Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  —

  In 1963, the architect Noriaki Kurokawa, who had begun work on a Japanese translation of Death and Life the year before, wrote Jane from Tokyo. Her writing, he said deferentially, was “so clear even for us Japanese to understand,” but on a few points he did need clarification. For example, Jane had pointed out that street lighting could discourage crime only so much. “Street lights,” she had written, “can be like that famous stone that falls in the desert where there are no ears to hear.” In other words, she was asking rhetorically, without eyes on the street to see, did street lighting cast light at all? “What means ‘famous stone’?” Kurokawa asked. “Has it any special meanings? Or [is it] a proverb?” He also wanted to know what a bocce court was, and who the “perverts” were who’d taken over Philadelphia’s Washington Square.

  Jane replied with suggestions for how Kurokawa might get around the cultural gaps between the languages. As for the “perverts,” she explained in her July 1963 letter, these were “people who are abnormal, usually in a sexual way; and when it is used as I have used it, it is understood to mean homosexuals who are aggressive and brazen, and seem unpleasant or even frightening, perhaps, to normal people.”

  Of course, Kurokawa’s final translation didn’t entirely escape error. The street crime Americans call a “mugging” came out as “overacting,” the “frosted pastry” you could get at Rockefeller Center as a “frozen pie shell.”

  —

  The British publisher of The Death and Life of Great American Cities didn’t much like that title for its readers and appealed to Jane for alternatives. “I keep thinking of things like ‘Plans Agley’ or ‘Secrets of the Streets,’ ” Jane wrote back in March 1962. “Kind of awful. Maybe the best thing is to stick to the American title by default, if for no other reason.”

  They did.

  —

  As early as spring 1962, Death and Life was being used in studio courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In spring 1963, the midterm for one Harvard seminar, “Visual Evaluation of the Urban Environment,” was based on Jane’s book.

  —

  “I have some real news for you,” Jane wrote her mother in 1964. She’d gotten a call, and then a formal invitation, from Liz Carpenter at the White House, inviting her to a luncheon with Lady Bird Johnson, the first lady. “I told Bob your first thought will be ‘What will she wear?’ Right? It was mine. I guess I will have to get a dress, which I need anyhow.”

  The way the story was told some years later, Jane was advised that “Mrs. Johnson would really appreciate, honey, a nice, nine-minute talk on beautification.” Jane said she’d be glad to talk for nine minutes, but not on beautification. On June 16, 1964, in the East Wing of the White House, at the Fifth Monthly Women Doers Luncheon—that’s what it was called—Jane spoke of “the profound need we have for character, convenience, visual pleasure and vitality.” These she lumped together as “amenity,” which required keeping things up. Amenity required people to clean, repair, and garden—maintenance, not capital spending. These days, however, cities found it easier to let things disintegrate, then pour in money to make something new and grand—which swept away “the good with the bad, the beautiful with the ugly, and the productive with the unproductive.” Cities, she declared, were impoverishing themselves with capital improvements!

  “I wanted to talk sense to those women,” Jane would say later, “not a lot of inspirational stuff about tulips.”

  —

  It was late winter of 1964, at the Lion’s Head, the neighborhood bar that had served as headquarters for the battle against urban renewal, and Jane was being “buttonholed” by Leon Seidel, its owner. A photographer friend of his was on assignment from Esquire to take pictures of mothers and sons. The photographer was forty-one-year-old Diane Arbus, then still on her way up; she’d won a Guggenheim, taught at local colleges, but was still a couple of years from her first big solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. It was quite a deal for her to land this assignment from Esquire, Seidel told Jane. Would she agree to let Arbus photograph her? Sure, she said.

  Big mistake.

  Arbus was not exactly your garden-variety “objective” recorder of the visual world. She would become famous for her photographs of giants, dwarfs, and freaks, elaborately arranged in odd compositions she felt revealed more than her subjects, or her viewers, might have imagined. Her portrait of Jane and her son Ned proved no exception. “She was so concentrated and so deliberate,” Jane remembered, “and put so much effort into exactly how she wanted it.” At one point, Arbus ordered Jane back into the house to get a raincoat and “told me how I had to button it all up. Then she looked at us both for a while and she decided she wanted me to have gloves on.” Didn’t matter that it wasn’t cold enough for gloves.

  Arbus posed the two of them in the little yard at the back of the house on Hudson Street. “This was quite an arduous thing. Our feet had to be exactly so. Our arms had to be exactly so.” Finally, Arbus started firing away with the camera.

  If you’re looking for flattering, don’t. Jane remembered feeling manipulated and exploited, “buttoned up and covered up.” She was pointed squarely at the camera, practically trussed up in her raincoat, looking dowdy and awkward, Ned angled toward her, his arm around her shoulder, the two of them set in front of a wooden fence. By family-snapshot standards, it was a disaster.

  But, of course, this was no family snapshot; it was Art.

  II. OBSIDIAN DAYS

  “As you know,” Jane wrote Forum’s new editor, Peter Blake, at the time she left it, her decision to do so reflected not dissatisfaction with the magazine, “but rather that I am anxious to get to work on some other writing, particularly another book I want to do on cities.”

  The book turned out to be The Economy of Cities, published in 1969.

  But there was apparently a brief period during which her next project was still uncertain. When she talked with Chadbourne Gilpatric in early 1962, the Rockefeller man came away thinking she was interested in finishing a book for children the following summer, then devoting “all of her best energies to a study of…citizen action.” A children’s book did materialize, many years later. The citizen action “study,” whatever it was, never did.

  Jane told of the origins of The Economy of Cities this way, in talking with a friend, Roberta Brandes Gratz, years later:

  It became evident to me while I was doing Death and Life of Great American Cities that if the city’s economy declines, that’s the end of it. It doesn’t matter what else cities have, what grand temples they have, what beautiful scenery, wonderful people, or anything else—if their economy doesn’t work. If a settlement does have a lively economy and is able to maintain that, almost everything else becomes possible.

  If it doesn’t, nothing is possible.

  What, then, accounted for healthy city economies?

  It could seem that Jane was turning away from the streets and sidewalks that had nurtured her and made her first book so memorable, giving herself over instead to the soft-sided field of economics, the notoriously Dismal Science, stepping onto its dreary landscape of supply-and-demand curves and marginal returns.

  In fact, the new book might better be seen as a sequel to Death and Life—in its very focus on death and life, on the fall and rise, decay and bursting-forth, of human society generally. Why did some cities decline while others prospered? As she’d one day put it, “This question of, you might say, ‘the death and life’ was what puzzled me.” That’s what had always puzzled her, really, all the way back to her father’s insistence that she look, look really hard, at that living tree. “Life is an end in itself,” she’d quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in Death and Life. For a while she called the new book Cities and Work: The Economic Principles of City Growth. Its inspiration lay in her

  cheerful and respectful curiosity about the persistence of big cities. They are, after all, the most durable of settlements. They endure longer than the nations and governmen
ts of which they form a part. They outlast whole series of the institutions, the businesses and the people, that seem to compose them. They survive invasion, revolution, physical destruction, and misery.

  Even Hiroshima and Dresden, she might have noted, had made their way back to life. On the other hand, she’d watched Scranton wither, seen up close the pitiful little fragment of economic life that was Higgins, North Carolina. She’d experienced the street life, economic life, public life, and every other kind of blustery, triumphant life, of New York City. These examples haunted her, held her.

  In an early draft of the new book, Jane wrote, “The most elementary point is the most startling: There are no causes of stagnation. There are no causes of poverty. There are only causes of growth.” She could have been talking physics, one of its most cherished and firmly established principles, the Second Law of Thermodynamics: left alone, everything runs down, falls apart. It doesn’t have to run down, doesn’t always run down, but without an infusion of outside energy it will for sure. Decline was natural, whereas germination and growth needed fresh energy. Scranton stagnation and Higgins poverty were in the nature of things. The real question was, what explained those moments in space and time—seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Chicago during the 1880s, London for much of the nineteenth century, Silicon Valley, parts of China today—that sprouted and gushed into prosperity?

  She made little progress on the new book at first. Her West Village battles, she’d later estimate, had cost her two years. And Death and Life’s success brought opportunities, seductions, and demands that were always threatening to pull her away from the writing. No, she wrote Brown University vice president John Elmendorf in August 1962, she couldn’t accept his invitation to become a Convocation Fellow for the coming academic year. “I have to stop talking and start working.” She had two talks to prepare that she “would give anything to be able to extricate” herself from. “Until I apply myself to learning and thinking some more, I’m only repeating myself and this has become just intolerably tiresome to me.”

  The following September, she wrote to her Japanese translator, Noriaki Kurokawa. He’d suggested that, for Japanese readers, photographs might be a useful adjunct to the text. No problem, Jane wrote back, but if he wanted her to collect the photos, she couldn’t do it. “I am already so badly delayed and behind my schedule in working on another book that I must finish, that it would be impossible for me to take the time required to hunt for the right ones.” Over the years, she would write dozens of letters begging leave not to serve on a panel, give a lecture, write a foreword, or do some other chore she deemed tedious—or, in some cases, not tedious at all, but nonetheless apt to draw her away from her writing.

  In the same 1964 letter to her mother in which she wrote of her invitation to the White House, she added, “I’m still plugging away at my book, making some progress I hope but having such a hard time with it. I sometimes wonder how I ever got into this mess!”

  At least in part, the “mess” could be laid at the door of Death and Life, whose success had shot her into a new life. Back in October 1961, after a party celebrating that book’s publication, Chadbourne Gilpatric wrote Jane that he and his wife had had a good time. “I certainly enjoyed the party too,” Jane wrote back. “I’ll never forget it.” How could she forget any of what had descended on her during those months? One might track Jane’s writing life by what she wrote about—from her adolescent poems about Girl Scouts and Blackbeard the pirate, to glimpses of American life in her propaganda work, to hospital and school architecture at Forum, and so on. But Death and Life represented a more seismic shift—not of subject but of genre. She was writing books now, and pretty much only books. Once, whatever she had to say would come out in modest articles like those she’d written for Vogue or Forum. But now, and for the rest of her life, any subject Jane Jacobs took the trouble to think much about was apt to emerge as a book. After that last year at Forum her whole previous life’s work was, to all intents, finished. She worked only on big canvases now. In a foreword to a 1992 edition of Death and Life, she wrote that whatever the book’s influence on the world, it “exerted an influence on me, and lured me into my subsequent life’s work.”

  She worked on a longer time cycle now, too—years instead of days or weeks, digging in for the long haul, dedicating herself to big ideas—groping, struggling, and then, after five years, or ten, delivering a book. Anything else—a brief essay, a letter to the editor, a public statement—however much it might strike an outsider as just more “writing,” was to Jane mostly unwelcome interruption now. In September 1963, she wrote David Gurin, a young planner she’d befriended, in response to his suggestion that she submit pieces of her book as articles for a journal he edited. No, thank you, she said, “I have to think of it and work at it as a total knit-together book.” Writing books—big and all-together, one after another, year by year—this was her “subsequent life’s work.”

  On the book destined to become The Economy of Cities, Jane’s progress was unsure and intermittent. “I am still distressingly and maddeningly slow,” she wrote Jason Epstein on March 3, 1966, “but the thing will get done. I have reached a point where new ideas click into place and make older ones click into place, instead of boiling up the pot of confusion into more confusion—that long misery.” Now, four years or more since she’d conceived the book, it bore “little resemblance to what I thought it was going to be when I first lightheartedly explained it to you and to myself.” She enclosed the book’s table of contents of twelve chapters in three parts. “I don’t think it will change further, so you can get some idea of what to expect.”

  It did change, of course, but by now Jane had reached a remarkable conclusion, one she’d stick with to the end and had developed enough to try out, as an excerpt, on Jason and his wife, Barbara, editor of The New York Review of Books. Barbara Epstein wrote back saying it was “marvelous” and that she might want to run it in the Review. It was called “Cities First; Rural Development Later” and it became part of chapter 1. In it, Jane breathed a new, invented city into the world, “New Obsidian.”

  Once, long ago, humans were hunter-gatherers. Living in small bands, they killed animals, gathered nuts and berries, surviving on what they could collect in the wild. That was human existence for eons. Then, ten or twelve thousand years ago—on this figure, at least, there is not too much scholarly disagreement—people began to domesticate animals and to plant and harvest crops. With the resulting agricultural bounty, the story went, stable and settled communities developed, and with them crafts, division of labor, complex social organization, and, ultimately, cities. In short: Agriculture first, urban development later.

  Jane didn’t think so. “Our understanding of cities, and also of economic development generally, has been distorted by the dogma of agricultural primacy. I plan to argue,” she wrote in The Economy of Cities, “that this dogma is as quaint as the theory of spontaneous generation,” the idea that, for example, maggots festering in rotten meat come to life out of nothing. Here was “a vestige of pre-Darwinian intellectual history that has hung on past its time.” Jane wished to advance quite a contrary notion, one that might seem “radical and disturbing” to some—that cities came first and from them, agriculture.

  To illustrate the idea, she created first in her mind’s eye, then for her readers, New Obsidian, located on the Anatolian plateau of Turkey near a real city, Çatal Hüyük, the ruins of which had been discovered by the British archaeologist James Mellaart some years before. Obsidian, of course, was real enough—a tough, black glass produced in volcanoes, in some ways the nearest thing to steel, used to make early man’s sharpest cutting tools, knives, arrowheads, and spearheads; yet, gleaming and glossy as it was, it was used for mirrors, too. Trade in it was known to go back to at least 9000 BC, among and between hunting groups, in small settlements. One of them, in Jane’s reconstruction, becomes New Obsidian, a nascent city.

  Over the course of twenty manuscript pages, we wa
tch it grow. Its population climbs. Its people become skilled at crafts. Traders from afar visit, bartering for obsidian with goods from their own hunting territories. Likewise, traders fan out from New Obsidian, the volcanic mineral in hand to barter, trading for copper, shells, and pigment. In both directions, commerce includes nonperishable food, especially live animals and hard seeds. In time, some of the animals are domesticated. Some of the seeds, not immediately consumed, are sown, at first haphazardly, in time with patience and care. Under the watchful eyes of local inhabitants, hybrids, crosses, and mutants lead to better, more bountiful food, superior to wild strains. All this takes place in the budding city’s relatively safe, protected precincts. “Prosperity is a prerequisite. Although time is necessary, time by itself does not bestow cultivated grains.” But the two together do. Agriculture, as we know it, comes to New Obsidian.

  But New Obsidian had been there first.

  Copper in the Caucasus, Jane allowed, or the trade in seashells from any coastal settlement, could have served as well to tell her story. But this, anyway—cities as the basis for agriculture—was what Jane was getting at. Of course, she was writing about more than agriculture, more than cities. She was writing about the tides of economic growth.

  III. TECHNICOLOR DREAMING

  Early in 1967, invitations to give talks in Hannover, West Germany, and in London took Jane, at age fifty, out of North America for the first time. In her almost monthlong travels through Europe, she proved an eager tourist and, in her letters home, a gifted raconteur. And maybe more: she seems liberated, as if being off in Europe, away from her book’s demands, left her freer to declaim on anything at all that caught her eye. These were not vapid postcard jottings, but small gems of reportage and memoir that together make for a fresh and lively picture of Jane in a new setting.