Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  East Harlem had been Kirk’s turf since 1949, before most of the projects had gone up, his memory speckled with visions of kite fights waged from tenement roofs. Stickball games between boys from rival blocks. Rows of three- and four-story row houses, magnificent in their gingerbread detailing, their wide stoops climbing toward great windowed frontages. Produce markets, their wares sheltered by awnings that dropped over the sidewalk. Tenement doors left open to catch the breeze on sweltering summer afternoons. And everywhere, on every street—front parlor to their crowded apartments—people. People parading down wide sidewalks. Tending clothes laid out to dry across steel-slatted fire escapes. Stepping out onto the sidewalk from their stores, looking up to the sky to check the day’s weather.

  “I can’t imagine how he took the time” to show her the neighborhood, Jane would recall, “but he did. Whenever I got a few hours that I could take off from work I would call him up and he would walk me around…He didn’t seem to have any plan about what he was showing me. It all seemed very aimless, in a way. We would just walk.”

  People who knew Bill Kirk remembered him for his wide web of friends, acquaintances, connections. “Everybody knew him,” recalls Eugene Sklar, his successor at Union Settlement. “And he knew everybody…He was interested in all the local people, in the storekeepers, in what was doing on the street.” The overtly religious side of him surfaced rarely—though Sklar did remember the big, colorful sign beside Kirk’s desk at Union Settlement: LET US REASON TOGETHER. He was warm, with a ready smile, “a great listener…People admired him, and they trusted him.”

  He was a public character. “We would stop every little while or somebody would stop him,” Jane would tell of their times together. “I would eavesdrop on the conversation. We would stop in at stores,” at housing projects, a walk-up. Kirk would point out local landmarks. He knew everybody. But while it was all interesting, she didn’t at first see what he was getting at, if he was getting at anything at all. “It was like a big basket of dry leaves being thrown up into the air. What would you make out of that?” And yet, there was something, and she began to see it: behind the seeming confusion of the East Harlem streets, a kind of order ran through them, an endlessly intricate one. There, right beside the social pathologies that were all too evident, behind the rattle of the trucks, the young toughs, the jarring clash of old tenements and new projects, were people of every color and shade, every species of vibrancy and decay, together. Jane drank it all in.

  You or me? Would we have drunk it all in? Might seeing East Harlem with Kirk have left us cold? Might it have failed to tug at our imaginations in the way it did at Jane’s? Or maybe it would have seemed mildly interesting, but only that—a briefly opened window on a world normally closed to us, a peek at urban life’s myriad variety, soon forgotten. Not Jane, though: somehow, she was susceptible to East Harlem’s charms, qualities, peculiarities, and how together they made a living place.

  When, years later, she was asked how she’d first gotten interested in cities, she said it all went back to the fourth grade in Scranton. It was a Friday, she remembered. A classmate, Elizabeth, was being told by the school librarian that since she’d returned her books late she owed a one-penny fee. Oh, said Elizabeth, “I’ll bring it in when the bird’s eye blows.” And unaccountably, the librarian accepted this answer with perfect equanimity, as a full and satisfactory explanation—accepted it, as Jane told it, “with dignity.” The Bird’s Eye, Jane’s mother explained to her later, was a nearby coal mine. If, come six in the morning, you heard the whistle blow, it meant there was work for you at the mine, money coming in. Elizabeth knew that. The school librarian knew it. Jane’s mother knew it. And now Jane knew it as well—a network of knowledge reinforced with one more tendril of connection. The incident made her think about how, all over Scranton, people made their livings. Her father treated sick people. Elizabeth’s father went down into the mine. Everybody working. Abruptly, “the whole city seemed so much more interesting to me. It became a web,” tied together, with odd details, intricate links, patterns.

  Jane’s parents—one from a small town, the other from a farm, but who’d met and courted in Philadelphia—were “delighted to live in the city,” she’d say. “They thought cities were far superior places to live, and they told us why.” In New York, it had taken Jane no more than climbing up from the subway at Sheridan Square and a stroll through the surrounding streets to sell her on Greenwich Village. The fur district had captivated her. So had the other commercial areas she’d written about for Vogue. Now, beside Bill Kirk, she began to see beyond where even her lively curiosity had taken her, to an East Harlem that was much more than it first appeared, something interwoven, connected, whole.

  Jane liked Kirk a lot. But not, says her son Jim, who first met him as a child, because of anything so fuzzy and indeterminate as his “personality.” It was, rather, out of respect for how he saw and made sense of the world. He saw East Harlem in its entirety, as all it was, “not as something he had to fix. He would see in it its glories, its values, where most people just saw a mess.” The piling up of detail and incident, the stream of insight, the snippets of conversation, that Jane absorbed at Kirk’s elbow opened her eyes. “He was showing me a different way of looking at the city, the social aspect,” the human ties that didn’t show up in architectural drawings.

  It was probably late in 1955 or early the next year that Jane learned of a study in the works, probably at Kirk’s behest, conducted by a group called the East Harlem Small Business Survey and Planning Committee. The report it would later issue needed just three typed pages to hint at the havoc the projects inflicted on the neighborhood. Squeezed into the bottom of its first page was a crude, hand-drawn map of Franklin Houses, a 1,200-apartment project occupying five blocks between First and Third Avenues that had wiped out 169 businesses. Then, with page two, came an extraordinary list, an exercise in data collection and tabulation sure to make your eyes glaze over—that is, until you got it and allowed yourself to imagine what 169 businesses that weren’t there meant, in their absence, to residents of Franklin Houses and adjacent blocks.

  Across the top of the page ranged five columns, for the five blocks of Manhattan street grid that were the old neighborhood, labeled I through V. Running down the page were forty-four classes of business, from appliances and baby carriage storage to shoe stores, toys, and travel agencies. It was a Tabulation of the Lost: not long before, the streets circumscribing block I were home to three fruit stands; now there were none. There’d been three cleaners in block II, two meat markets in block III, five grocers in block IV, three barbers, a beauty parlor, and a radio-and-TV-repair shop in block V, and fourteen candy stores in the project area as a whole, among scores of others. All were gone. So were thirteen hole-in-the-wall manufacturers, two union offices, three churches, one political club, and eight social clubs.

  All told, across East Harlem, the projects had eliminated more than fifteen hundred retail stores, with virtually none built in their place. Pity the poor capitalists? Maybe. But if you took your eyes off their troubles and looked instead at the neighborhood they served, you’d see not only entrepreneurial livelihoods lost, but social glue weakened—a community, as Jane would put it, replaced by a dormitory.

  —

  In early 1956, José Luis Sert, a Catalan architect who’d immigrated to the United States in 1939 and now was dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, proposed an urban design conference to be held at the university that April. Urban design? Sert saw it as a “design discipline” straddling the work of architect, landscape architect, and city planner, broader than each alone. As Andrés Duany, a chief proponent of the late twentieth century’s New Urbanism movement, would put it, Sert’s conference at Harvard could be seen as “a group of middle-aged gentlemen gathered in an attempt to mitigate the consequences of their youthful indiscretions”—as purveyors of city-bashing modernism. “Harvard must lead the correction,” Sert had resolved.

&n
bsp; Among distinguished figures from the planning, architectural, and design communities invited to the conference was the editor of Architectural Forum. On January 21, 1956, Doug Haskell wrote Sert that he would be delighted to attend.

  But about two months later, when Sert’s lieutenant, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, phoned, he told her “a conflict had come up.” The conflict was that “this is the one time I can get to Europe” that year. So he couldn’t attend after all, “dearly as I would love to.” Who, then, in his place? “If another woman [that is, other than Tyrwhitt, herself an accomplished architect] would not be out of place, might I suggest that a substitute be Mrs. Robert Jacobs—Jane Jacobs on our masthead.” When it came to the urban redevelopment stories they were running in Forum, she was the most experienced.

  It’s not clear whether Haskell offered Jane’s name to Tyrwhitt after he’d spoken with Jane or before; at this point, the conference lay only three weeks ahead. What is clear is that Jane first said she wouldn’t do it.

  Wouldn’t do it because she was not going to stand up and speak in public—just wasn’t going to torture herself again. A few years before she’d given a public talk. She’d written it out, scarcely giving a thought to actually delivering it. But when the time came, she’d remember, “my knees trembled and my voice trembled and I was terrified and I couldn’t control this, and I just sort of ducked my head down and mumbled the speech from the paper and got through it.”

  Especially frightening was the way it had come over her out of the blue. She’d had no premonition, was heedless of any buried fears she might have had until the time came to actually do it. In print, Jane Jacobs was confident and authoritative. In person, in the right settings, among a few people, she voiced her views volubly, often was the dominant figure in the room. But give a talk publicly, in front of a roomful of people? This was sheer terror. She couldn’t do it, wouldn’t do it. After the earlier fiasco, “I said to myself I will never do this again…I wouldn’t put myself through this for anything.”

  Yet now Forum’s managing editor was on the phone with her to say that’s just what she had to do. Something about land banking for urban renewal—that was supposed to be her topic.

  “I said no.”

  “Well,” said the managing editor, “you have to. He is depending on you.” “He” was Doug Haskell.

  She said nothing. The phone must have seemed to have gone dead.

  “Well, I’ll do it,” she said at last, “but it will be a subject of my own choosing.” Land banking? No, no. “I’ll talk about something that interests me.”

  CHAPTER 10

  TEN MINUTES AT HARVARD

  JANE HAD ALREADY BEGUN to voice some of her contrarian ideas at Forum. Around the kitchen table at Hudson Street, Bob and some of their friends had heard her speak of them, too. But the Harvard conference would be different. This was public, and big. Among the two hundred attending would be many of the most notable figures in the worlds of architecture, planning, and design.

  First of all, there was José Luis Sert, who had brought them to Cambridge in the first place. Sert, from Barcelona, had in his youth worked for Le Corbusier himself. “City planning has developed as a new science,” he’d assert in his welcome speech. Planners now needed to think about the very “structure of the city, its process of growth and decay.”

  There was Ed Bacon from Philadelphia, whom Jane would call “the grand poobah” of American planning. And the Austrian American architect Richard Neutra, celebrated for the clean, crisp modernism of his California homes. And Lloyd Rodwin from MIT; David Lawrence, mayor of Pittsburgh; Charles Abrams, creator of the New York City Housing Authority; the Hungarian-born design theorist György Kepes; Hideo Sasaki, pioneering landscape architect. And, of course, Lewis Mumford, down briefly from his perch at The New Yorker, the grand eminence of American architectural criticism, author of more than a dozen books on art, architecture, technology, and culture—aloof, respected, proud. Virtually all of them were men—degreed and credentialed, with long résumés attesting to their distinguished careers, men who had designed important buildings, changed the face of cities. Jane needed no cheat sheet for those she’d meet at Harvard; at least by name and reputation, she already knew many of them.

  Jane, career woman, at Architectural Forum, ca. 1960 Credit 12

  For months now, in the wake of her visits to Philadelphia and East Harlem, Jane had been troubled by the great gulf between how things were supposed to work in the new modernist city and how they really did. She needed to say something about it; that intellectual tickle, that writerly need to express, had grown. She had two, maybe three weeks to prepare her talk. As if composing any ordinary article, she wrote it out first. Not that she would simply read it out loud; that would be deadly. On the other hand, notes or flash cards might leave too much room for a podium meltdown once she stepped up to speak. So she memorized her talk, all fifteen hundred words. Bob made her try it out on him first.

  First my knees trembled and my voice trembled because I had to get through it. But he made me say it over and over to him so I could do it without that happening…So when the time came and I had to give the speech, I went into some kind of…I mesmerized myself. I have no memory of doing it. I just said it. I blanked out and said it without all this trembling and everything, and got away with it.

  She began with East Harlem, and how, in the rehousing of fifty thousand people in the projects, more than a thousand stores had disappeared from the neighborhood. This was not just consumer goods and services made harder to come by; this was community. “A store,” she said memorably, “is also a storekeeper. One supermarket can replace thirty neighborhood delicatessens, fruit stands, groceries and butchers…But it cannot replace thirty storekeepers or even one.”

  Candy stores, diners, and bars served as social centers. When sometimes they failed, social clubs, political clubs, and churches took over their empty storefronts. And if these, too, were gone? It was easy to joke about the poor ward heeler who’d lost his organization. But, Jane cautioned, “this is not really hilarious.” She continued,

  If you are a nobody, and you don’t know anybody who isn’t a nobody, the only way you can make yourself heard in a large city is through certain well-defined channels. These channels all begin in holes in the wall. They start in Mike’s barbershop or the hole-in-the-wall office of a man called Judge, and they go on to the Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club where Councilman Favini holds court, and now you are started on up.

  How all this worked couldn’t be formalized. But by the whole weight of her argument, it needed the shabby, low-rent, leftover spaces of poor city neighborhoods. It didn’t work so much in new buildings, in the secure, serenely ordered places of the world.

  Places like Stuyvesant Town.

  Jane had reason to know about Stuyvesant Town; her sister lived there. All through the late 1940s, 1950s, and beyond, the two of them, their husbands, and their children were in and out of each other’s homes, a half hour’s walk or a ride on the crosstown bus away, their families off together to museums, free concerts, the zoo. Betty and Jules Manson and their three children (aged three through eight in 1955) lived in one of a great eruption of new thirteen-story apartment buildings named after Peter Stuyvesant, the last mayor of New Amsterdam before it became New York City. The complex was built after the war to help remedy the housing shortage faced by returning GIs. Stuyvesant Town wasn’t a “project,” in that it wasn’t the work of federal housing agencies. It wasn’t built to serve the poor. But “project” it was in every other sense—vast, covering sixty-two acres, its three dozen redbrick towers all but identical, home to twenty thousand people.

  In 1942, from their perch six hundred feet above Madison Avenue in the headquarters of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, as Samuel Zipp tells the story in his masterful Manhattan Projects, the company’s money men looked south and saw the whole East Side below the East Twenties as, weirdly, “vacant.” That is, they saw crumbling tenements ripe
for investment, demolition, and reconstruction. Eventually, work crews rendered the whole eighteen-block Gashouse District, as the neighborhood was known, indistinguishable from European cities laid waste by war. But before they did, Met Life went through it, block by block, photographing streetscapes that would soon be gone.

  One corner of the site did look pretty bad. But some of the rest of the neighborhood, if not exactly bustling with life, could pass for prosperous, with four- and five-story tenements lining well-kept streets. There were theaters, two schools, numerous ornate churches. Lewis Mumford himself would write of the gasworks that gave the neighborhood its name, that the sight of its “tracery of iron, against an occasional clear lemon-green sky at sunrise” offered a memorably aesthetic moment. Journalists documenting the area’s death throes found, in Zipp’s words, “a living neighborhood…[whose] residents viewed the place with simple affection, despite poverty and a declining population…[It] was the setting for the great events of ordinary life and had become as precious to them as the people with whom they had shared their lives.”

  The Gashouse District was leveled. Stuyvesant Town rose in its place. By many measures it had to count as a success. Aimed squarely at the middle class, it boasted pretty landscaping, curving paths, relatively spacious rooms, and a careful tenant selection process—which for years excluded blacks and other minorities. In these ways, if not in every other, it mirrored the new suburbs going up around the same time. Betty Manson’s daughter, Jane’s niece Carol, would recall fondly how, from her bedroom window in apartment 10F of one of the buildings, she could look north to see the Empire State and Chrysler buildings. The window of her brother’s room looked south, across Fourteenth Street, to the older tenement neighborhood where they could watch people flying pigeons from the rooftops. Stuyvesant Town, she’d think, was as different as could be from Aunt Jane’s ramshackle Greenwich Village.