Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Now, though, it was Jane with whom Bob was abruptly and irredeemably smitten. After meeting her at the party, he asked her out for the following weekend. They wound up on the roof deck of the Sutton Hotel on East Fifty-fifth Street east of Second Avenue, eighteen stories above the East River. There Bob proposed to her.

  Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr., about the time he met Jane in 1944 Credit 5

  They’d known each other a week.

  “She said no,” Bob would recall, “but very nicely.”

  The following Wednesday, she called him at work. “Have you changed your mind?” she asked. He hadn’t.

  “Because I have.”

  The engagement ring he bestowed on her, the story goes, was fashioned from a hose clamp, or was a hose clamp, probably from the Grumman shops. But the engagement wasn’t long in any case, and would have been shorter still had Bob not felt Jane needed to meet his family; given the whirlwind courtship, they might have worried she was pregnant.

  How long had he known her? they asked.

  “Well,” he replied, smoothly enough, “I’ve known her sister for almost a year.” That, apparently, was good enough for Mom and Dad.

  The small wedding took place in Jane’s childhood home on Monroe Avenue in Scranton. The living room was decorated with lilacs and roses. Jane wore a white, street-length dress trimmed with turquoise and fuchsia.

  MRS. JOHN DECKER BUTZNER

  ANNOUNCES THE MARRIAGE OF HER DAUGHTER

  JANE

  TO

  MR. ROBERT HYDE JACOBS, JUNIOR

  ON SATURDAY, MAY THE TWENTY-SEVENTH

  NINETEEN HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR

  SCRANTON, PENNSYLVANIA

  It was two weeks before D day, two months since they’d met. Their honeymoon took them on a bicycle trip into northern Pennsylvania and southern New York State.

  “He was conventionally good-looking. She was conventionally not good-looking,” says John Jacobs’s wife, Katia, analyzing their marriage from a perch six decades into the future. “She was superior in brainpower and he admired that.” He was from “a good family, good-looking, and this was flattering to her.” That’s one way to look at it. Another is that, through the fever of their romance, they could discern the deep harmony of spirit that would serve them so well and for so long. It must have helped that by this time, Jane was almost twenty-eight, had lived in New York for a decade, and knew something of herself and the world. “Their easy intimacy was the envy and wonder of people who knew them,” one admiring obituary of Bob Jacobs asserted; and it seems to capture the largest truth of their marriage—the two of them, best friends, confidants, comfortable in one another, feeding ideas and fruitful insights to each other all their lives. Under other circumstances, Jane told her children later, she might have kept her maiden name. But given her weakness for alliteration, how could she not go through life as Jane Jacobs?

  Bob was an architect by training. After two years at Bard College, he’d gone on to the Columbia University School of Architecture, where the normal run of courses included design, descriptive geometry, construction methods, architectural history, and strength of materials. Awarded a bachelor of architecture degree in June 1942, he did not immediately work as an architect. It took him until well into his thirties before he found a secure professional niche.

  The war, first of all, directed Bob to serve its own stern strictures. At Grumman, he worked on a variety of design projects. In one, a test pilot’s urine-release gizmo had to be redesigned so that bodily waste flowed out of the plane instead of back into the cockpit. Another was an auxiliary fuel tank. The prototype was supposed to be made of sheet metal but, unaccountably, the drawings went to the foundry, where they were used to make the heavy wooden pattern needed for metal casting. Oops. When they discovered the mistake, Bob was able to take the useless pattern home, where it became a doorstop.

  After the war, Bob taught art appreciation at New York’s City College. In an article he wrote for College Art Journal, he described an approach aimed at overcoming the slavish deference to word and symbol most students dragged into class with them. “We run the risk,” Bob wrote, “of letting verbalized symbols overwhelm, smother and even negate the direct data actually supplied by our senses.” His simple exercises—for example, using pairs of L-shaped cardboard as a collapsible frame around a scene—were designed to force students to simply see what lay before their eyes. They needed to push beyond “myths” linking, say, the color red to “blood, courage, war.” They needed “to use their eyes as a direct instrument to the brain.” In fact, this sounds like Jane in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Did she influence Bob? Or did Bob influence her?

  Bob would design many of the quirky clever features of their houses, from a kitchen that left the cook practically in the middle of the dinner conversation, to the public phone booth in their living room. He would be as much the community activist as she, in the Village and then later in Toronto. He was handy, a good draftsman and artist, a close student of human nature; he could meet people cold, his daughter remembers, make them feel special, learn from them. Friends would listen with interest as he declaimed on subjects close to him, including his work, but with perhaps greater interest when it was just him, alone; when Jane was around, says Katia Jacobs, he was apt to “slip back into the shadows.” Jane, by every account, was the queen bee, Bob comparatively subdued. “Bob was wonderful,” recalls Decker Butzner, son of Jane’s brother John, whose earliest memories of Bob and Jane go back to the 1950s. He knew about everything, could talk about anything, was easy and calm. “And he was never bothered playing second fiddle to Jane.”

  Which, of course, he did.

  —

  To celebrate the Allied invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia ordered the city’s lights back on after years of wartime blackout. New Yorkers in tenements and brownstones trooped up to their rooftops to watch the spectacle. “Without warning, the entire skyline of New York erupted into glorious light,” remembered the writer Pete Hamill, then a nine-year-old Brooklyn boy: “Dazzling, glittering, throbbing in triumph. And the crowds on the rooftops roared. They were roaring on roofs all over Brooklyn, on streets, on bridges, the whole city roaring for light.”

  With the race of Allied armies across Europe and the success of American arms in the Pacific, the war was drawing to a close. Near the end, Jane at one point had a dozen people reporting to her. Of course, some of them weren’t very good and she wound up staying late trying to clean up their work. “They were so fast!” she would say. But “it took me so long to rewrite what they’d written.” She tried farming some of them out to other departments, until she was down to just herself and one particularly adept researcher. She was a boss now, but apparently not a very good one. Says son Jim: “She was not a leader, not an organizer, not a manager.”

  But Jane did not have to endure this role for long. Soon, no one at OWI had much to do, since there wasn’t much of a war left. People would show up late for work, gather together for the rest of the day discussing the postwar world ahead—“the PWW,” they called it—talking hopes, dreams, and job prospects, thinking about the ad agency they’d start or the novel they’d write.

  One day, probably in late 1945, the Washington Place apartment where Jane and Bob first met was the scene for another party, this one with many of the Butzner clan on hand. Jane’s younger brother Jim and his wife, Kay, high school sweethearts who’d married in 1942, were there. So was John, newly demobilized after three and a half years with the army meteorological service in Alaska. And so were some of the Grumman people Bob and Betty liked to bring home. One of them was a tall, thin, stylish young Barnard College graduate from New York’s Staten Island. She had enrolled in a graduate fine arts program at Yale, but the war had derailed that plan, bringing her to Grumman instead, where she worked as a draftsman. Her name was Viola Peterson but everyone called her Pete. Betty liked her. Jane liked her. Bob liked her. Everything they saw in
Pete convinced them she was just right for John. Recalled Jane, “We wanted her in the family.”

  The two of them, John and Pete, had actually met at an earlier party but found little chance to talk. Well, then, how to promote a budding romance that hadn’t budded? It was Bob who hatched the strategy. Uncle Billy Butzner’s daughter Elizabeth was up from Virginia, visiting; of course they’d have to commemorate the occasion in a photo. So the whole party, all those Butzners, marched up to the roof, there to be artfully arranged for the camera: In front was Jane, in slacks and jacket, sitting on the roof, Bob squatting beside her. In the back, Elizabeth from Virginia; brother Jim, towering over everyone, with wife, Kay, in a pretty print dress; Betty in the center, looking regal; John in uniform, smoking a cigarette; and Pete, a great sweep of dark hair lofted behind her head, beside him. No hint of the hardships of war, everyone well dressed and groomed, looking great, lined up for the camera, snap. The scene recorded for posterity…

  Clockwise, starting from Bob Jacobs crouched in the front row: Jane; Kay Butzner, brother Jim’s wife; Jane’s cousin Elizabeth Butzner, daughter of her uncle Billy; brother Jim; sister Betty; brother John; Viola (“Pete”) Peterson, John’s future wife. This was taken on the roof of the building where Jane and Betty were living at the end of World War II. Credit 6

  And now Bob’s scheme swung into action. He guided John and Pete to the parapet by the side of the roof and started pointing out New York landmarks. But behind his back he was making hand signals to Jane and the others, shooing them off the roof. “And so we all beat it,” Jane recalled. Bob got the couple fixed on some landmark, then quietly scooted away, too, locking the door to the roof behind him. Pete and John were stuck there, alone together, left to figure out how to get back down.

  John urged Pete down the fire escape first; as a woman, she’d be less threatening to anyone seeing them swing gigantically into view at their window. Finally they found someone willing to buy into their story, open his window, and let them back inside. By this time, of course, they were fast friends, victims together of Bob’s devilish ruse, intrepid adventurers.

  On May 25, 1945, three months before the end of the war, they were married. Recalled Jane, “It all worked just the way Bob said it would.”

  —

  In August, atomic bombs incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In September, Japan surrendered. Soldiers, sailors, and airmen began streaming home. The great belligerent apparatus of man, woman, and machine built to defeat Germany and Japan began to break up. Soon, paperwork progressing through the war-bloated federal bureaucracy was informing hundreds of thousands of government employees that they were out of a job. Jane was among them.

  Like many a writer out of work before and since, Jane became a freelancer. The word sometimes just means a writer between jobs, or a wannabe who’ll never make a nickel from writing. But it can also mean just what it sounds like: an independent writer for hire, paid by the article, essay, or book. It could be scary, weathering rejection, your income dependent on the vagaries of editors and the uncertain depths of your own wit, skill, and diligence. On the other hand, you were apt to meet people you wouldn’t normally meet, go places—geographic, intellectual, and imagined—you might not normally go. One of Jane’s early assignments took her to the South Pacific, if only in her head.

  Even before Pearl Harbor, the Australian navy had put together a network of missionaries, planters, miners, and government workers that, all through the Pacific war, surrounded by Japanese army and naval units, funneled information on their movements to the Allies. Its head was Eric A. Feldt, an Australian naval officer, who wrote of their exploits in a book titled The Coast Watchers: “It is a story of damp, dimly lighted jungle camps, of hidden treetop lookouts; of silent submarines, landing a few intrepid men on hostile beaches, in the dead of night; of American airmen mysteriously rescued from enemy-held islands, surrounded by enemy-dominated seas.”

  That’s from the first page of Feldt’s book, but it’s not certain he wrote this, or any other particular line. For in 1945, Jane was asked by Feldt’s publisher, Oxford University Press, to take what she’d call “a huge, chaotic mass of data” and shape it into a book. “He was not,” Jane would write of Feldt later, “a professional writer.” She ought to know, because by now she was one. It was why she had landed this job, and why she’d have no trouble landing others.

  The jobs Jane took on all through 1946 could scarcely have been more varied. She wrote press releases for a public relations firm about leather footwear. She wrote about Christmas customs. She edited a book of puzzles. She edited a textbook on powder metallurgy, a gig likely the product of her Iron Age contacts.

  Jane wrote one article about the coastal islands of New England, Virginia, and North Carolina. “Some look like neatly cut Christmas cookies. Some are like drop cakes that spattered too much, and some are old-fashioned golden caramel sticks. They are dotted all along our Atlantic coast—the green and brown islands which are the fringes of a continent,” like Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay or Ocracoke off North Carolina. The article was for Harper’s Bazaar, a fashion magazine; it almost had to be charming, and it was. But it was substantive, too; she selected the islands to highlight, researched their history, stepped into the lives of their inhabitants.

  As was true all her life, she found herself drawn to invention, innovation, and ways of making a living: “For years,” she wrote of Tangier Island,

  the crabbers have been making their own chicken-wire crab traps after a simple but ingenious design. A few years ago, a man from the mainland turned up with the news that he was the son of the trap’s deceased inventor and was now asking an annual royalty of four dollars from each user. Each spring since, he has appeared and collected his fees. The crabbers see nothing remarkable in the fact that this homespun transaction takes place without benefit of agents, receipts, lawyers, or other mainland furbelows, and they cheerfully pay up every year. “It’s the best trap,” is their comment. “Good thing his father thought it up.”

  When Jane totted up her income at the end of nine months of freelancing, it averaged out to $88 a week—much more than she’d made at Iron Age or the OWI. Still, in October she applied for another federal job, as a writer for the magazine Amerika, published by the U.S. State Department for readers in the Soviet Union. Jane was a propagandist once more.

  —

  With the war over, so was its vast uniting impulse, the need to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. But now the world split in two all over again, this time across the fault lines between the Soviet Union and the U.S., East and West, Communism and capitalism. During the war, the United States had been allied, if uneasily, with the Soviets. But the postwar division of Germany into Soviet and Western spheres, the Soviet takeover of Poland, Hungary, Romania, and other Eastern European countries, the brandishing of nuclear weapons, rhetorical feints, jabs, and angry mutual recriminations, all left the world on edge—sometimes, as in Berlin in 1948, Hungary in 1956, and Cuba in 1962, with cold war threatening to boil over into hot.

  Amerika, the big, glossy publication for which Jane went to work late in 1946, and its dowdier counterpart, Soviet Life, embodied this geopolitical divide. Given the fractious relations between the two sides, it’s a wonder an agreement to publish the paired magazines ever came off. But it did, through a deal worked out between the U.S. ambassador Averell Harriman and his Soviet counterpart, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in 1944. The two countries maintained the arrangement, troubled but more or less intact, over the years Jane worked at Amerika. Certainly, both publications were peddling propaganda. But looked at through rose-colored-enough glasses, they were being a little more civilized about it, maybe making the world a little safer.

  Between Amerika’s offices in New York and Moscow, ideas for articles shuttled back and forth, some of them destined for print, some not: an article on summer leisure in America; one on Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist; one devoted to a city high school. (This last was
“a particularly fine job,” the assistant cultural officer at the U.S. embassy in Moscow wrote to New York in early 1948, “and a lot of credit is due Jane Jacobs,” its author.) There was a piece about a typical American small town. Others on the World Series, the American optical industry, the Kansas heartland, modern art. Jane suggested a piece on dictionaries, which shape-shifted into an idea for one on the American language. “We think it can be done without creating insurmountable translation problems,” wrote the Amerika editor Marion Sanders; “the idea is to convey some notion of the wealth and flexibility of our language.” Of course, words like “juke box,” “short-order cook,” and “swing band” were already causing trouble enough for the magazine’s Moscow-based translators.

  The logistics of putting out Amerika were formidable. It was written in one language for readers of another. Its two offices were halfway around the world from each other. Soviet censorship was always a concern. In June 1947, editor Sanders, a Wellesley graduate who’d studied also at the Columbia School of Journalism, “a dynamic, hell-for-leather New Yorker,” as one colleague remembered her, tried to help the U.S. embassy in Moscow understand just how the New York side worked. In a four-page memo she told the “life history” of a single article, about American cafeterias, by Jane Jacobs.

  Jane, one of three writers on staff, had submitted a written outline. At a Monday editorial meeting, she was told to go ahead with the idea. In a week she produced a manuscript, which was sent to the embassy in Moscow for review; a copy also went to a cafeteria manager, to catch any technical slip-ups. Jane had identified possible illustrations, and now she wrote captions for about two dozen of them. When translations of text and captions came back from Moscow, a Russian-language editor in the New York office went through them to pick out any infelicities of expression that had crept in. Soon the whole job was off to the typographer, and thence through the endless back-and-forth rigmarole the era’s pre-digital technology required.