“Arrogant, arch”: Interview, Alan Littlewood.
or even, just possibly, whether: The possibility that Jane did not see the Philadelphia projects before she wrote about them for Forum draws support from three sources: First, an editor’s note to a June 24, 1962, article about Jane in the Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin Magazine quotes her: “My initial skepticism that urban renewal was on the right track occurred as a result of comparing the city planning department’s sketches and verbal rationalizations of things-to-be for Philadelphia with the results.” Second, the excerpt of the letter to Grady Clay quoted at the end of the previous chapter (March 1959, LaurenceDiss, p. 195) is preceded by: “Then I began to see some of these things built.” Finally, in their summary of a 1962 panel discussion at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Frigand and Lapham summarize JJ’s comments as follows: “Bacon showed her sketches of their concepts and projects, and she wrote the articles praising their work. When she visited the completed projects later on she felt that she had been tricked—that what looked nice on paper was horrible in reality.”
“awful endless blocks”: Jane Jacobs, “Philadelphia’s Redevelopment,” Architectural Forum (July 1955).
she joined Bacon: Account distilled from some of Jane’s many tellings of the incident, including: Saunders; Dillon, p. 41; Wachtel, pp. 47–48; Alexander and Weadick, p. 15; Matter, p. 126; Frigand and Lapham; Books and Authors Luncheon, March 19, 1962.
visiting sister Betty: Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin Magazine, editor’s note to article about Jane, June 24, 1962.
“found out what they had in mind”: Books and Authors Luncheon.
“looked so seductive”: Matter, p. 126.
slices of Americana: See correspondence with John S. Zinsser Jr., Burns, 22:9.
science fiction: Burns, 22:10.
“the terrific acceleration”: Doug Haskell to colleagues, February 4, 1955, HaskellPap, 58:3.
“hard for an outsider”: “Cleveland: City with a Deadline,” Architectural Forum (August 1955), unbylined.
“Parentheses” column: William McQuade, “Get a Bike!,” Architectural Forum (April 1956).
“hitch-hiking with the fish”: “Hitch-Hiking with the Fish,” typescript, with appended note dating it to 1954, Burns, 22:8.
sit on the rear rack: Ned Jacobs, Jane’s Walk description, “Cycle Cambie Corridor-Vancouver,” May 2, 2010, online tour description, for Jane’s Walk 2010; Ned Jacobs to author, October 19, 2013.
$10,000: Memo, Chadbourne Gilpatric, June 4, 1958, Rockefeller: “Her present salary on the staff of Forum is $13,750.” But that was two years after the events of April 1956 that, as we’ll see in chapter 10, dramatically elevated Jane’s profile. In Joe Hazen to R. D. Paine Jr., February 24, 1961, HaskellPap, 2:1, we learn that a Forum secretary averaged a little under $6,000 a year, a researcher about $8,300, a writer about $11,750.
Glennie Lenear: Interviews, Jim Jacobs, Carol Bier, Jane Henderson, Burgin Jacobs. D&L included Lenear in the acknowledgments.
“no more romantic”: Matter, p. 52.
“almost with disbelief”: Flint, p. 65.
transformed their home from a slum: Matter, p. 65; see also Lucie Preuss, Sunday Milwaukee Journal, July 8, 1962: “The back yard had been a dump and Bob had to reinforce the foundation…We did a lot of the work ourselves. We did it as we could afford it. That’s different from urban renewal, which is done all at once.”
William Kirk: Interviews, Judy Kirk Fitzsimmons, Eugene Sklar, David Gurin; “Metro North: Death of a Slum,” WNBC-TV broadcast, February 25, 1967, viewed at Paley Center for Media, New York City; obituary, New York Times, October 24, 2001; Union Settlement Papers, ColumbiaRare.
great swaths of tenements: For a taste, visit the Tenement Museum on New York’s Lower East Side.
As recently as 1939: Gerald Meyer, “Italian Harlem: America’s Largest and Most Italian Little Italy,” http://www.vitomarcantonio.com.
No bank: Lurie, “Community Action in East Harlem,” p. 247.
a fifth of East Harlem: See Projects, part IV.
Phil Will: Obituary, Chicago Tribune, October 24, 1979; R. Randall Vosbeck, A Legacy of Leadership: The Presidents of the American Institute of Architects (Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects, 2008), pp. 98–100. In 1961, Rev. William Kirk conducted the marriage of Will’s daughter Elizabeth.
approach Doug Haskell: Kirk to Haskell, November 19, 1954, HaskellPap. See also William Kirk to Chadbourne Gilpatric, August 11, 1959, RF 1.2, 200 R, Box 390, Folder 3381, Rockefeller.
wrote Haskell again: Kirk to Haskell, March 17, 1955, HaskellPap.
hauling out maps: Books and Authors Luncheon, from which much about Jane and her experience with Bill Kirk is distilled, and probably the most vivid and complete of the several accounts Jane offered over the years. See also Alexander and Weadick, p. 15.
Kirk’s turf: See Gerald Meyer, “Italian Harlem: America’s Largest and Most Italian Little Italy,” http://www.vitomarcantonio.com; Lurie, “Community Action in East Harlem”; The WPA Guide, pp. 265–70; New York City Housing Authority photos from the period, La Guardia and Wagner Archives.
“can’t imagine how he took the time”: Books and Authors Luncheon.
“We would stop every little while”: Books and Authors Luncheon.
see what he was getting at: JJ to Chadbourne Gilpatric, July 1, 1958, Rockefeller.
“a big basket of dry leaves”: Books and Authors Luncheon.
“when the bird’s eye blows”: Edwin J. Slipek Jr., “An Urban Planning Expert Shares Her View of Richmond,” Style Weekly (Richmond, VA), January 1, 1980.
“delighted to live in the city”: Kunstler, II, 14.
Jane liked Kirk: “He wasn’t just a one-trick pony of East Harlem,” says Jim Jacobs.
“He was showing me”: Lucile Preuss, Sunday Milwaukee Journal, July 8, 1962.
study in the works: “Fact Sheet, East Harlem Small Business Survey & Planning Committee,” January 16, 1956, Union Settlement Papers, RB 35/7, ColumbiaRare. See also “Shops a Problem in East Harlem,” New York Times, May 8, 1955.
“mitigate the consequences”: Krieger and Saunders, p. xviii.
delighted to attend: Haskell to Sert, January 21, 1956, HaskellPap, 20:5.
“a conflict had come up”: Haskell to Sert, March 19, 1956, HaskellPap, 20:5.
she wouldn’t do it: Account drawn primarily from Kunstler, II, p. 13; Alexander and Weadick, p. 15.
“depending on you”: Alexander and Weadick, p. 15.
CHAPTER 10: TEN MINUTES AT HARVARD
Harvard conference: See Krieger and Saunders.
“developed as a new science”: Krieger and Saunders, p. 3.
“First my knees trembled”: Alexander and Weadick, p. 16.
She began with East Harlem: The text of Jane’s talk, from which the quotes over the next few pages are drawn, can be found in Architectural Forum (June 1956), as “The Missing Link in City Redevelopment”; in Matter, pp. 39–40; excerpted also in Progressive Architecture (August 1956): 102–03; and Krieger and Saunders, pp. 9–11.
Stuyvesant Town: See Projects, part II; Jane’s references to it in her Harvard lecture and later in D&L; interview, Carol Bier.
from their perch: Projects, p. 73.
“tracery of iron”: Projects, p. 85.
“a living neighborhood”: Projects, p. 95.
“posperous belt of stores”: Matter, p. 39.
“a big hit”: Kunstler, II, p. 13.
“the foggy atmosphere”: Lewis Mumford, The Urban Prospect, p. 185.
“passionate plea”: Fumihiko Maki, “Fragmentation and Friction as Urban Threats: The Post-1956 City,” in Krieger and Saunders, p. 88.
“wonderful”: Victor Gruen to Douglas Haskell, April 16, 1956, HaskellPap.
“stewing around in me”: Jane Jacobs to Catherine Bauer, April 29, 1958, in LaurenceDiss, p. 348.
“The last ten years”: Jane Jacobs, “By 1976 What City Pattern
?,” Architectural Forum (September 1956): 103.
“sensible-sounding postwar catchwords”: Jane Jacobs, “New York’s Office Boom,” Architectural Forum (March 1957): 106.
“The big rediscovery”: Jane Jacobs, “Row Houses for Cities,” Architectural Forum (May 1957): 149.
“not by abstract logic”: Jane Jacobs, “Metropolitan Government,” Architectural Forum (August 1957): 125.
a brotherly memo: Holly Whyte to Doug Haskell, January 17, 1957, HaskellPap, 78:6.
“I kept hearing”: Matter, p. 16.
CHAPTER 11: A PERSON WORTH TALKING TO
“just the person”: William H. Whyte Jr., “C. D. Jackson Meets Jane Jacobs,” preface to Whyte, The Exploding Metropolis, p. xv.
“a screed of facts”: Dillon, p. 41.
“mainly of writing captions”: William H. Whyte Jr., “C. D. Jackson Meets Jane Jacobs,” preface to Whyte, The Exploding Metropolis, p. xv.
They respected one another: On two occasions, for example (see below and next chapter), Whyte supported Jane’s grants with the Rockefeller Foundation.
“a manifesto of cultural politics”: Sam Bass Warner Jr., foreword to Whyte, The Exploding Metropolis, p. iv.
“huge patches”: William H. Whyte Jr., “Urban Sprawl,” in Whyte, The Exploding Metropolis, p. 133.
“They will be spacious”: Jane Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” in Whyte, The Exploding Metropolis, p. 157. In what follows, I use the page numbering of the 1993 University of California Press reprint, which differs from the 1957 edition (which is credited to “The Editors of Fortune”).
“narrow, back-door alley”: Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” p. 162.
“The smallness of big cities”: Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” p. 163.
“This cultural superblock”: Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” p. 173.
“To the north”: Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” p. 173.
“the cheerful hurly-burly”: Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” p. 158.
Lincoln Square: My account largely follows Projects, part III.
“The pain brought on”: Projects, p. 200.
“the logic of egocentric children”: Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” p. 158.
“Look what your girl did”: “Comments on Downtown Is For People,” Ruth Kammler, Fortune Letters Dept., RF, RG 1.2, Ser. 200R, Box 390, Folder 3380, Rockefeller.
“the first blink”: Gillian Darley, “Ian Nairn and Jane Jacobs, the Lessons from Britain and America,” Journal of Architecture 17, no. 5 (2012): 738.
the mainstream place: My account of Forum during this period derives in part from Blake, No Place Like Utopia; LaurenceDiss; see also David A. Crane, “Working Paper for the University of Pennsylvania Conference on Urban Design Criticism,” University of Pennsylvania, Institute of Urban Studies, 1958, p. 11. Crane could be harsh: “These magazines seem to defer to a real or imaginary demand for easy entertainment: ‘slick’ pictures and glib captions which never intentionally show faults in a building. The level of discourse is rarely of real professional caliber; indeed it compares unfavorably with some newspaper writing on art or drama.” (But, he noted, “Jane Jacobs’s recent comprehensive and thoughtful treatment of urbanism in Forum comes as a very welcome change.”)
“quickly to understand”: Dark, p. 127.
Barcelona Pavilion: This brief survey of modernist architecture and planning has been drawn from, among others, Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century; Blake, No Place Like Utopia; Goldberger, Why Architecture Matters; the Le Corbusier exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, 2013; Martin Perschler, through his course “Modernism & Postmodernism in Architecture,” Johns Hopkins University, 2013; and, inevitably, D&L itself.
“What is the ideal city?”: Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, p. 3.
stood before a map: I saw the footage at the Le Corbusier exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, 2013.
“The Garden City”: Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, part I; Miller.
Charley in New Town: Halas & Batchelor Cartoon Film Production, Central Office of Information, U.K., 1948.
“didn’t bring them around”: Kunstler, II, p. 9.
“shattering to those of us”: Blake, No Place Like Utopia, p. 290.
party with architects: Chadbourne Gilpatric diary, February 22, 1958, RF, RG 12, Box 168, Rockefeller.
“flashing charm and audacity”: Arthur Meier Schlesinger, A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 115.
“approach to city pattern”: Douglas Haskell to Messrs. Hazen, Lessing, Grotz, November 21, 1957, HaskellPap.
“Jane’s blockbuster”: Laurence, “Jane Jacobs Before Death and Life,” note 46.
“What Is the City?”: JJ to Doug Haskell, April 25, 1958, HaskellPap.
“Wow!”: Douglas Haskell to JJ, April 28, 1958, HaskellPap.
“I would eventually”: I wasn’t there when she said this, which was during an interview in 1994 for a television station in Texas; rather, I watched a video recording of it. But what she said didn’t sound the way the words read on the page. I must have played back the clip a dozen times, trying to read into Jane’s peculiar mix of shyness and self-assurance. As she said, “…eventually have persuaded them,” her eyes closed and her eyebrows lifted, and abruptly she seemed like some geeky high school student telling us, sweetly and demurely, “Oh, and I won the school science fair prize”—except with an implicit “Of course, what would you expect, certainly I won it, how could I not?” The interview was by Lee Cullum, May 4, 1994, VHS recording, Burns.
In a letter to Peter Newman, January 20, 1997, Burns, Jane uses similar, if more qualified, language: “My editors were very orthodox in their beliefs about city planning and related architecture and not receptive to this iconoclasm. Eventually, I think, I might have persuaded them—maybe—but in any event I got a contract with Random House to write a book instead.”
“The criss-cross of supporting relationships”: Typescript, “Talk given April 20, 1958, at a dinner panel of the New School Associates,” Box 37, Folder 380, Rockefeller.
“the deepest satisfaction”: Lewis Mumford to JJ, May 3, 1958, Kunstler, II, p. 22.
“Mrs. Jacobs herself”: Chadbourne Gilpatric diary, May 9, 1958, Rockefeller.
“fairly bubbled”: Chadbourne Gilpatric diary, June 4, 1958, Rockefeller.
“sounds very abstract”: JJ to Chadbourne Gilpatric, June 14, 1958, Rockefeller.
“questions about the scope”: Chadbourne Gilpatric diary, June 26, 1958, Rockefeller.
“One is the image”: JJ to Chadbourne Gilpatric, July 1, 1958, Rockefeller.
“an interested publisher”: JJ to Chadbourne Gilpatric, June 14, 1958, Rockefeller.
His name was Jason Epstein: See Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing, Past Present and Future (New York: Norton, 2001); introduction to 50th anniversary edition of D&L, Modern Library, 2011.
both urged Jane: Chadbourne Gilpatric diary, June 26, 1958, Rockefeller.
“clearer and better composed”: Chadbourne Gilpatric to JJ, July 13, 1958, Rockefeller.
a professional biography: JJ to Chadbourne Gilpatric, July 13, 1958, Rockefeller.
“She made a brief address”: Lewis Mumford to Chadbourne Gilpatric, August 1, 1958, Rockefeller.
“wholeheartedly enthusiastic”: William H. Whyte to Chadbourne Gilpatric, August 4, 1958, Rockefeller.
“grandiose and vague”: Christopher Tunnard to Chadbourne Gilpatric, August 18, 1958, Rockefeller.
“I’d back Jane Jacobs”: Catherine Bauer to Chadbourne Gilpatric, August 5, 1958, Rockefeller.
“some general usefulness”: JJ to Chadbourne Gilpatric, September 15, 1958, Rockefeller.
CHAPTER 12: A MANUSCRIPT TO SHOW US
“completed plans”: Chadbourne Gilpatric, October 17, 1958, Rockefeller.
“opinions and critical comments”: Chadbourn
e Gilpatric, December 2, 1958, Rockefeller.
“had it all figured out”: Lucy Jacobs video interview; see also Claire Perrin interview of JJ, May 1999, Burns, 23:32.
“woman wanted to see the North End”: Interview, Herbert Gans.
didn’t seem interested: Herbert Gans, “Remembering The Urban Villagers and Its Location in Intellectual Time: A Response to Zukin,” City & Community (September 2007): 231–36.
“district taking a terrible beating”: D&L, p. 12.
“I looked down a narrow alley”: D&L, p. 13.
“Mrs. J’s most exciting discovery”: Chadbourne Gilpatric, December 2, 1958, Rockefeller.
“a lot of unexpected problems”: Chadbourne Gilpatric, June 10, 1959, Rockefeller.
“On almost everything I had thought about”: JJ to Chadbourne Gilpatric, July 17, 1959, Rockefeller.
realized they knew little: Union Settlement brochure, January 31, 1961, p. 14, Burns, 2:4.
Ellen Lurie: Interviews, Ron Shiffman, Kathy Goldman, Rebecca Lurie, Jim Jacobs; Zipp, “Superblock Stories.”
George Washington Houses: Statement of General Purpose of George Washington Houses Study Project, January 9, 1956, Union Settlement Papers, ColumbiaRare.
“sobering”: Union Settlement brochure, January 31, 1961, p. 14, Burns, 2:4.
DeWitt Clinton Houses: See Projects, pp. 327–32.
“We realize”: William Kirk to William Reid, December 30, 1958, Union Settlement Papers, Box 35, Folder 8, ColumbiaRare.
“We are convinced”: See, especially, typescript presentation, February 3, 1959, Union Settlement Papers, Box 35, Folder 8, ColumbiaRare.
close to the original design: Projects, p. 332.
“tall, angular, monotonous”: Mildred Zucker to Will, February 6, 1959, Union Settlement Papers, Box 35, Folder 7, ColumbiaRare.
time and energy were drawn off: See William Kirk to Chadbourne Gilpatric, August 11, 1959, where he comments on Jane’s role in East Harlem over the preceding five years, RF 1.2, 200R, Box 390, Folder 3381, Rockefeller: She, along with her husband, “was indefatigable in attendance at all manner of large and small neighborhood meetings…In all of these her interest was unfailing and her discernment was sensitive, perceptive, and deeply imaginative.”
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