Jacobs reviewed the history of Quebec from the British victory on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 through the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s; looked at the separation of Norway from Sweden in 1905, among other examples; described how cities influence the development of nation-states; and concluded that Quebec sovereignty would be a good thing. Otherwise, Montreal might eventually become a mere regional centre in the Toronto hinterland and Québécois culture and language be overwhelmed. “In sum,” she wrote, “Montreal cannot afford to behave like other Canadian regional cities without doing great damage to the economic well-being of the Québécois. It must instead become a creative economic centre in its own right . . . Yet there is probably no chance of this happening if Quebec remains a province.”
The label that irked her most was amateur — gifted, but an amateur nonetheless — because she had dared to write about planning in Death and Life without professional credentials. “I am a professional writer, I’m not an amateur writer,” she insisted in an interview with the Globe and Mail in 2000, pointing out that when she wrote about planning, she was making a living as a professional critic at Architectural Forum.
In reality, Jacobs was two personalities: the ferocious intellect who talked about issues and a gentle-natured woman interested in the lives of complete strangers. A friendly figure, she wandered the streets of her midtown Toronto neighbourhood, her magpie eyes peering out from behind the owlish glasses that rested on her apple cheeks. She shopped in local stores and appeared at citizen-organized meetings to present cogent opinions that countered bureaucratic bombast and wrong-headed platitudes. Her attire was casual rather than stylish. She usually wore sneakers and a denim jumper over a white long-sleeved turtleneck. Over the years her straight hair, cut in a chin-length bob with bangs, mutated from brunette to pewter to chalk.
Many thought her intimidating — and she was when confronting cant and artifice — but mostly she was unassuming and idiosyncratic. After Christmas, instead of discarding her tree, she would hang it from a hook in the ceiling of her porch, letting it dangle about an inch off the floor, where it danced and swayed like an evergreen dervish until summer finally had its way and turned it brown. Like everything else about Jacobs, it was transformed from commonplace to unique.
JANE BUTZNER WAS born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on May 14, 1916, the year before the Americans entered the First World War. She was one of four children of John Decker Butzner, a doctor, and Bess Mary Butzner (née Robison), a teacher and nurse. An independent, curious child and an avid reader, she took great advantage of the riches to be found in the local reference library, museum of natural history, and zoo. By the time she had completed high school, she was “thoroughly sick of attending school and eager to get a job.”
She worked as a reporter for the Scranton Tribune before moving to New York to live with her older sister in the early 1930s. Jobs were scarce during the Depression, and she scrambled to find short-term secretarial work. Between assignments she wrote four articles about working districts of the city that she sold to Vogue — her first real literary sale.
Her parents wanted her to go to university, so she went to the School of General Studies at Columbia; however, she was bored by the courses required for completing a degree. “I went for a couple of years to university because I wanted to learn, not because I wanted to sit in custodial care or wanted credentials,” she said later about her decision to quit university to embark on her own curriculum of reading, observing, wondering, thinking, and trying to assemble her thoughts into a coherent piece of writing.
To support herself, she worked in magazines and as a feature writer for the Office of War Information. She met her husband, Robert Hyde Jacobs (who was working at the same defence plant as her sister), when her sister invited him to a party in the apartment the two young women shared. “I walked in the door,” Bob Jacobs said later, “and there she was, in a beautiful, green woollen evening dress, and I fell in love. It took me a little longer to convince her.” Four months after they met in March 1944, they were married.
After peace came, she found a job at Architectural Forum, a journal that she read frequently because her husband was a subscriber. It never occurred to her to stay home and be a full-time wife and mother after her children, James Kedzie (April 1948), Edward (Ned) Drecker (June 1952), and Mary (Burgin) Hyde (January 1955), were born. Her female forebears had always worked in their communities, so “I grew up with the idea I could do anything,” she said later.
At the magazine she was assigned stories on urban life and structures and was stunned to discover that “city planning had nothing to do with how cities worked successfully in real life.” One of her readers was William H. Whyte, editor of Fortune magazine and author of The Organization Man, who hired her to write an article on cities. She concluded in her essay that “Designing a dream city is easy. Rebuilding a living one takes imagination.”
The Fortune article caught the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, which asked her if she had any other ideas about cities. She did, envisaging “writing a series of articles, which might be a book, of about ten chapters, mostly about city streets, and that it would take me a year.” The foundation offered her a grant in 1958 and she set to work on the manual Remington typewriter that she used for the rest of her life.
It took more than two more years and as many grants to complete The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a book that has never been out of print since it was first published in 1961. She was challenging not simply the mistakes she saw around her but the very idea that an urban utopia could be designed. Her argument was that cities begin at the pavement level and grow organically in a self-organizing mix of commerce and domesticity. Zoning by function — a prime example being the razing of neighbourhoods to build isolated public housing projects — deprived whole areas of the interactive human oxygen they needed to survive as dynamic entities.
Many urban planners and architectural writers were aghast, but the book found a receptive audience. Partly it was the writing, which was clear, concise, and jargon-free; partly it was the argument, which moved from the concrete — a city sidewalk — to the abstract; partly it was the fact that her book connected with a generation of young adults who were trying to make sense of the postwar world.
She was barely back at work from her book leave when the City of New York decided to appropriate her own neighbourhood for urban renewal — a case study of the “intellectual idiocies and ignorance of city workings that I had been writing about.” She protested along with her neighbours and was made chairman of the Committee to Save the West Village. The journalist and critic had been transformed into an activist.
About this time, opposition to the Vietnam War was coming to a boil on many American campuses. Jacobs joined a protest march on the Pentagon in 1967 and found herself smack up against a row of soldiers in gas masks. “They looked like some big horrible insect, the whole bunch of them together, not human beings at all. And I was also not only appalled at how they looked, but I was outraged that they should be marching on me, an American,” she said in an interview with the Boston Globe, explaining her decision to move to Toronto with her family in 1968.
Her husband, a hospital architect, found work with architect Eb Zeidler, a friend and colleague. The Jacobs family moved into a flat on Spadina Avenue — in the path of the proposed expressway — and then into a house on Albany Avenue, in the nearby Annex area. She was still unpacking when she found new foes to combat with the radical activism she had learned on the streets of New York City: developers who wanted to tear down historic properties to erect high-rises, and politicians who wanted to build expressways to bring cars from the suburbs into the downtown core.
She made a profound impression on reformist city politicians such as Mayor David Crombie and alderman John Sewell, who were opposed to the expressway. They had known her reputation as an activist and her writing before they met her in the flesh. In addit
ion to giving them a living, breathing, pragmatic model of an ethical thinker, she gave them and other activists who cared about the city in which they lived the confidence that their ideas mattered and that it was essential to act upon them.
She was not above civil disobedience. Besides her Spadina antics — lobbying, writing, marching — she helped save a historic inner-city neighbourhood. In 1973, developers had erected hoardings around a row of Victorian houses at the corner of Sherbourne and Dundas Streets and were about to demolish them. During a protest, Jacobs told Alderman Sewell to rip down the hoardings, because she knew that it was against the law to demolish a building unless there was a hoarding surrounding it. He said, “I can’t.” She said, “You must.” And it was done. That act of vandalism led to the city’s first non-profit housing project.
After Bob Jacobs died of lung cancer in 1996 — in a hospital he had helped design — she remained in their Annex house, continuing to write books and to respond to calls to engage in neighbourhood and city protests, including an unsuccessful struggle against the amalgamation of the City of Toronto with its outlying boroughs in 1998.
Her adopted city of Toronto honoured her in 1997 by sponsoring a conference titled “Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter,” bringing together a wide range of diverse thinkers who shared a proclivity for thinking outside the box. The conference spawned a book by the same name and the Jane Jacobs Prize, which offers a $5,000 annual stipend for three years to an “unsung hero” engaged in “activities that contribute to the city’s vitality.”
No matter how frail Jacobs became — she had a hip replacement in 2000 — many people thought of her as indestructible and remembered that her mother had lived past a hundred. But her mother had never smoked, a habit that Jacobs had enjoyed with furious intensity for decades before she finally butted out her cigarettes. Smoking she could give up; working was something else. Even in her late eighties she was under contract to write a short history of the human race and an anthology of her thoughts about economics.
Inevitably old age caught up with her and “her body wore out,” according to her son Ned Jacobs. In announcing her death at Toronto General Hospital on April 25, 2006, at age eighty-nine, her family said in a statement: “What’s important is not that she died but that she lived, and that her life’s work has greatly influenced the way we think. Please remember her by reading her books and implementing her ideas.” And if you don’t, her son warned, “there’s a Dark Age Ahead.”
Pierre Trudeau
Statesman
October 18, 1919 – September 28, 2000
AS ENIGMATIC AS he was complex, as combative as he was charismatic, Pierre Trudeau was the fifteenth prime minister of Canada. He championed bilingualism, multiculturalism, and national unity; he patriated our constitution and gave us the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which has defined modern Canada and become a model for the world.
Trudeau arrived in the House of Commons in 1965, as the junior member of the federalist trio led by Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier, whom Prime Minister Lester Pearson had recruited to bolster the Quebec wing of his caucus. A law professor and a neophyte politician who had worked briefly in the Privy Council Office more than a dozen years earlier, he was an intellectual who had studied at Harvard, the London School of Economics, and L’institut d’études politiques in Paris and then travelled the world, juxtaposing theory with the rough realities of life on the road. An athlete and an outdoorsman, he was given to testing himself on rugged canoe trips, punishing treks, and daredevil ski runs. A shy and introspective bachelor who lived with his widowed mother well into his forties, Trudeau was also a renowned ladies’ man who cut a mean figure on the dance floor. Abidingly Catholic, independently wealthy, a graduate of the elite Jesuit-run Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, he had flirted with militant ultra-nationalism as a student at the Université de Montréal, protested against conscription in the Second World War, and failed to enlist in the armed forces. Yet he grew out of his insular pro-nationalist phase, emerging as a civil and human rights activist who defied repressive Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis in Cité libre, the political magazine he co-founded in 1950.
In their book Trudeau Transformed, Max and Monique Nemni argue that they could have written several biographies of Trudeau, concentrating on him as an athlete, a scholar, an adventurer, a heretic, a believer, or a ladies’ man. None of these would have worked, they contend, because they would provide only slices of the man. His strength and his appeal came from the powerful and often odd contrasts among the myriad components of his character and upbringing. His many private sides and personal angles — above all his belief in individual liberty, social justice, and federalism — combined in unusual and unexpected ways to make him the most memorable Canadian politician of the twentieth century.
JOSEPH PHILIPPE PIERRE Yves Elliott Trudeau was born in Montreal on October 18, 1919, the middle child of Grace Elliot, an anglophone of Scottish descent, and Charles-Émile Trudeau, a rural Québécois lawyer-turned-entrepreneur. Growing up, Pierre moved from one language to another like a paddle slicing through the still waters of a northern lake (what other francophone politician of his day had the linguistic ammunition to sneer, “Zap, you’re frozen,” at a stunned Robert Stanfield to deride the Opposition leader’s campaign pledge to freeze wages and prices to combat stagflation in 1974?).
His father grew rich after selling his string of automobile service stations to Imperial Oil during the Depression for the then-staggering sum of more than a million dollars, but the family always lived modestly, even after they moved to Outremont, an affluent section of Montreal. “My father taught me order and discipline,” Trudeau once said, “and my mother taught me freedom and fantasy.”
After his father died suddenly of a heart attack in the spring of 1935, when Trudeau was fifteen, he grew even closer to his mother. He also grew more introspective and took up karate and boxing, developing the pugilistic skills and the stance of the solitary warrior that he would later use to his rhetorical advantage in debates and on the campaign trail. A team player he was not.
When he accepted Pearson’s invitation to run in the safe Liberal riding of Mount Royal in the 1965 federal election, Trudeau was forty-seven, a law professor at the Université de Montréal — the theory of the law had always appealed more to him than its practice — a critic of Pearson’s decision to allow American nuclear-armed Bomarc missiles to be deployed in Canada, and politically aligned with the social democratic aspirations of the New Democratic Party. Far too much of a pragmatist to settle for moral rather than electoral power, Trudeau decided that if he was going to enter politics, he wanted to run for the Liberals, a party with a likelihood of governing the country. After winning his seat, he served as parliamentary secretary to the prime minister and was appointed minister of justice a little more than a year later.
He excelled in the role. Late in December 1967, at the end of an exuberant, self-confident centennial year, he introduced two pivotal pieces of legislation to bring the antiquated divorce laws and the stringent Criminal Code in line with the behaviours and attitudes of a younger generation of Canadians, even if the changes contravened religious codes and mores. The omnibus amendments to the Criminal Code, which proposed legalizing contraception and decriminalizing homosexual acts between consenting adults, provided Trudeau with one of his most celebrated quotes — albeit lifted from an editorial in the Globe and Mail — that “the State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.”
Enshrining individual rights and personal freedom was one of his core beliefs and would become a hallmark of his political career and his legacy. He showcased another political and philosophical tenet — a strong federal government surmounting its constituent provinces and territories — at a televised federal-provincial conference on constitutional affairs in Ottawa in February 1968. Union Nationale leader Daniel Johnson had been elected premier of Quebec in 1966 after a campaign of “égalité ou ind
épendance,” and he brought that mandate and the idea of a new kind of federalism — based on the notion of two equal nations: Quebec and the rest of Canada — to the conference.
Trudeau eviscerated the argument coolly but with merciless logic, and humiliated the man on national television. “His tone ever more biting, his voice metallic, Trudeau responded to Johnson’s reference to him as the ‘député de Mont-Royal’ by describing the premier as the ‘député de Bagot’” (his provincial riding in the Eastern Townships of Quebec), as John English relates in Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. At a coffee break hastily called by Pearson to allow the tension to dissipate, Trudeau “curtly nodded at Johnson and muttered that the premier was seeking to destroy the federal government. Johnson sneered that Trudeau was acting like a candidate, not a federal minister.” Here was an early example of the lone combatant in action, yet another side of the dashing, eloquent bachelor who sported a rose in his lapel, wore a leather coat, and drove a silver Mercedes 300SL convertible.
A little more than a week later, Trudeau announced that he would be entering the leadership race to succeed Pearson as party leader and prime minister at the Liberal convention in April 1968. He had agonized over the decision to run and he didn’t win the contest easily — it took four ballots. But in the wider world, the one reached by television, he was already generating emotional crushes normally reserved for rock stars.
Working the Dead Beat Page 6