pains and frailties and calamities. Back in 1973, after her return from Japan, a bad fall had broken her left hand, menacing an important nerve. “That was one hell of an operation,” she wrote Jason Epstein from the hospital. “Last week is all a (mercifully) doped blur to me.” Without the operation, “I would certainly have lost the use of my arm & hand.” The letter was handwritten; she’d not be able to type for months. As it was, she could “move only in a sort of sliding, slither-pivot fashion—I think, actually, it is an old Charleston step—and just managing this now takes about what energy I can muster.”
In 1981 or early the next year Jane stumbled over a pile of bricks in her backyard, broke her right arm and nose, and bashed up her lip. Such a “stupid, stupid lady” she was, she wrote Roberta Gratz with the news.
In 1985, it was something quite similar. “I did such a stupid careless thing,” she wrote Gratz again. “In a hurry & neglecting to turn on the light, I slipped on the stair & broke my collar-bone. Not serious, & it’s healing well, but it has held me back from work”; she couldn’t type.
Jane seems to have measured these mishaps against a backdrop of generally good health—good, at least, for her age, which was ticking ahead, like everyone’s around her. Her brother John, appointed fifteen years earlier to the U.S. Court of Appeals, in 1982 took “senior” status, at age sixty-five, which allowed him a lighter caseload. Around the same time, brother Jim retired, moving with his wife, Kay, from New Jersey to North Carolina. In 1993, on March 12, Betty died, aged eighty-three. A memorial service held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture eight days later brought Butzners together from all over. A few months later, a Boston Globe reporter wrote of Jane that “white hair and a marked stoop remind a visitor of Jacobs’s age” but that otherwise she seemed just fine. “Internally, I’m not any different from when I was younger,” Jane told him. “It’s always a surprise to me that I don’t get out of bed so easily, and I can’t run up and down those stairs…It doesn’t seem natural to be physically old.”
Back in her late thirties, renting a cottage with John and Katia Jacobs on Sconset in Nantucket — collecting rose hips on the beach, a whole wonderful week of laughing, talking, and playing—Jane had made a mutual vow with Katia: when they were eighty—“which to us,” says Katia, “then seemed an unreasonable distance”—with the relatives gathered around the Thanksgiving table set for The Moment when it was time to serve the turkey, they’d exhibit instead, the two of them cackling crazily, a bird and a pig sewn up together, a chimerical creature. “In subsequent years,” Katia says, “we reminded one another of our pledge,” though they never did it. But now, impossibly, that “unreasonable distance” had been bridged, and Jane was eighty.
But however old Jane was, Bob was much older.
Siblings and spouses, 1988: Compare this photo with the one on this page, from 1945—same family members forty-three years later (except for Elizabeth Butzner). The family, left to right, are Bob, John, Betty, Jane, Pete, Jim, and Kay. A newcomer is Jules Manson, who married Betty in 1947, at extreme right. Credit 29
While working on the Alaska book in 1994—it was before the trip, the manuscript still “quite disjointed”— Jane wrote to a Dutch friend that she and Bob were “aware we’re aging—creakier.” Bob’s, though, was more than a benign creakiness. He was actually a few months younger than Jane, but had already been retired from Z
eidler for several years. Then came a succession of blows. “Bob has lost the sight of his right eye from a burst blood vessel,” Jane wrote Ellen Perry, her sometime research assistant from Death and Life days, “but minimizes the loss and keeps on working, now at machinery design for our son Jim.”
That was early in 1996. In April, Bob was able to accompany Jane to Charlottesville, Virginia, where the University of Virginia was giving her a medal. Someone snapped a picture of them as they sat together on a bench, their heads two matching puffs of white hair. The stately columns of Thomas Jefferson’s campus behind them, they sat, Jane in a fringed jumper, gripping her cane, Bob in tuxedo, bow tie, and dress shoes (forsaking the sneakers he usually wore), one hand on Jane’s shoulder, a drink in the other. He looked okay. He wasn’t.
A few months later, Jane wrote John Branson, the Alaska historian, “Our news is not so great, because Bob is ill with inoperable cancer.” After most of a lifetime’s smoking, lung cancer. He’d gotten a course of radiation treatment at Princess Margaret Hospital, which he’d helped design. “He actually liked going for the treatments,” Jane would say, “and I did, too, because he liked seeing how his hospital worked.” He handled the treatments well. Between then and the next round they were bound for Prince Edward Island.
They had “a happy month” on PEI, Jane wrote Branson in October, “which is good to remember.” But in the end, the cancer took him fast. Early in September, he’d begun “to weaken and decline rapidly.” The children gathered, nursing him at home. He died on the 17th. “An interesting, loveable, good and irreplaceable man,” one obituary called him.
Jane wrote with the news to Ellen Perry, who had approached her for memories of her grandmother back in Bloomsburg, for a book Perry was preparing on family recipes.
I am kind of useless at the moment, as you may imagine. You had better not count on my contribution to the cookbook. It’s ridiculous, but I feel so blank and distracted that just the idea of hunting up a photo of my grandmother, getting it copied, and doing the small revision…that you need seems so formidable.
At the funeral, Jane didn’t cry. “I never cry,” she once told Toshiko Adilman. But the sadness washed over her whenever she’d think, I want to tell Bob something.
CHAPTER 24
IDEAS THAT MATTER
I. THE LIFE OF Death and Life
The citation for Jane’s Jefferson Medal, received that day in Charlottesville, Virginia, Bob still by her side, declared that The Death and Life of Great American Cities was
firmly ensconced on the list of the most influential books of our century. It is hard to identify a single work that has influenced more the thinking and strategies in the field of American urban planning and design.
From the publication of this book, one can date the rethinking of U.S. urban renewal policies, the eclipse of modern architecture, the rise of historic preservation, the invigoration of neighborhood involvement, and even vigorous and principled public opposition to large-scale public projects that threaten to destroy the texture and vitality of urban places.
She created a mood that has influenced urban planning and architectural concepts for over 40 years.
Across those forty years, Jane had explored new subjects in new books, but all the while Death and Life was sinking its roots deep into the earth of intellect and culture, finding new readers, inspiring scholars, architects, and planners, influencing the shape of real cities. Jane could escape the book no more than anyone else. Inevitably, she was celebrated for it, forced to think back to its origins, respond to criticisms of it—and surely, in spare moments, drink deep drafts of pride that she had created it.
Bustle and surprise, bountiful variety, human energy, and sheer, vital messiness: might these trump the suburban troika of light, air, and green? Hundreds of thousands, probably millions, had read the book whole or in part and absorbed the idea that maybe they did. Among planners and architects who had grown up on the tenets of modernism, Death and Life asked, Are you sure? “I still cannot walk down a city street without Jane Jacobs rushing up to me and shouting: ‘Look at that…’ ” wrote the British journalist Simon Jenkins. “She saw in streets the crooked timber of mankind on vibrant display.” An urban consultant grown up in London, Richard Gilbert, wrote Jane that Death and Life had “made sense of my life.” A Stanford University student, Nick Grossman, feeling cut off from the energy of his New York roots, read it during his sophomore year and abruptly got it, understanding how he felt about where he’d lived before and where he lived now. Michael Kimmelman, art critic of The New York Times, wrote that on reading the book, “it was with a jolt of recognition…It said what I knew instinctively to be true but had never articulated, which is the quality of great literature.”
No need to dwell on testimonials like these; I’ve heard or read dozens of them and so perhaps have you. The book that on publication had faced both derision and praise had become enshrined, early criticism mostly drowned out by a sustained chorus of attachment, loyalty, and love — for the book and for the kind of city it championed. By the time of the thirtieth, then the fortieth anniversary of the book’s publication—and then later, after Jane’s death, with the fiftieth anniversary in 2011—critics and scholars of every stripe were exploring its origins, its impact on the U.S., Canada, and the world, its literary and intellectual qualities, and whether its insights even still applied.
“Is There Still Life in Death and Life?” asked Roger Montgomery, a University of California, Berkeley, professor of city and regional planning. For Jane Jacobs, he went on to observe, the city was a kind of “vernacular utopia…And that is what the book is really about: teaching us how to love big cities…Jacobs taught her readers city love.” It let readers ’fess up, during those long decades of suburban night, that it might actually be among the stately row houses of Baltimore’s Mount Vernon Place that they felt more at home than in Cockeysville, or Towson, or any of the city’s other sprawling suburbs; or in San Francisco’s still-ragtag Castro District more than some perfect little town up in Marin.
In 1961, when the book came out, the postwar suburbs, their modernist style, their vision of the good life, were so entrenched it could be hard to recognize any other. But in a way reminiscent of the “liberation” struggles of black people, ethnics, women, gays, and other marginalized groups during roughly the same years, Jane’s book helped legitimize the heretical sensibilities of the confirmed city dweller. It helped its readers think about neighbors and strangers, anonymity and privacy, security and adventure, ugliness and prettiness, the very shape of daily life, in new ways.
At the time of Jane’s death, a Canadian writer, Sandra Martin, observed that Death and Life “connected with a generation of young adults who were trying to make sense of the post-war world.” But not that whole generation, Jane realized, only part of it. Writing in 1992, she distinguished between “car people” and “foot people,” those seeking “the camaraderie, bustle, and promises of surprise and adventure” of the street. They got her book, which gave “legitimacy to what they already knew for themselves.”
The city, Death and Life emphasized, throws you up against strangers, whereas the suburbs insulate you from them, leave you snug in a cocoon of familiarity and comfortable sameness. One scholar, Jamin Creed Rowan, has pictured Jane as part of a literary tradition, epitomized by certain New Yorker profiles of the 1940s and 1950s, that abjured sweet togetherness (a “nauseating name for an old ideal,” Jane called it); city dwellers were “interconnected, not interrelated.” That is, the city wasn’t a place where most people knew your name; on the other hand, it tied you by invisible threads to everyone else, and to the larger organism that was Chicago or LA. Urbanites, Rowan wrote, were bound by “the involuntary accumulation of public contacts rather than the purposeful cultivation of private intimacies.” A good thing? Bad? You could debate that all day and night. But it was different—and different, Death and Life declared on every page, was okay.
Of course, the
long decades during which the book became a back-to-the-city bible also allowed time for a reaction to set in against it, for new rounds of reappraisal and revisionism. Early critiques of the book had pictured Jane as antagonistic to visions of the city other than her own; as unmoved by sides of city life unrelated to physical form, including the social and, especially, the racial. Now, with the stark improvement of many city neighborhoods, also laid at Jane’s door has been gentrification—that unwelcome consequence, or exaggeration, of the “unslumming” Jane hailed as a route to urban health: the new gentry snatch up marginal properties, make them glisten and shine, attract glittering boutiques, new high-end gyms, and high-rise condos. Prices rise. Taxes climb. Ordinary people can’t afford to live there and soon move out. Just tour broad square miles of Brooklyn, Boston, and San Francisco to see the social damage. Not that it looks like damage; at first it seems seductive, bright, and appealing. But it exacts a price. “I have lived in the West Village since 1964, and I can attest to the fact that gentrification has destroyed this area,” wrote one respondent, “Joyce,” to an online article by Michael Powell titled “An Urban Theorist Questions the Gospel of St. Jane”:
Gone is any semblance or authenticity of a vibrant, creative, economically mixed area. I am sickened by the influx of unbelievable wealth…I can barely afford to buy a hamburger in my neighborhood anymore. I mourn the death of this once vibrant community.
Eyes on the Street Page 43
