by Jane Jacobs
The American Labor Party was a political party, founded by socialist union leaders, which briefly flourished in the 1930s and ’40s in New York. Riven by internal battles between socialists and Communists, the ALP began a slow collapse in the late ’40s. Just as she believed in the fundamental role of unions in the workplace, Jacobs liked third parties for their “valuable function in needling popular opinion.” She had registered with the ALP in the 1940s but began to grow disillusioned with both party and union when they followed the Communist Party line on domestic and foreign policy issues. She stayed in both organizations as a matter of principle, convictions she defended when her memberships made her a target of the FBI and State Department’s Cold War campaigns to expose Communists. For Jacobs’s full response to the Loyalty Security Board’s “interrogatory,” see Ideas That Matter (pp. 169–79).
*2 The Greenback-Labor Party was a late-nineteenth-century third party that united rural farmers and urban workers. Formed in 1876 as the Greenback Party, its main goal was to push for the increased availability of paper money not backed by gold—“greenbacks”—in order to make it easier for farmers and workers to pay off their debts. The party elected a number of congressmen in 1878 but faded away in the 1880s. The goal of loosening the money supply and ending the gold standard did not fade, however, and was taken up by the Populists and eventually the Democrats, thereby earning Jacobs’s admiration for the party’s role in pushing new, untested ideas.
*3 The Loyalty Security Board asked Jacobs about her “attitude toward the Communist Party, the Soviet system of government, and the aims and policies of the Soviet Union.” She answered that insofar as it could be proved that the Communist Party in the United States was “an apparatus for espionage or sabotage, I believe it is dangerous and that such activities must be rooted out, hampered and so far as possible destroyed, for the sake of our national security.” However, she did not think the Communist Party dangerous as a political force because it “never has convinced more than a relative handful of Americans….Ideas and ideologies will become a domestic menace only if we fall into the trap of believing that each of us must think like all the others.” As for the Soviet Union, she said, “I fear and despise the whole concept of a government which takes as its mission the molding of people into a specific ‘kind of man,’ i.e. ‘Soviet Man’; that practices and extols a conception of the state as ‘control from above and support from below’ (I believe in control from below and support from above).” The Communist Party in Russia, she said, was “a ruthless device for maintaining power, an apparatus for political tyranny.” See Ideas That Matter (pp. 178–79).
*4 This is a reference, of course, to Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (1908–57; in office 1947–57), whose zealous, self-aggrandizing, and ultimately self-defeating pursuit of waning Communist influence in America in the early 1950s gave the popular name “McCarthyism” to the entire period of the Second Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s.
*5 Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (1898–1980) sat on the high court for over thirty-five years (1939–75), the longest tenure of any justice in American history, and was particularly known for his defense of individual rights and personal liberty.
Jane Jacobs speaking at an anti–urban renewal rally in 1966, protesting the construction of a new library for New York University.
Jane Jacobs began work at Architectural Forum in May 1952. Published by Time-Life, Forum was one of the leading design magazines of its day and a champion of modernism in architecture and city planning. Douglas Haskell, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, initially offered Jacobs a position covering the design of schools and hospitals. Over time she would become his most trusted editor and writer on architectural and urban planning issues of all sorts, lending her observant eye and skeptical wit to accounts of housing, shopping centers, suburbanization and sprawl, metropolitan governance, and urban renewal.
Jacobs had written about architecture and urbanism at Amerika, and she learned much from her husband, Robert Jacobs, a practicing architect whom she had married in 1944. But in her writing at Forum she developed a particular interest in the way a building worked, rather than simply how it looked. How did the architect organize the building’s complicated mix of uses in space? How did he or she solve practical problems or save money in novel ways? How did the building’s users experience it day to day? What did the building do differently than others of its kind that came before? She shared with the modern architects and planners she covered a wholehearted belief in the primacy of function in design, and in the potential for putting science to work in improving human life.
She and her colleagues also saw that American cities in the postwar era faced grave problems: People were fleeing to the suburbs, factories and offices followed hard on their heels, and swaths of so-called “slums” and “blight” spread in the neighborhoods left behind near downtown. Unlike their “decentrist” peers who favored building at the fringes of cities as the solution to urban ills, Forum’s editors believed in cities, so when the federal government authorized subsidies for public housing programs and privately backed urban renewal projects, the magazine applauded. Federal money and power would be used to acquire “blighted” land through eminent domain, clear the “slums,” and build new apartment complexes, hospitals, universities, and other projects, all of which would be designed in the latest modern styles. Over the course of the 1950s, the number of redevelopment projects around the country boomed, more than doubling between 1954 and 1958. As Haskell summed it up in a 1956 editorial, “A new order of architecture and building is not only coming, it is here already: city architecture, city building and rebuilding.” However, personal experience would soon shake Jacobs’s belief in the conceits of modern architecture, if not the functionalist foundations on which it rested. In fact, she would soon find herself at the heart of a series of debates about city life that would drastically alter her understanding of the modernist credo “form ever follows function.”
In 1955, Haskell tasked Jacobs with covering the urban renewal beat, and under the heading “City Building” Jacobs favorably reviewed projects in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Washington, Fort Worth, and Baltimore. Although she found praiseworthy elements in every plan, beneath the surface she began to have doubts about the true impact of this emerging urbanism. One moment particularly gnawed at her. As she toured Philadelphia with planning officials, they tried to demonstrate the contrast between a “bad, old street” and a “good, new street” for her. As Jacobs recalled nearly fifty years later, the “bad” street was “just crammed with people, mostly black people, walking on the sidewalks and sitting on the stoops and leaning out of the windows,” while the “good” one, a recent patient of urban renewal, sat empty except for a lone little boy, idly kicking a tire in the gutter.1 She admired Ed Bacon and Louis Kahn, the masterminds behind Philadelphia’s renewal, describing them as the kind of “pavement pounding” planners she valued. But something wasn’t working.
Over the next year, it became clear to Jacobs that to design and build on the scale of a city demanded an understanding of the functions of the city itself that modern rebuilders had not yet grasped. Another encounter helped her see this. In 1956, Jacobs met William Kirk and Ellen Lurie, workers at Union Settlement House in New York’s East Harlem, where the city had been putting up chunk after chunk of public housing. Eager to demonstrate to Architectural Forum the deleterious effects of modern rebuilding, they took Jacobs on several walks around East Harlem, showing her how the “bad, old streets” really worked. They pointed out that the dense, intricate mixture of storefronts, residences, and workplaces gave rise to what Jacobs would later call “a living network of relationships” between neighbors that provided them with friendship, trust, safety, and the ability to collaborate when under threat. In short, they taught her about the city’s role in building what she would later call “social capital.” No amount of policing, planning, or subsidized services, she argued, could replace this indispensab
le, self-organizing asset of urban life.
Later that year, Jacobs got a chance to publicly express her growing concerns. Extending Kirk and Lurie’s observations about East Harlem to a general principle, Jacobs delivered a speech at a Harvard design conference criticizing how modern architects—her very audience—excised storefronts from the streetscape at the expense of social capital. Their supposedly functionalist projects had betrayed that great function of the city. “The Missing Link in City Redevelopment,” as it was called when it appeared in Architectural Forum (and in this volume), was a hit and set Jacobs on her path to notoriety.
Jacobs’s contrarian views were starting to be known among the architecture and planning cognoscenti. But she wouldn’t find a national audience for them until 1958, when she got a chance to launch a full takedown of city planning orthodoxy in the pages of Fortune, Forum’s older sibling in the Time-Life family. “Downtown Is for People,” which summed up everything she was learning in East Harlem, Philadelphia, and other neighborhoods undergoing renewal, appeared in editor William H. Whyte’s influential series of articles on urban problems, later published as a book called The Exploding Metropolis. The stir “Downtown” kicked up attracted the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, which agreed to support Jacobs as she set out to research and write the book that would become The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Death and Life was an instant sensation upon its publication in 1961, and Jacobs soon found herself giving talks all over the country, including at the White House. Today the book is considered a great turning point in the art of understanding cities. Although it began with the well-known words “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding,” in truth Death and Life took modernist planners and architects to task on their own terms. In her decade at Architectural Forum, Jacobs had become disillusioned with modern city building in practice, but its purported principles and goals still resonated with her. While postmodern critics like Charles Jencks and Robert Venturi would later denounce the aesthetics of modern architecture—a poverty of ornament, meaning, and historical or popular reference—Jacobs sought instead the lost promise of modernism in the city itself—the squandered possibility of true scientific understanding, functionalism, and progress. Instead of relying on abstract reasoning and statistics, though, she called for students of the city to observe its economic and social processes firsthand. Instead of embracing a narrow, discipline-driven interpretation of functionalism, she demanded that architects and planners better express those broader economic and social functions in their design. And to improve the lives of city dwellers, she proposed that reformers start with the already existing assets of neighborhoods, rather than violently ordaining a clean slate.
Jacobs’s reformist take on modern city building was spurred not only by her discoveries of the abuses of urban renewal, or the intricacies of East Harlem street life, but also by an appreciation for the textures of life in her own Greenwich Village, where she had lived for two decades. Jacobs, her husband, and their three children occupied a hundred-year-old storefront building on Hudson Street that she and Robert were renovating in their spare time. So when she heard, in 1955, that New York’s public works czar Robert Moses wanted to run a roadway through the neighborhood’s chief amenity, Washington Square Park, she resolved to do all she could to help stop it. Jacobs was only a rank-and-file member of the successful campaign to stop the road—the effort had started years before she even knew Moses had proposed it—but it would not be her last run-in with the city planning establishment she attacked in Death and Life. Between early 1961, just months before the book’s publication, and her departure from New York in 1968, she led successful campaigns against an urban renewal project for the Village and a freeway across Lower Manhattan, experiences that further fueled both her ire at the forces of modernization from above and her ambition to understand what it was that truly makes cities work.
NOTES
1. Interview with Eleanor Wachtel, Writers & Company, CBC Radio, August 6, 2002.
Philadelphia’s Redevelopment: A Progress Report
* * *
ARCHITECTURAL FORUM, JULY 1955
Once upon a time the general problem of the City Chaotic looked so simple.
Boulevards and civic monuments were going to create the City Beautiful. After that proved insufficient, regional plans were to create the City Sensible. These proved unacceptable and now we are struggling, sometimes it seems at the expense of everything else, to improvise the City Traversible.
And still the deserts of the city have grown and still they are growing, the awful endless blocks, the endless miles of drabness and chaos. A good way to see the problem of the city is to take a bus or streetcar ride, a long ride, through a city you do not know. For in this objective frame of mind, you may stop thinking about the ugliness long enough to think of the work that went into this mess. As a sheer manifestation of energy it is awesome. It says as much about the power and doggedness of life as the leaves of the forest say in spring. All else can only be oases in the desert. Hundreds of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of plans and purposes built the city and only they will rebuild the city.
Philadelphia is a city, perhaps the only U.S. city thus far, that has looked at this appalling fact and begun to deal with it.Hundreds of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of plans and purposes built the city and only they will rebuild the city.
In Philadelphia, a redevelopment area is not a tract slated only—or necessarily primarily—for spectacular replacements. In short, it is not simply to be an oasis. Most certified areas include a great deal of acreage that never will have a magic wand waved suddenly over it. Some of Philadelphia’s redevelopment money is to be spent thinly and very, very shrewdly in interstices of these areas to bring out the good that already exists there or play up potentialities.*1
The Philadelphia approach also means a busybody concern with what private developers will be up to next: a jump ahead. To keep the desert from spreading interminably, plans and persuasion for thinly settled outer reaches have already been marshaled. Downtown, Penn Center is an example of this approach. By the time the Pennsy decided to remove its tracks and old Broad St. Station, the planning commission was ready with a suggested scheme and through thick and thin it has never let the essentials of the scheme get lost.*2 It has not been easy, but the gain to the city—and the developers—is incalculable.
Whether a new oasis is public or private, Philadelphia’s planners look at it not simply as an improvement, but as a catalyst.
Little good can happen to people or to buildings when a sense of neighborhood is missing. Philadelphia’s inexpensive devices toward the enormous gain of restoring the neighborhood to the desert may be its greatest contribution to city planning. As part of this aim, the city’s public housers are not rearing alien institutions unrelated to the surrounding murk, nor are they using public housing as social and economic wall-building to dam off portions of the city. Instead, the projects are being sunk into their neighborhoods, to help rehabilitate, not eviscerate, them.
In this atmosphere of hope for the city, the initiative of private citizens seems to be thriving in the little and the large. The new food distribution center will not only be a huge improvement in its own right and serve as a two-way catalyst (removing blight from several parts of the city, instituting improvement in another), but it is an unprecedented display of public-spirited, private building.*3
What is happening in Philadelphia is of such scope and involves so many people there is no neat and easy explanation for what started it or why. Physical rejuvenation of the city seems to be related to a booming hinterland, dissatisfaction with long do-nothing, a surge of municipal reform and citizen activity, the jolt of the war years.When a city can carry on a love affair with its old and its new at once, it has terrific vitality.
There is something else you cannot help seeing as you walk about the city or listen to its planners, its architects an
d businessmen. Philadelphia’s abrupt embrace of the new, after long years of apathy, has by some miracle not meant the usual rejection of whatever is old. When a city can carry on a love affair with its old and its new at once, it has terrific vitality.
1.
TEN THOUSAND ACRES OF CHANGE
When Philadelphians talk about a program to transform their city, they mean just that, as a glance at the map shows. Philadelphia, first city to take advantage of the redevelopment law, has now certified a total of 10,524 acres (16 sq. mi.) for redevelopment in 18 major planning tracts. Fourteen of the tracts, with about half the total acreage, form almost one continuous swatch covering the mid city and pushing out to north and west. The mid city “hole” is the well-kept Rittenhouse Square area and part of the main business district.*4 There is no intention that the bulldozers can, or should if they could, run loose through these great tracts; rehabilitation and catalyst improvements are a very important part of the program.
Expressways (connecting on east and west with the New Jersey and Pennsylvania turnpikes) will have two cross-city extensions; the long-term plan is to line these with parking. Mass surface transit is to connect these extensions with the center of town, thus keeping the city from strangling in its traffic.
Public housing projects, which formerly averaged about 630 units to a project, average about 270 in work under construction or recently completed. In the future many projects will be only 20 to 100 units, with even smaller groups of only a few houses in nearby blocks. Idea: to clear out pockets and edges of blight in larger stable areas, to give leadership in areas with good rehabilitation potential, and to avoid total clearance projects so costly that extremely high densities must result. Philadelphia housers prefer putting only small families in elevator buildings, aim at placing three- to five-bedroom families in two- and three-story row houses with individual yards. This means about one-third of units high-rise.