Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Jane, as chairman of the Committee to Save the West Village, presents evidence at a press conference at the Lion’s Head restaurant, New York, 1961. Credit 23

  A public meeting on June 8 dragged on until four in the morning, fresh speakers summoned by telephone to testify into the night. Planning commission head James Felt would remember the meeting’s “unreal and almost dreamlike quality.”

  On the eve of a key primary election, Mayor Wagner asked the planning commission to withdraw its proposal, “so as not to leave an integral portion of Greenwich Village in a state of limbo.” But affirming its own independence, the commission ruled at its October 18 meeting that the neighborhood was indeed blighted and thus eligible for urban renewal. “The villagers, led by Mrs. Jane Jacobs,” The New York Times reported, “leaped from their seats and rushed forward,” shouting that a deal had been made with a builder, that the mayor had been double-crossed, that the commission’s action was illegal. Chairman Felt pounded his gavel, demanding that order be restored, called in police. Shouted protests only increased. Felt called a recess, sent for more police, and, with the other commissioners, left the room. The West Villagers stayed where they were, chanting “Down with Felt!” When later chastised for their behavior Jane coolly replied, “We were not violent. We were only vocal…We had been ladies and gentlemen and only got pushed around. So yesterday we protested loudly.”

  Early the following year, responding to the neighborhood’s relentless pressure, Mayor Wagner finally prevailed on the planning commission to see things his way, which was Jane’s way; a newsletter of the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Council, a group supporting the commission, described the mayor as like “a weary father asking his son to drop a young lady of dubious repute.” The neighborhood had won, as Jane would calculate, “eleven months and ten days after our ordeal began.”

  The victors, it is said, write the history books. But this time, the losers got their say, too. In his October 18 ruling, soon to be reversed by the mayor, Chairman Felt, troubled and resentful after what for him had been an ordeal, too, set out a long, measured, even philosophical defense of the commission’s action. The stance of the “highly sophisticated and articulate opposition leadership,” he wrote, was rooted in “two premises,” with both of which he disagreed. First, that neither the planning commission nor public officials generally “mean what they say, can be believed, or can be trusted to do what they say they intend to do.” Second, that urban renewal and housing programs were inherently destructive, “and that only local residents, if left to their own efforts without the interference of government,” can renew the city. This he called “the laissez faire theory of urban renewal.” He was right; this was, more or less, what Jane and her friends were saying. Today, for better and for worse—perhaps equally so—versions of both premises are deeply ingrained in American public life.

  When it was all over, a friend from the United Housing Foundation, which had helped bring cooperative housing to poor areas of the city, wrote Felt a letter of sympathy and lament. It was fortunate, he wrote, that people like the West Villagers had never tried to block cooperative housing projects like those successfully brought to the Lower East Side: “They would have discovered beauty in the colored drapes of the stores behind which the gypsies lived and in the old clothes shops that lined both sides of Grand Street from the East River to Third Avenue. The capacity of these people to find beauty in the cold water flats and the belly stove never ceases to amaze me.”

  At a public lecture around this same time—she was back at Forum now and Death and Life was in print—Jane told of a rumor “that I had somehow whipped up this book during the fight as a campaign document.” In a way, this was flattering. “I would love to be able to carry on a job, and a fight against the city, and whip up a book at the same time,” she said, but it was a long and lonely job to write a book, one that meant talking to herself interminably. Just now, she said, she was happy to be talking again with others besides herself.

  Clearly, she enjoyed the victory. “She loves the game…of wheeling and dealing for a cause,” The Village Voice’s Jane Kramer reported in 1963. “She manipulates, though she thinks that’s a nasty word.” Maybe Jane enjoyed her life on the urban front lines more than she let on; if she didn’t relish these time-crunching civic battles, maybe they weren’t unalloyed misery, either. “As long as it couldn’t be avoided, which it couldn’t be if you were a responsible person, you had to fight,” she’d tell another interviewer. But “as long as you’re doing it, you might as well decide to have a good time.

  “Of course, what makes it a really good time is if you win.”

  V. “NOT A SINGLE SPARROW”

  It was good when you won, yes, but it would be a dozen years before Jane and her West Village committee could chalk up anything like a win for their radically old-fashioned housing plan. Over the years, West Village Houses, as their plan was known, would face resistance and delay, and run smack into the realities of the New York City housing market and the New York City housing code. When it finally materialized, Jane would be long gone from the Village and the bricks-and-mortar incarnation of their idea could be counted only a partial victory.

  West Village Houses took one early step on its rocky, eleven-year ride to realization in a 1963 brochure designed to make its quirky case: a row of stylized city houses march, block-printed, across a blue cover. Inside, on its first page, is a line drawing of a bird, fragile in its stick-figure simplicity, venerable—like city dwellers, snared by urban renewal, facing loss of their homes and neighborhoods. But not this time, vowed Jane and her co-conspirators, not with West Village Houses: “Not a single person—not a single sparrow—shall be displaced.”

  Jane’s group had blocked urban renewal by being relentlessly negative, unwilling to so much as entertain the city’s plan. Now, with West Village Houses, they were rebutting the charge that they stood in the way of needed improvement. “This will show that we have a constructive side,” said Rachele Wall, one of those instrumental in the scheme and a longtime friend of Jane’s. Of course, what they came up with was so different, so new—and so weird and so old—that when it finally came before city officials it would be ridiculed as a throwback to a primordial urban past. Which, in a sense, it was. An ad in The SoHo Weekly News in 1974 would herald

  WEST VILLAGE HOUSES

  …WHERE PROGRESS IS OUR LEAST IMPORTANT PRODUCT.

  A New York Herald Tribune writer observed that “although Mrs. Jacobs disowns impressing her ideas on the plan…[West Village Houses] meets most of her published objections to renewal plans in other neighborhoods.” You tear down most of the neighborhood so you can start over with a clean slate? No, said Jane, you pick and choose, preserving what’s worth preserving, razing only where necessary. You lavish on a neighborhood great buckets of what she called “cataclysmic” cash? No, she’d said in Death and Life, you keep things small. You tear down nineteenth-century tenements, put up modernist high-rises? No, any new buildings should respect the scale and flavor of the surrounding neighborhood. Most of all, you don’t kick anyone out of their houses: Not a single sparrow. “Revolutionary in its modesty,” Mary Perot Nichols, a Village Voice writer, called West Village Houses in 1969. It was surely that, in its conception and in how it turned out.

  It was to include 475 dwelling units, which was not so small, as urban projects go. It included no efficiency, or “studio,” apartments—the Village had enough of those—but, rather, one- to three-bedroom units suitable for families. At which corner, or between which two streets, would West Village Houses go? There was no simple answer to that. Rather, forty-two individual buildings were to be arrayed on seven small sites, along six blocks of Washington Street from Morton to Bank—a Monopoly set of unassuming structures stuck into the corners of lots, replacing truck parking here, a rattletrap of an old factory there. The new housing would restore the balance between residential and commercial that had existed before the overhead rail track (which, far
ther north, became today’s High Line linear park) had gone in to serve the adjacent warehouse district. The architects devised three simple building plans and arranged them, in different combinations, to fit oddments of underused land, leaving room for gardens, courtyards, and plazas, first floors sometimes given over to small shops. No stretch of Washington Street would look just like any other, but no stretch of it, either, would look so different from the rest of the Village.

  The plans called for five-story buildings, two apartments to a floor, with no elevators. “The dangers of unattended elevators to children—and adults—are already too well known to require retelling here,” said the blue brochure, referring to the new high-rise projects. West Village Houses would all be walk-ups. Walk-ups, like the one Nathan Glazer had grown up in on East 103rd Street in East Harlem. Or the one Jane and Betty had inhabited in Brooklyn Heights. West Village Houses was radical, in a nineteenth-century sort of way. Ranging up the avenues and down the crosstown streets of Manhattan and in swaths of the other boroughs as well, the walk-up was a veritable icon of old New York. Besides, you’d hear it argued, walk-ups were perfect for Greenwich Villagers, for whom “walking upstairs is considered a sound and healthy diversion.”

  Were they serious?

  The reaction to West Village Houses among city officials was incomprehension, curdled with rage at what Jane and her friends had the effrontery to offer the city of New York. And yes, it was Jane herself—Jane Jacobs of Hudson Street—who was seen as the instigator of this insult to the city and to the most elementary precepts of modern planning. What, asked the anonymous author of one internal planning commission document, were the chief influences behind this nutty idea? One was the “well-publicized ‘victory’ ” of the West Village committee in blocking urban renewal. A second was the assumption that the sole way to better a neighborhood was to fight city hall. A third was “the philosophical point of view of its most vocal member, Jane Jacobs,” who opposed the prevailing planning troika of urban renewal, residential relocation, and high-rise construction.

  This commission author saw West Village Houses for what it was—a model for inserting new housing into slivers and specks of underused or vacant land; here was Jane’s “in-fill,” not just for Greenwich Village but for the city at large. And it advanced a breed of community planning that was neighborhood focused and so, presumably, more trust inspiring than anything government could do. But while he (or she) could more or less fairly outline the thinking behind the project, he was hostile to it. It required no residential relocation, true, but it did demand nonresidential relocation. Maybe the local truckers made a ramshackle mess of their river-fronting blocks. But, as later documents would point up, their little companies, with names like Empire Transfer and Arjay Consolidators, were a going industry, moving goods twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, up and down the East Coast. And they had no wish to move; their handy access to the West Side Highway gave them what might be the last suitable site on Manhattan Island. With West Village Houses, they’d have to move, which risked forcing many of them out of business. Didn’t they count, too?

  The West Village plan, according to another anonymous foe, had been “conceived in utmost secrecy,” and was pushed with “not even vaguely disguised attempts at blackmail and retribution.” It promised no fresh cityscape at all, just “a simple-minded repetition of a basically antiquated housing type—the five-story walk-up.” Its “avant-garde trappings of ‘human scale’ and ‘mixed land use’ ” made it no less regressive.

  These criticisms rank as among the more measured ones. A local newsletter writer, Jeanne Godwin, termed the West Village Houses plan (“through which the fine hand of Jane Jacobs may be discerned”) “startling and frightening.” It was “appalling” that anyone should propose anything like it. When the housing and redevelopment board’s Frank S. Kristof weighed in on June 25, 1963, he termed it “the most incredible proposal for housing that we have met since the adoption in 1879” of the old-law “dumbbell” tenement. Arguments in its favor added up to “absurd allegations, assertions masquerading as fact, attempts to make virtues of obvious deficiencies, and false and misleading misrepresentations.”

  The architect of the West Village scheme was thirty-seven-year-old Ray Matz, who worked out of the White Plains, New York, offices of Perkins & Will, the Chicago firm that had worked on the DeWitt Clinton alternative; that scheme also proposed walk-ups, and was also decried. Now, in November, Philip Will wrote William Ballard, the planning commission head, trying to explain to him what the West Villagers were about. Back in Chicago, Will was a planning commissioner, too; let’s try to see this, he seemed to say, commissioner to commissioner. Before them lay a “classic example of conflict between established rules and the pragmatic proposals of local citizenry.” Here was “a rare opportunity to be experimental and daring.” Ballard needed to realize he was “dealing with a unique community populated with concerned and determined people,” who knew what they wanted and were willing to push for it; who wanted “not only to preserve but to enhance a way of life which they find to be complete and rewarding.” He and Ballard—we planners, we commissioners—might not see it that way, he all but said, but they did. If cities were to retain the middle class, “we must listen respectfully to the wishes of the very families we wish to keep.” He hoped Ballard could find a way to support the West Village plan. “The result might well be a breakthrough in the art of city planning.”

  Will’s letter ranged over a single-spaced page and a half. Ballard’s reply was three sentences. Yes, the West Villagers were “a determined lot.” There were, however, “problems to consider” with their idea. He’d distribute Will’s letter to other commission members. The following month, Ballard wrote the housing and redevelopment board that the West Village proposal was simply “unacceptable.”

  That was 1963. Years passed. The neighborhood pushed. Politics intervened. A new mayor, John Lindsay, was elected. Holdovers from the previous administration first blocked the project. But when Lindsay’s appointees consolidated their power, it finally won approval, warranting an article in the August 3, 1969, New York Times: “ ‘Village’ Group Wins 8-Year Battle to Build 5-Story Walk-up Apartments.” Jane’s arrival at a city planning commission meeting a week later was welcomed with “a thunderous, standing ovation.”

  The buildings went up. But the mansard roofs of one early sketch, floor-to-ceiling sliding windows, pretty landscaping? These and other features of the original design had largely vanished. The years of fighting had taken their toll. Politics, steep inflation, opposition by the city—principled opposition, it should be said—and the passage of years hacked away at some of the design features and flourishes. The result, as one account had it, was “plain brick buildings punctured by small windows, topped by flat roofs, and unadorned by anything other than an occasional window box of flowers.” That was the bad news.

  The good news was that, socially speaking, West Village Houses worked.

  Pearl Broder, who moved in with her daughter in 1978, remembers how, hard by the city’s West Side, pushed up against the river, it felt like “the end of the earth”; she speaks from a Manhattanite’s perspective that makes a ten-minute walk to the grocery a trek across Siberia. Mostly gay men lived in her building in those days. The surrounding area was “run-down, yet exciting”; the gentrification so ubiquitous today—new high-rises, expensive condos—came later. She loved being there. “I couldn’t have lived in Manhattan if it weren’t for this,” she says.

  And whatever their aesthetic failings, the West Village Houses worked pretty well as places to live, with bright, decently sized rooms, some of them garden apartments directly off courtyards, just one other apartment to the floor, only ten or twelve per building; you got to know your neighbors that way. “The people who live on the top floors are in great shape and live longer than the rest of us!” says Katy Bordonaro, another long-timer, who lives with her husband in one of the garden apartments. Those were
pretty, but they could be a little dark, whereas top-floor apartments, up tidy, well-lit stairs, were flooded with light, with fine views of the West Side and the river.

  Walk along Washington Street today and you might not notice West Village Houses at all; they’re precisely the opposite of “starchitecture.” Maybe you couldn’t celebrate their dowdy, bare-bones appearance. But for their thousand and more residents, and for their neighbors, they embodied many of Jane’s ideas for moderately priced in-fill housing. No housing torn down. Nobody shooed away. A masterpiece of sorts—if you dare use the word for something so modest.

  And a victory.

  CHAPTER 16

  LUNCHEON AT THE WHITE HOUSE

  I. A NICE, NINE-MINUTE TALK, HONEY

  In the aftermath of Death and Life, Jane’s friends and acquaintances, her experiences both personal and professional, the very rhythms of her days and weeks, all took a turn. About a year after returning in early 1961 to Architectural Forum—“their patience (and my money) both having thoroughly run out,” as she wrote Epstein—she advised the new editor, Peter Blake, that she planned to leave for good at the end of May. Now, and for the rest of her life, Jane would be self-employed, on her own clock, responsible primarily to herself. In one sense, her everyday life became narrower, no longer nourished by her colleagues at the magazine; in another sense, it became broader, beyond Hudson Street, beyond Rockefeller Center. Her 1964 date book mentioned dinner parties with old friends, like the Kirks and the Haskells, but also a Hillman Award dinner at the Windsor Ballroom in the Hotel Commodore; an appointment with the feminist writer Betty Friedan; in the back, phone numbers for the radical organizer Saul Alinsky and Mayor John Lindsay. She met John Holt, whose 1964 best-selling book, How Children Fail, must have resonated with her. Jane was stepping onto the stage of the nation and the world, her attention drawn off from her writing not just by battles in the West Village but by opportunities and life experiences she might scarcely have imagined a few years before.