Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  On January 24, Jane wrote Nathan Glazer, saying, “Here is chapter 22, the last! Now I am going out and getting two martinis. Maybe three.”

  CHAPTER 13

  MOTHER JACOBS OF HUDSON STREET

  IN 1961, A BLISTERING REVIEW of The Death and Life of Great American Cities would dismiss its author, in its very title, as “Mother Jacobs.” Later, when Jane led the fight to block a highway backed by Robert Moses, he would declaim in a fit of pique that the only people who opposed it were “a bunch of mothers.” Now, whatever else Jane was when she left her job at Forum in 1958 and set to work on the cities book, she was indeed a mother. Her three children, Jim, Ned, and Mary, were ten, eight, and three respectively. By the time the family left Hudson Street for Toronto in 1968—with Death and Life published to much acclaim and Jane a public intellectual and community figure of note—Mary was an adolescent, the two boys were men, and Jane had been a Greenwich Village mother for two decades.

  In the fall of 1958, Jane was forty-two years old. It was the first time she hadn’t reported to work at a Midtown office since 1946, when she’d briefly freelanced from home. Actually, she didn’t work from home now, either, but in a rented office. Early on she’d realized, as she wrote to Chadbourne Gilpatric the following July, that she needed “a room to work in, where I am uninterrupted by people, telephone, etc.” She found one on Bethune Street, a five-minute walk from home, on the second floor of an old 1830s-vintage rooming house that shook to the rumble of trucks bound for the West Side Highway. It was Bob who arranged it, for $45 a month, and when Jane moved in, rumors spread that, as son Jim would tell the story, she was “a kept woman.” Later, the building was sold out from under her (to a literary agent), so she had to find another place, and she wound up in the Sheridan Square building she mentioned in Death and Life. Mary would remember that “stark little room” of an office, with its shouts and thumps of boxing from the gym next door.

  Jane and her son Ned, about 1952 Credit 17

  Meanwhile, Jane paid for the help she needed at home. During these years, up until 1960 when she died, Glennie Lenear, the woman whom Jane had hired after Jimmy’s birth, was a conspicuous figure in all their lives. When she was still at Forum, Jane’s routine was to wait until Glennie arrived in the morning, then haul off on her bike for Rockefeller Center. Glennie cared for the kids when they got home from school and prepared their meals, staying until Jane got home at around six. “She looked after me in the nicest way,” says Mary, who, groping for words, opens her arms wide, hugging Glennie’s remembered girth fifty years later. “She was wonderfully capable. I just loved her. She was like another mother.” Ned walked Mary to kindergarten, Glennie picked her up. With school about to let out for the boys, she might be heard to groan, “Oh, it’s time for those devils to come home.” Jimmy and Ned could be a handful; their cousin Jane, Jim Butzner’s girl, remembers them as “wild, rambunctious, mischievous,” her own visits to the house welcomed by Glennie as those of, finally, “a girlie girl.” The rented office and Glennie’s ministrations over many years (which Jane acknowledged in Death and Life) let her keep her writing time sacrosanct.

  Jane cooked for Bob. She read to her children before putting them to bed. She could be counted on to get what the kids needed for school or play, to head up to Macy’s to buy ankle straps for the kids’ ice skates or a corduroy jumper for Mary. Sundays, she and Bob took the children to church, St. Luke’s Episcopal, a few blocks down Hudson Street. Jane wasn’t religious. She felt scant attachment to the Presbyterian church of her childhood. She saw people of a spiritual bent as misguided. And yet, she wrote one correspondent, services at St. Luke’s “gave me the satisfying, in fact inspiring feeling that I was a link in a long, sinewy, living human tradition of being.” This worked for Jane, anyway; for the kids, who attended Sunday school, not so much. A “vaccine to stave off religion,” is how Jim came to see their Sundays at St. Luke’s. In the end, seen through a liberal-minded enough lens, Jane was just another American mother, doing her parental best.

  Still, if she was a mother of the 1950s, she managed to sidestep most of its tyrannies and would rank as one of somewhat unorthodox style—as were she and Bob, together, as parents. “There was something weird about us,” allows Jim, speaking of the family. To the children, all through their lives, their parents were never Mom and Dad, but Jane and Bob. From early on, Jane treated her children as adults; for his parents, says Jim, the children were “not small versions of you. They were their own people.” Hey, listen to this, she’d say, rounding them up to read aloud what had caught her attention in some book she was reading, about archaeology or politics or who knows what else. She and Bob included them almost automatically in their adult activities. An acquaintance from one community battle, Pierre Tonachel, remembers Jane bringing them to protests and neighborhood meetings; the kids—“happy, sweet kids,” he calls them—were “always listening in” to whatever was going on. “It must have been fun for them to come along.” Mary remembers being with the adults at the Lion’s Head, a local tavern, where a round table in the window served as neighborhood meeting place.

  Death and Life devoted a whole chapter to the role of city streets in “assimilating” children. The streets and sidewalks granted them an “outdoor home base from which to play, to hang around in, and to help form their notions of the world”—in short, she all but says, become civilized. The tone is one of clear-eyed acknowledgment of what young people are really like. “Little tots are decorative and relatively docile,” she writes, “but older children are noisy and energetic, and they act on their environment instead of just letting it act on them,” which is what gets them into trouble. As they grow older, they leave their jump ropes and roller skates behind, and flirt, talk, push, shove, and indulge in horseplay. “Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it.” Mary was too young while Jane worked on Death and Life to figure much in it, but glimpses of the boys do appear—darting out into the street, finding secret hiding places in the subways, contriving to avoid getting beat up by other kids.

  Jane’s boys, Jimmy and Ned Credit 18

  A photograph of Jimmy and Ned, ages maybe seven and five, shows two ragamuffins, the bigger boy with his arms tightly twined around his younger brother, devilish glee written across his face, Ned looking plaintively off to the side. Ned, in his sixties, recalls that one of his parents’ regrets is that they seemed unable to restore peace between them, intervening perhaps a bit too little or too late. Oh, they’ll be friends someday, Jane’s own mother assured her, and they are. “But it was certainly hard to believe” at the time, Jane would say, “when they were such fighters.” They were always fighting. A friend of Jane’s from later years theorizes that they’d ratchet up the conflict to gain her attention. Ned tells how he and Jim exploited Jane’s tendency to get lost in what she was thinking, counting on a distracted “Yeah, yeah” when asking permission for this or that. But they got into trouble often enough that eventually Jane rewrote the rules: “Not only do I have to say yes, I have to know I’m saying it.”

  There was plenty of intellectual challenge in the family, less room for the emotions, navel gazing, or overt criticism. “It wasn’t part of the family dynamic to raise voices,” the way you’d see in some families, says Mary. “There were no heavy trips,” no histrionics, no yelling and screaming. The emphasis was on thinking things through, the children left to learn from experience, free from too heavy and oppressive an adult hand. “Permissive” is the word that can bubble up. Indeed, Jane and Bob’s relaxed parenting style could raise the eyebrows of some, even among friends and family, who felt their brand of permissiveness, if that’s what it was, went too far. “Some of their shenanigans would not have been acceptable” in her own family, says cousin Jane, Jane Henderson today, speaking of the Jacobs kids. Her second husband, Riley, who joined the family in the late 1960s, speaks of the Jacobses’“unorthodox way of rearing kids.” Still,
he adds, “no matter what they did or didn’t do, Jane always praised them.”

  Katia Jacobs, whose husband, John, Bob’s cousin, had worked with Jane at Amerika—the four of them close friends who would vacation together on Nantucket in a house in Sconset near the beach—says of her that “Jane had a wonderful, vivid personality, but not much of a maternal instinct.” It bothered her the time Jane and Bob came over with baby Mary, and Jane “didn’t seem to care where she was going to sleep.” Oh, we’ll find a place to tuck her in. “I was shocked with her casual approach,” Katia says.

  A letter in the Jane Jacobs archives, from Mary to her grandmother when she was twelve, in block printing mixed with cursive, is littered with misspellings, like “gooing” for “going” and “rember” for “remember”; Mary was dyslexic. At home, among her parents and brothers, life was stimulating, educational, with lots going on, and she soaked it right up. She was bright, even gifted. Like her father, she could do almost anything with her hands. But, she says, she “had a hard time in school.” Her reading problems had slipped through whatever there was at school to help her, as well as right by her parents; no one, it seems, ever asked whether she’d done her homework. Jane “didn’t pay a lot of attention” to her school problems, she recollects—until, she says in a carefully neutral way, “at age nine it came to her attention that I hadn’t learned to read.” Her brothers had been teasing her about it for a while “before Jane finally got wind of it.”

  When she did, Jane pounced on the problem. She tracked down a special kit of color-coordinated books, with stories and questions, that someone had recommended to her and that she purchased by mail order. It was perfect for her, Mary remembers, something she could use on her own; maybe Ned and Jim could block out all the distractions of home, street, and school, but she couldn’t. Using the reading kit Jane found for her, she “progressed by myself and learned to read in jig time.” The first book she remembers reading was Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.

  Something similar happened with Jim. In high school, taking the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, he did poorly on the math part. Around the house, Jimmy was the Little Professor, obviously very smart (he would wind up with a PhD in solid-state physics), so why had he done so miserably on this standardized test? Belatedly, Jane and Bob realized, it wasn’t mathematical concepts hanging him up, it was basic arithmetic—times tables and the like. Jane began drilling him in these fundamentals and, the following year, when he took the college-qualifying SATs, he did well.

  Their parents, the children agree, didn’t tamp down or crimp their natural instincts. No need to micromanage, intervene, or unduly fret over your children; trust in them and they’d do fine. Something like this was the Jacobs credo. On the other hand, you could miss things that way, as Jane and Bob occasionally did. “Benign neglect”? The children themselves, reflecting back, don’t see it that way. The hands-off stance that let Mary’s reading problems and Jim’s in arithmetic slip by could seem a blessing. Jane “had a sense that we were all right,” says Mary. When one of the kids got into trouble in school, Jim recalls, Jane or Bob—more typically Jane, at least while she was still at Forum—showed up at school “and supported us totally,” he says, “no matter who was right or wrong.” One time, the boys wanted cowboy boots, which Jane bought for them and they wore to school. But the teacher said no, that for whatever reason they couldn’t wear them in her class. Jane went in and remonstrated with her. She was the parent. She had bought boots for her sons. They were perfectly good boots. There was nothing wrong with the boots, or with them. The teacher gave in.

  It was a moral and practical education the Jacobs kids received at home. When Glennie was dying, Jane gave blood, taking Mary with her to the hospital, which was “a total hell hole, all black people, terribly sick people, very crowded”; Mary never forgot it. Jane taught her about scams, the kind that came through junk mail, and about book clubs that suck you in and charge you for books you don’t want. She was lucky to get an education like that, she says, one that inoculated her against being manipulated as an adult. One time, around 1961, in the cold war days of nuclear posturing and real nuclear threat, the air raid sirens went off while she and Jane were out walking; the wailing sirens meant they were to “duck and cover,” and, sure enough, everyone disappeared from the street. But not them. It was silly and pointless, Jane told her six-year-old. “We’re not ducking and covering.”

  Reminiscences of Jane’s children and their cousins often come tinged with the flavor of extended family, of one big clan of Butzner cousins. Jim and Kay Butzner’s family and their children, Jane, Ann, and William, lived in southern New Jersey, in a suburb called Woodbury. John, his wife, “Pete” Butzner, and their son, Decker, lived in Virginia. Of course, Betty and Julie, and their children, Carol, Paul, and David, were over in Stuyvesant Town. As several of them tell it, they were cousins, yes, but closer than cousins, more like brothers and sisters.

  Decker Butzner, today a physician living in Calgary, Alberta, holds memories of the Jacobs household going all the way back to 1953, when he was three. On family trips to New York they’d also visit his mother’s family in Staten Island, and Aunt Betty and Uncle Jules in Stuyvesant Town. But it was Jane and Bob’s Hudson Street house he remembered best. As you came in from the street, there was a galley kitchen to your left, with open shelves separating it from the dining room; Bob had designed it that way so whoever was working in the kitchen wasn’t cut off from conversation around the dinner table.

  On Thanksgiving, the men would take the kids to the Macy’s parade, finding a spot along the west side of Central Park near the Museum of Natural History at Seventy-ninth Street. Most often, it was Jane’s three kids, Betty’s three, and him, Decker, but sometimes also the South Jersey contingent. They’d get around by subway or, more often, on foot—the better to burn off youthful energy before dinner, as Decker later reckoned the grown-ups’ strategy. Meanwhile, the women would be cooking—turkey, green peas, creamed onions, three or four kinds of pies. The big meal would come around three. Then the cousins would go out and play, the food left out for “grazing.” He loved those trips up to New York. “We were all so excited to see each other.”

  To the cousins, Hudson Street could seem an isle of liberation. Decker and the Jacobs boys would ride the train down to the South Ferry station, there to briskly make their way down the bank of pay phones, collecting coins left by frazzled Staten Island Ferry commuters rushing for the boat. Jane Butzner, sometimes known as Little Jane to distinguish her from her aunt, after whom she was named, was the eldest of the cousins. Growing up in New Jersey, she “couldn’t wait to visit my cousins in New York,” the Jacobs kids and the Mansons. When she was old enough, she’d be dropped off at the bus station in Philadelphia and arrive at the Port Authority in New York, where Betty would pick her up and ferry her over to Stuyvesant Town or to Jane’s. She’d arrive at Hudson Street wearing her pretty patent leather shoes and soon head off with the boys to Washington Square. Fun, apparently, was planting her on one end of the seesaw, then jumping precipitously off the other, slamming her end down. She’d return with the boys hours later hopelessly “dirty and disheveled,” her nice shoes sorely scuffed; her own mother would never countenance that. In the house, she played on the jungle gym in the boys’ bedrooms, a horizontal ladder that let you walk across the room with your hands. She ate raw clams and artichokes, things she’d never get at home. They’d take the storied subways; she was still small enough to duck under the turnstiles. Once or twice her mom invited the Jacobs kids to their house in New Jersey, doing them a kindness, presumably, by getting them out of the city; of course, says cousin Jane, “they were bored out of their minds” in leafy Leave-It-to-Beaverville. Hudson Street was more interesting, though it didn’t adhere to the highest standards of suburban spit and polish. Lucia Jacobs, Katia and John’s daughter, second cousin to Jane’s children, remembers walking barefoot around the old house, the soles of her feet in no
time turning black.

  Jane’s West Village was as much a place of business, warehousing, and small-scale manufacturing as of homes. A former stable at the corner of Hudson and Perry dealt in industrial fasteners. The Fisher Chemical warehouse was just down Hudson Street; Jimmy, not much older than twelve at the time, would walk there for a liter of potassium chromate, some sulfuric acid, potassium hydroxide pellets, and purple dye, pay for it with a little pocket money, and head home to concoct crazy “experiments.” Decker recalls visits where they’d play under the old West Side Highway, a few blocks from the house, and spy longshoremen, with their iconic, scary-looking steel hooks, pilfering from broken-open crates.

  Christmas at the Jacobs house had its own rhythms. Christmas cookies meant not just the cookies themselves but the family ritual of producing them in the hundreds, the kitchen littered with trays of them, shapes stamped out with cookie cutters, in countless sizes, styles, and recipes; as Jane herself would say, “We would go crazy.” And, of course, there was the annual ham to prepare. Each year, Jane would buy a new datebook to record doctors’ appointments, social events, and the like, one small enough to stick in her own Christmas stocking. And first thing each year she’d open it to the back and enter, as almost ritual incantation, the same words: December 22: soak ham…December 23: boil ham…December 24: bake ham.

  Come vacations they’d pile into the car, if you want to call it that. It was one of those evolutionary dead ends in the history of the automobile that, like evolutionary dead ends in the natural world, was more interesting than most. It was called a Multipla, made by Fiat, a miniature van introduced in 1956, smaller than a VW Beetle, that looked about the same coming or going, powered by a tiny, four-cylinder engine that took most of a minute to get the car up to highway speed; they bought it new in 1958. “A delightful lemon,” Jim calls the car. In family lore, its fuel pump was forever going on the fritz, which meant frequent, seemingly endless waits in service stations. When that happened, or just on long drives out to Shelter Island, on the eastern tip of Long Island, the children needing to be entertained, Jane would make up stories. One of her characters was an industrious little boy named Peanut, so tiny he could fit into a hat, who was always getting into scrapes. Jane could spin out these stories—maybe kid photographer Peanut sliding down the weasel hole, or Peanut escaping from the evil carnival barker—as long as it took to fix that damned fuel pump, or traverse those endless tracts of Long Island, or until the children fell asleep.