by Jane Jacobs
Many a smidgen of rural pasture, minus the grazing sheep, horses, mules, cattle, or swine, has been inserted into cities with the deliberate intention of combating urban decadence. Some people still have faith in the moral superiority of an upbringing attended by well-sprayed and well-trimmed lawns.
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NOW I AM GETTING into the subject of memorials. At the time of one of the anniversaries of the September 11th terrorist attack, I was astonished to read in The New York Times that New York possesses no great memorial. Nonsense. The Statue of Liberty is surely the world’s most widely known modern memorial and perhaps its best loved. It memorializes “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” who pursued their dream to America, often enduring much woe and hardship before taking passage, during passage, and after landing. Liberty does not rise on a symbolically uplifting pasture. She rises from the harbor waters like Venus herself arriving on her seashell. As a memorial, Liberty owes nothing, in either form or substance, to plantation mentality.
It’s a rare American city park, whether it bears a memorial or not, that bids users enjoy contact with fellow citizens and city culture. New York has splendid examples in tiny Paley Park, larger and older, redesigned Bryant Park, and some portions, particularly along or near its Fifth Avenue border, of large Central Park. Notable examples in other cities include Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, Paul Revere Park in Boston’s North End, and the Music Garden in Toronto, a magnificent gift to the city from a great cellist, Yo-Yo Ma. Washington’s memorial to America’s dead in the Vietnam War departs, in its own way, from plantation mentality. The fifty-eight thousand names, each distinct and dignified on its black granite, semi-buried background, speak of the irreplaceable worth of each individual’s lost life.
One of the difficult design problems associated with the sixteen-acre site at Ground Zero is that there is so much to memorialize; so much, that it has placed the public and the planning committees in the sort of super-dilemmas called quandaries.
Many want to memorialize the martyred buildings themselves: their heights, by means of towering gee-whiz illumination, or their depths, by revealing the engineering triumph that defeated incursions of an innocent bystander, the Hudson River, into the towers’ foundations. Some citizens want one or the other of these building mementos to memorialize Ground Zero. Other people want both.
Many people prefer memorializing the human victims and the sorrow of their survivors, or want to make sure that the heroic firemen and police who lost their lives in rescue work will never be forgotten. Some who emphasize the sad premature deaths in what should have been the victims’ fullness of life, want Ground Zero to remain perpetually sacred burying ground. Still others view a memorial as an opportunity to refurbish lower Manhattan. Ideas of how that can be done are unlimited. Among them are a museum explaining what happened at this site, perhaps also serving as a magnet for tourists; fine new recreational facilities and other amenities for residents of the district, perhaps restoration of anchorages for the coastal steamers that used to ply the waters between New York and Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Washington and Richmond, on their delightful little overnight summer ocean voyages. Almost nobody wants something incoherent or too crassly commercial that will be an embarrassment to posterity. Everybody hopes that the memorial, whatever it is, can be experienced as art.Art is not tamely dutiful.…It is never timely in the slogging way that newspaper reports and headlines are, or public opinion polls. At its best, art is timeless, communicating with generations of viewers.
But art is not tamely dutiful. It is subverted when it is pressured into shouldering too many meanings, however noble. It is never timely in the slogging way that newspaper reports and headlines are, or public opinion polls. At its best, art is timeless, communicating with generations of viewers. It works this magic by paring itself down to an emotional essence. To discern and express such an essence, and to appreciate it too, often requires perspective developed after a lapse of time. That is no disgrace. Some important things cannot be rushed.
Ground Zero will probably require two memorials: an interim design, followed in the fullness of time by a permanent memorial. One way to deal with a quandary is to get tired or bored with it and let it slide. Not a good policy, if for no other reason than neglected quandaries can backtrack and torment the slothful.
A much better policy is to fall back on truth. As of now, the truth about Ground Zero is still simple: It is a very significant site, but agreement is lacking on what its significance is and how to express it.
Professor Sorkin, you may be surprised at how seriously I take your solution, arrived at so swiftly, as an interim solution. I think the version I saw must have been from the Protetch Gallery exhibition, but I’m not sure where it was shown or published.*9 For those who have not seen it, the design is a large circular earth berm, a literal zero, occupying the whole Ground Zero site. I admire it because it is bold, handsome, unfussy and dignified, because it tells the truth as of now, and because it does not foreclose consideration of most other permanent possibilities.
The berm and its generous circumference resonate with the distant past, specifically with the beautiful circular forts the Irish built from small slabs of stone piled up as walls without mortar. The example in Donegal I’m thinking of may have been the seat of an Iron Age Celtic king, according to a tourist leaflet picked up miles away. No interpretive material or other clutter is necessary at this site. It speaks for itself, unforgettably, telling of the timeless human longing for security, and the equally timeless human impulse to venture daring peaks and make sorties into the great world.
In any case, an interim solution is necessary because the site, it seems, will not be ready for a permanent memorial for some fifteen to twenty years of repair and reconstruction work at the site and in its close vicinity. With or without an allowance for lapse of time to grant perspective, an interim solution should not look or be makeshift or banal. Its design quality will surely influence quality of the permanent solution.
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BELATEDLY, I COME TO Lewis Mumford.*10 My belatedness is not meant ungraciously. It is splendid that the State University of New York is memorializing Mr. Mumford with annual lectures on subjects he cared about. I’m grateful and honored to have been chosen to deliver the first talk in the series.
Mr. Mumford would have disagreed with much I have said tonight. The one thing he might applaud is my expectation of a problematic future for office skyscrapers.
He did not like skyscrapers. He did not like big cities either. He did not value them for having peculiar economic traits and unique social characteristics. He would have liked big cities to be replaced by collections of carefully planned, suburban-like towns, misnamed Garden Cities. He placed his hopes for city decentralization in the powers of centralized regional planning such as were exercised by New York’s Regional Plan Association. Marshall McLuhan put his finger on one among many failures of this vision when he commented years later that “you can’t decentralize centrally.”
But Mr. Mumford was a disciple of the British planner, Sir Patrick Geddes.*11 Sir Patrick correctly surmised that far-flung electricity grids were to be expected later in the twentieth century. He thought that they would make possible such unprecedented freedom of industrial location that factories, and hence settlements for workers and their families, could be placed wherever rational human beings such as planners judged them to be desirable. Neither Mr. Mumford nor other planners sharing this world view saw any reason why “obsolete” big cities should continue to encumber the earth. This supposition was highly popular in the 1930s among people with allegiance to all shades of political opinion, from conservative right to radical left.
Nevertheless, Mr. Mumford recoiled against the ruthlessness with which limited-access expressways were being bashed through cities, suburbs and countrysides, largely by Robert Moses in the New York area, in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Mumford had been among the very first Americans to scent th
e threat to all community values by what he called “the insolent chariots.” He stimulated many citizens to wonder, for the first time, whether the kind of transportation they were getting really did constitute progress. He became surprisingly protective of cities, perhaps surprising even himself. He sent an effective statement to the Board of Estimate, the New York City governing body at the time, urging its members not to approve the state-planned and federally financed Manhattan Expressway, which would have bisected the city a little north of Canal Street to make a slightly faster route between Brooklyn and New Jersey. The members of the Board of Estimate—the Mayor, Comptroller, and borough presidents—followed Mr. Mumford’s advice. Their vote, and hence his statement, helped delay the expressway another year, an interval during which public understanding grew of the proposal’s destructive consequences for the city at large. That growing realization eventually defeated the scheme for good.*12
Those of us who prefer Chinatown, Little Italy and Soho to a wide expressway with its apparatus of ramps, parking lots and uplifting garnishes of chain-link-fenced pasture bits owe Mr. Mumford’s memory a large debt of gratitude. I sometimes wonder what he would think of Soho. I suspect he would think it decadent. But he generously helped to give it a chance to live and develop in an unpredictable, open-ended New York way.
I first met Mr. Mumford in 1956 at an academic symposium. He was friendly, kind, and encouraging to me then and on the few occasions when we encountered each other during the following five years. But upon publication of my first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, he was outraged by it and by me.*13 His Lower Manhattan Expressway statement about a year later briefly made us allies, but with that exception his bitterness against me lasted until his death, as far as I know.
I didn’t take his disappointment with me personally. We are all much molded by our dates of birth, and even more by the extra decades we may be granted at the other end of our life span. Mr. Mumford, as a kind paternalist, was a man of his time. He was half a generation older than I, and he did not get the extra decades later, during which he might have become used to the fact that women didn’t necessarily aspire to being patronized. He seemed to think of women as a sort of ladies’ auxiliary of the human race. This attitude is evident in his planning philosophy and the kinds of projects he approved of. The point is that I was a person of my time, and our times and minds were different.Our adaptability seems to be magnificent when we keep our wits about us.
He was correct that he and I didn’t think alike, especially about cities. Another way we differed is that I don’t want disciples. My knowledge and talents are much too skimpy. The very last thing I would want is to inadvertently limit other people with minds of their own. As we negotiate the difficult transition out of the dead, but not buried, Plantation Age, we need unlimited independent thinkers with unlimited skepticism and curiosity.
I haven’t touched tonight on values and influences from the past that it is necessary to retain in the present and carry into the future. While I am serious about not wanting disciples, I hope that my most recent book, Dark Age Ahead, which went on sale in bookstores yesterday, will help stir up some of the independent thinking urgently needed as a wake-up call for America. Some of my new book’s content overlaps with what I’ve said tonight, but mostly it goes into other subjects. I’ve been giving you here a partial preview of a future book I hope to write, under the optimistic assumption that we have not reached a point of no return in loss and corruption of our culture.*14 Not yet. But we could.
I appreciate your patience, Professor Sorkin and ladies and gentlemen, as I struggle, like all of us, to find sane footing in the pervading insanity and insecurity of our shaky present tense.
One reason for taking comfort from history is to learn that transitions from one epoch to another are always difficult at best. Our culture is not more stupid or ugly than others, and our adaptability seems to be magnificent when we keep our wits about us.
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*1 Michael Sorkin (1948– ) is an American architect and urbanist. His own interpretations of Jacobs’s work can be found in Twenty Minutes in Manhattan and the foreword to What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs.
*2 Akron, known as the “rubber city” because it was home to Firestone and other automobile tire manufacturing concerns, boomed in the first half of the twentieth century, but like many other industrial cities dependent on one industry fell on hard times in the postwar era.
*3 It’s likely that Jacobs is here referencing the “steam circus” that the British inventor and steam rail pioneer Richard Trevithick (1771–1833) exhibited for a few weeks in London in the summer of 1808. A small engine called “Catch Me Who Can” went around a circular track in Bloomsbury to the delight of spectators. Whether it was the first “financially successful” rail operation or not, it was not the first railroad. Earlier horse-drawn and steam railroads had been used in mining and other industrial operations.
*4 Perhaps to emphasize hope rather than doom and gloom or perhaps by mistake, Jacobs has reversed Dickens’s own phrasing, mirroring the title of The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
*5 One of the first management consultants, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) was a mechanical engineer best known for the system of workplace efficiency he designed for the new assembly line factories of the early twentieth century. Among other things, “scientific management” sought to control the way workers worked, as Jacobs suggests, by breaking down the process of a given task into individual, repeatable units of movement and time. He thought his time and motion studies would encourage workers to be more efficient, but “Taylorism” became a feared system for many workers and unions, because employers used it as a speed-up technique to extract more work from employees, regiment their workday, restrict their autonomy, and reduce their control over their own work process.
*6 Jacobs recounts this shift from mass production to “differentiated production” more fully in the final chapter of The Economy of Cities, “Some Patterns of Future Development,” from which the title of this section takes its name. In unused notes for the book, she describes this new approach to work as “the Age of Differentiated Production,” perhaps foreshadowing the ideas she presents here.
*7 For more on the similarities between ecosystems and cities, see the foreword to the Modern Library edition of Death and Life in this volume, as well as The Nature of Economies.
*8 For Jacobs’s critique of the Malthusian fear of overpopulation, see “The Real Problem of Cities” in this volume.
*9 Michael Sorkin’s proposed memorial was exhibited in the show “New World Trade Center: Design Proposals” at the Max Protetch Gallery in New York. All the designs in the show were later published as a book, A New World Trade Center: Design Proposals from Leading Architects Worldwide (New York: HarperDesign, 2002) and acquired by the Library of Congress.
*10 As the architectural critic for The New Yorker for over three decades and the author of numerous books, Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) was America’s foremost public writer on cities and city life in the first half of the twentieth century—a title Jacobs arguably inherited. In fact, as Peter L. Laurence relates in his book Becoming Jane Jacobs, when the Rockefeller Foundation provided funding for Jacobs to write Death and Life, it was through the foundation’s urban design research initiative, which as its administrator put it, sought to answer the question of “where there were to be found other Lewis Mumfords” (p. 246).
*11 Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) was a Scottish city planner. He pioneered the regional planning movement whose latterday proponents Jacobs criticized harshly in Death and Life.
*12 It was Jacobs who asked Mumford to write his letter to the Board of Estimate, even after The New Yorker published his scathing review of Death and Life, described below.
*13 Mumford wrote a critical thirty-page review of Death and Life for The New Yorker. The title of the article, “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies,” captures the veile
d condescension of his critique, which concluded by comparing her piecemeal approach to reviving the city to giving a cancer patient “a homemade poultice,” when of course, it’s implied, he needs surgery.
*14 The future book, to be titled “A Short Biography of the Human Race,” would have traced the trajectory of humanity from its “infancy,” some two hundred thousand years ago, to our forthcoming maturity in the Age of Human Capital. The final chapter of Dark Age Ahead, “Dark Age Patterns,” outlines a similar hypothesis of a postagrarian age, but it relies more heavily on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Karen Armstrong’s Islam and omits elements of this speech, like the specific tenets of the Plantation Age and the history of agriculture and industry.
TO NEW YORK AND TORONTO,
TWO GREAT NORTH AMERICAN CITIES
Acknowledgments
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Thank you first of all to the estate of Jane Jacobs, and particularly Jim Jacobs, for his enthusiasm, generosity, memory, and sharp mind.
Thanks to Max Allen, Peter Laurence, and Robert Kanigel for their indispensable research on Jane Jacobs, without which this volume would be far poorer, and for their generosity with their time. Thanks also to the staff of the New York Public Library; to Shelley Barber and Andrew Isidoro of Boston College’s Burns Library, where the Jane Jacobs Papers live; and to Ben Tyler at Brown University’s Rockefeller Library.