Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  In her Harvard talk in 1956, Jane emphasized the similarities, more than the differences, between Stuyvesant Town, a middle-income development east of First Avenue in Lower Manhattan, and George Washington Houses, a low-income public housing project in New York’s East Harlem. Credit 13 / Credit 14

  And, of course, it was as different as could be from East Harlem.

  Only Jane thought it wasn’t so different from East Harlem after all, which is what she wanted to tell her Harvard audience.

  To her, Stuyvesant Town seemed a creature of the same postwar planning impulse. Like East Harlem, it had no stores, virtually nothing but apartments. Like East Harlem, it was huge, occupying a great swath of real estate along the eastern edge of Manhattan, from First Avenue almost to the East River. As with the East Harlem projects the street grid had been torn up, new buildings plopped down into a great superblock. Butting up against Stuyvesant Town, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets now simply vanished at First Avenue. In numerous visits to her sister’s place, Jane had walked Stuyvesant Town’s lawn-lined paths and apartment hallways, and didn’t like what she saw.

  “We all knew of Jane’s dislike for Stuyvesant Town,” says Carol, who recalls a breath of tension between the sisters about it. “I did not for a long time understand her antipathy to the place, since it was certainly cleaner, and less smelly, and with fewer rats and insects, than the buildings south of us. And the toilets and bathtubs I thought had nice lines, and the windows were larger, and I liked the parquet floors.” Over the years Stuyvesant Town’s hesitant early tufts of foliage and shafts of green would grow into a lush springtime canopy. To many among her listeners at Harvard, Stuyvesant Town had no business being mentioned in the same breath as East Harlem. It was middle income, not poor. It was private, not public. Maybe it wasn’t up to the standards of the Upper East Side or Gramercy Park, but compared to the East Harlem projects, rooms were bigger, the level of finish and care higher. Certainly it was easy to list all the ways in which it and East Harlem differed.

  But Jane was drawing out what she saw as their similarities, which she saw as more telling. And she did so, oddly enough, through a kind of “figure-ground” reversal, by looking outside Stuyvesant Town to the streets around it: Take the elevator down from your tower apartment, step out along a broad curving walkway to Fourteenth Street, cross it, and you were in another country. Now it was four- and five-story walk-ups, fire escapes parading down their streetside faces, basement grates poking up onto the sidewalks, streets crowded with people, small stores of every description. A feast for the senses (if for some an assault on them). Jane pictured “an unplanned, chaotic, prosperous belt of stores, the camp followers around the Stuyvesant [Town] barracks.” And beyond, a yet more chaotic belt, of “the hand-to-mouth cooperative nursery schools, the ballet classes, the do-it-yourself workshops, the little exotic stores.” All this, “among the great charms of a city,” lay outside Stuyvesant Town.

  “Do you see what this means?” Jane asked her audience. Some of the most essential and characteristic elements of city life had been extirpated from Stuyvesant Town and from East Harlem alike, “because there is literally no place for them in the new scheme of things.”

  It was this “new scheme of things” that was Jane’s real subject. The architectural and planning notions of the postwar period wiped real neighborhoods clean away and supplanted them with places made uniform, inflexible, inhuman, and dull. This was the new scheme of things. It was “a ludicrous situation,” said Jane, “and it ought to give planners the shivers.”

  At one point, as she told the story, Union Settlement had sought a spot in an East Harlem project where they could meet easily with adult residents. Well, there was no such place, anywhere—no place to meet and gather except maybe the laundry room in the basement. Did the project’s architects realize that relegating the social and public realm to the bowels of the basement made for a “social poverty beyond anything the slums ever knew”?

  Jane wasn’t finished. She observed that some of the East Harlem projects were by now a decade old. Yet with enough time now elapsed to forge new social networks, residents still visited their old neighborhoods while few from outside came to visit them. Why? Because there was nothing for them there, nothing to do. Planners needed to learn from the stoops and sidewalks of the city’s livelier old parts. The open space of most urban redevelopment was a “giant bore,” whereas it “should be at least as vital as the slum sidewalk.”

  “We are greatly misled,” she concluded, “by talk about bringing the suburb into the city.” The city had its own, very different virtues, “and we will do it no service by trying to beat it into some inadequate imitation of the noncity.”

  —

  When she emerged from the near-hypnotic state, or whatever it was that had gotten her through it, Jane learned her talk had been “a big hit, because nobody had heard anybody saying these things before, apparently.” Lewis Mumford came up to her afterward, shook her hand, and “enthusiastically welcomed me,” as if to throw an arm around her and admit her to the club. “Into the foggy atmosphere of professional jargon” of the conference, he’d write later, Jane “blew like a fresh, offshore breeze to present a picture, dramatic but not distorted,” of the human cost of the projects. Her appearance had

  established her as a person to be reckoned with. Here was a new kind of “expert”…This able woman had used her eyes and, even more admirably, her heart to assay the human result of large-scale housing, and she was saying, in effect, that these toplofty barracks…were not fit for human habitation.

  In later years, other urban design conferences would be held at Harvard. But this was the first, the one they’d talk about later, the one where Jane Jacobs first stood up to speak. A moment before, she had been invisible; now she was a name. She was like the understudy for a Broadway show brought in at the last minute to sub for the real star. Doug Haskell they’d wanted; they got Jane Jacobs instead. And a lot of them never forgot it.

  The twenty-seven-year-old Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, a future Pritzker Prize winner then studying at the Harvard School of Design, would recall Jane’s “passionate plea” on behalf of endangered neighborhoods. But the passion didn’t come out as broad emotion or through commanding stage presence; then and later, Jane Jacobs was not a galvanizing speaker. Rather, it was what she said that stuck with people, the actual words, the ideas themselves; they conveyed the passion. “I had hypnotized myself,” she’d say in an interview later, “but I had apparently hypnotized them too.”

  This wasn’t artful sleight-of-hand, either. Jane had been observing and writing about cities almost since she first came to New York—first in the pages of Vogue, then in Amerika, and now, since 1952, in Forum; she was no Janie-come-lately amateur. She had something to say because she’d thought deeply about things she’d seen and read; and because she’d been around long enough that she had plenty of city life to think about—plenty of buildings, plenty of streetscapes, plenty of architects, maps and drawings, books and articles, artistic statements and aesthetic principles, plenty of neighborhood characters, city officials and developers, storekeepers, moms and dads. When she stepped before her audience at Harvard, her stew of ideas had long been simmering.

  A week after the conference, Doug Haskell heard from the architect Victor Gruen, whose work was the subject of one of Jane’s Forum articles and who had attended the conference. Jane was “wonderful,” he wrote.

  Everyone was using the expressions “human scale” and “warmth” but Jane was the only one who really talked about it, without ever using any of the big words. She was like a fresh wind in the airless room…Her simplicity and sincerity and her thoughtfulness swept everybody off his feet. There’s no doubt that she was the “star” of the show.

  At Harvard, Jane stood among the giants of the field; you couldn’t vault much higher into the urban design firmament than her audience there. It wasn’t that everything she’d said in those ten minutes had nev
er been said before. As Gruen intimated, modernist architecture and planning had begun to wear a little thin; intimacy of scale had become part of the conversation. Still, Jane made her mark. On the back of Gruen’s letter, Haskell penciled, “The wisest thing I have done in a long time was to turn over that assignment to her!”

  —

  That Jane was independent, even fearless, doesn’t mean she was immune to praise, that she didn’t care what others thought of her. Certainly the plaudits that came her way now would help extinguish any vestigial self-doubt about the worth of her ideas or her ability to express them. Preparing her talk and enjoying the response to it plainly marked a turning point for her. In a letter to Catherine Bauer, the public housing expert, Jane would write that her ideas had “been stewing around in me for the past two years or so,” taking care to add: “not before.” The letter was dated April 29, 1958—two years, to the month, since Harvard. High-profile honors like Nobel Prizes often go to those toward the end of their careers. But a second-tier honor, coming earlier, can serve its own, perhaps greater social purpose, reinforcing the recipient’s sense of worth, bolstering her ambitions, helping to propel her and her ideas into the world. Something like this had now happened to Jane.

  Her Harvard showing strengthened her hand at Forum, landing her higher-profile assignments, many of them now anointed with her byline. Jim remembers his mother coming home with the news, the significance of which, at age nine, escaped him. Jane explained that her name would now appear on the articles she wrote; she was, quite literally, no longer anonymous. It was good for Forum to be publishing the work of the woman who’d electrified Cambridge. And good for Jane, too, left freer to stretch her intellectual and editorial muscles.

  In September 1956, a substantial chunk of the magazine was devoted to the question “By 1976, What City Pattern?” Jane wrote the lead essay: “The last ten years have given us an unholy mess of land use, land coverage, congestion and ugliness. This is nothing to what the next twenty promise. Barring annihilation, deep depression, or a more tractable invention supplanting the automobile, we have no way to avert this crisis of growth.”

  In a March 1957 article, she surveyed the office boom in New York, which had seen sixty-four major office buildings go up since the war—Lever House, the Seagram Building, 430 Park Avenue. “What,” she asked, “has happened to those sensible-sounding postwar catchwords, ‘dispersal’ and ‘decentralization’? What has happened to the vision of the happy file clerks eating sandwiches on the grass far from the madding crowd?”

  In May, she revisited that classic urban form, the row house: “The big rediscovery is that a basic scheme dating from pedestrian days in Pompeii, and carriage days in Philadelphia, turns out to be an excellent answer to the automobile.”

  In August, she turned from streets and alleys to regions. The problems of metropolitan government would be solved “not by abstract logic or elegance of structure, but in a combination of approaches, by trial, error and immense experimentation in a context of expediency and conflicting interests. Whatever we arrive at, we shall feel our way there.”

  All this energetic voicing-of-views appeared within Jane’s longtime journalistic home. But Forum could not contain her forever. It was the littlest child in the Time-Life family. It had the smallest circulation. Bigger by far, with a broader reach and larger profile, was Fortune, Henry Luce’s oversized business magazine, launched in 1930. In the first week of January 1957, nine months after Jane’s Harvard talk, Doug Haskell received a brotherly memo from a Fortune editor, Holly Whyte, seeking help.

  William Hollingsworth Whyte, a Princeton graduate and Marine Corps officer who’d served in the Pacific, had made a splash the year before with one of those era-capturing popular books, The Organization Man, about corporate life in the new American suburbs. Now, at Fortune, he was turning his attention to the problems of the cities. He had in mind a whole series of articles to come out later that year. He was looking for ideas, and for writers to take them on.

  Jane was one of his finds. “I kept hearing about this Jane Jacobs,” he’d recall. “I went to see her and I was mightily impressed. I thought she was a real genius.”

  CHAPTER 11

  A PERSON WORTH TALKING TO

  LATER, IN 1992, thinking back to the article he commissioned her to write for Fortune that would bring her such attention and acclaim, Whyte remembered deciding that Jane was “just the person” to do it. Nonetheless, the article, “Downtown Is for People,” almost never happened at all.

  At first, as Whyte told it, “she demurred and told me she wasn’t up to it; she had never written anything longer than a few paragraphs.” His colleagues at Fortune “felt she should not be entrusted” with so important a piece. “She was a female; she was untried.” Why, she commuted to work on…a…bicycle. All in all, it seemed to them, Jane Jacobs was “a most inappropriate choice” and was actually taken off the story—which, to hear Whyte tell it, left her feeling relieved. But when a senior editor on the project fell ill, Jane was reinstated. And this time there was no stopping her. “She wrote and wrote and wrote, providing a first draft of 14,000 words with not a word, she believed, to be edited out. Our lamb had become a tigress.”

  Controversy lit up Jane’s piece, not just potentially but right then, right there, within Time Life. When her draft was passed around, Whyte heard right off from the publisher, C. D. Jackson, who was “aghast.” Just who, he demanded to know, was this “crazy dame” who, in the pages of Fortune, proposed to give “aid and comfort to critics of Lincoln Center?” That much-anticipated, gleaming new performing arts complex was all set to go up and transfigure the cultural life of the city’s West Side. Yet Jane was painting it as an example of all that was wrong with modern planning.

  A luncheon meeting was arranged. Jackson was there, along with a coterie of Fortune editors, and Jane. “The antagonists went at it,” recalled Whyte. Jackson—Mr. Charles Douglas Jackson, a fifty-five-year-old Princeton grad, veteran of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor to the CIA, expert in psychological warfare, speechwriter for President Eisenhower, trustee of the Metropolitan Opera and long-standing champion of Lincoln Center—questioned the accuracy of Jane’s reporting. Jane defended her essay with “a screed of facts and firsthand observations.” Whyte kept his head down; when it was over, Jane asked him why he hadn’t stuck up for her. “No need,” replied Whyte. “The poor man”—meaning Jackson—“thought he’d hit a buzz saw.”

  Now, there are discrepancies in Whyte’s account, which may be a little more “colorful,” and less accurate, than one might like. When he first encountered Jacobs, he’d assert in 1992, her work at Forum “consisted mainly of writing captions.” This is untrue. Like other staffers, she wrote some of the captions a photo-stuffed magazine like Forum required. But this was the least of her work; her pages-long, research-heavy articles going back five years represented the magazine’s last word on urban subjects. And in claiming that Jane demanded not a word of her article be cut, Whyte was imputing to her a stance more like that of a novice writer than of the seasoned pro she was; Jane knew better than anyone the value of an editor’s blue pencil.

  Because Jane’s Fortune article led her directly to The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Whyte had legitimate reason to revisit those days in 1957 when, in retrospect, Jane stood at the threshold of fame and he, Whyte, was there to witness it. But just why he wrote so dismissively of her in 1992 remains a wonderment. He and Jacobs were friends. They lauded city life with equal ardency. They respected one another. Perhaps the passage of thirty-five years had clouded his memory. Perhaps depicting a callow Jane Jacobs made for a story more fun to tell. Perhaps he’d ingested more of the prejudices of his Fortune colleagues than he realized. Or maybe, back in 1957, he’d simply not known any better. As Jane’s son Jim suggests, he may never have known that Jane’s career as writer and editor reached back across two decades; “Jane wasn’t one to toot her own horn.”

&
nbsp; Certainly, the article’s passage into print was difficult; the fourteen-thousand-word draft of Whyte’s memory got whittled down by more than half. Though he was only nine at the time, Jim remembers his mother working on it. “It was really hard; she worried she couldn’t get it to work.” But she did get it to work. And with it, the gate onto the big world that had inched open after her Harvard talk swung open wide.

  —

  The articles in the Fortune series began appearing in the fall of 1957. They stood out, Whyte would say in his introduction to The Exploding Metropolis, which carried them into book form, because they were written “by people who like cities”; in that era of Suburbia Ascendant, there weren’t many of them around. Together the seven articles made for what Sam Bass Warner would call in his foreword to a later edition “a manifesto of cultural politics,” one holding for the small-scale and the local as against the over-big.

  Whyte himself introduced the series with a provocatively titled piece, “Are Cities Un-American?,” though he didn’t really ask, much less answer, the question. Then, month by month, came articles about cars and cities, slums, urban sprawl; this last was again by Whyte, who lamented how “huge patches of once green countryside have been turned into vast, smog-filled deserts that are neither city, suburb, nor country.” Then, in April 1958, Jane’s piece appeared.