Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  She wrote of her struggle with unfamiliar foreign currencies; of the short skirts the English girls wore; of a large hospital with projecting sunporches designed by Finnish architects, commending it to the attention of her husband, the hospital architect; of a Denmark that was clean, neat, and manicured: “When our living room is all cleaned up it looks very much like Denmark.” At a club, she saw how the Danes loved jazz. “But the dancers,” she lamented, “are much too sedate and uninventive and self-conscious. I kept wishing they could see some Americans doing the monkey.” She visited many places and met many people, but plainly she missed home. “I hope you get my letters,” she wrote from Amsterdam, to Bob, Ned, and Mary (Jimmy was away in college). “I think of you so often.” Once she reached London, she noted with evident pleasure, she’d be on a clock only five hours off, not six, from that of her family in New York.

  On January 25, about a week into her trip, Jane wrote a long letter home from her Venice-bound train. She’d given her talk in Hannover, a city she found nicely rebuilt after the war’s devastation. Frankfurt, by contrast, had come as a shock—“dirty, garish, ugly and just plain mean looking,” redeemed only by Goethe’s rebuilt house, in whose music and game room she saw early pianos, clocks, and chessboards. “You could play chess in that house almost anywhere the fit took you!” On the plane from Frankfurt to Milan, she caught her first sight of the Alps. “Snow covered, wild, beautiful and incredible: peaks, valleys, glaciers and finally the lake bordering Switzerland and Italy.” But Milan had been shut in by fog, so they’d had to land in Genoa instead, and now she was sprawled across three seats of a nearly empty first-class train carriage bound for Venice.

  The following morning, installed at her hotel, drinking her coffee after breakfast in her room, she thought back to her arrival early the previous morning. She’d come in the fog—“just enough to enhance the mystery and beauty.” Getting off at the Rialto, a porter had escorted her across Venice to the hotel, Jane’s bag atop his head. “This walk through the streets was enchanting, in the quiet and the fog; through a maze of astounding alleys, steps, bridges, squares, hidden corners, populated only by cats.”

  She’d enjoyed her day in the city. “I spent most of yesterday walking the streets,” which she liked more than the fabled canals, “and could hardly stop.” And then, on into the night, “when the city had returned to the cats and the fog, and a few people were left, most of them singing as they walked. This city is so beautiful it almost breaks your heart.”

  Two days later, she was in Paris, writing just to Mary this time, thanking her for her “dear, lovely letter. I was so glad to get it, and have read it about ten times.” She told Mary about a street along the river where they sold birds, goldfish, and turtles. “The whole street for blocks was like a big, cheerful pet store. I also saw a church with stained glass so beautiful it was like standing inside a jewel.” She promised to save a coin from each country she visited; she’d ask Jimmy to drill a hole in each so she could make a necklace or bracelet from them.

  A week later she was finally in London. She went on a walking tour of the city, visited the Tower of London, was later taken to “one of those great and famous London clubs for a drink.” This was a men’s club, but one that opened its great gates to women “for about an hour on Fridays. This radical move is a 5-year experiment!” Well, she did see the rooms of the club—“what a palace, what a refuge”—but she saw no club members. “Evidently they all clear out while the weekly experiment occurs. Bill & I were the only souls to be seen except for the servants.”

  On February 7, at a meeting of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Jane gave the last of her scheduled talks, which was like a work in progress, a foretaste, of The Economy of Cities: How did some cities come to prosper? One way was when a product or service “produced for a market within [the city slips] into supplying people outside.” Case in point: London’s Carnaby Street clothing makers, for years serving only the locals, had in the early 1960s become an icon of hip and cool in world fashion. This kind of transformation, a “slippage” from purely local to export markets, represented one path toward economic vibrancy.

  This was her last talk, she wrote the night after it was over, and she was “so relieved that that is done. Now I feel truly on vacation. NO MORE SPEECHES.” Jane appended a PS: “In answer to your question, Bob, I hardly can stand it. I dream about you, in full technicolor, if you know what I mean.”

  From Chester, near the border of Wales, after a bit of sightseeing and tea with the mayor, Jane wrote home grousing about another dull evening with the planners. “These people are tiresome beyond belief about their new towns, etc. I wish they would just leave me alone.” By now this was a vexing problem for her and, on the train to Edinburgh the next day, she set her mind to solving it. That evening, the chill of the house where she was staying relieved by a roaring fire and a hot water bottle in bed, she wrote home with her solution, which was simply “to enjoy my own company instead.” The following evening, inaugurating her strategy, she “took charge of the conversation and never let it get on the subject of planning for more than 30 seconds.” She pulled off this feat right there, in front of the great Sir Robert Matthew, eminent Scottish modernist architect, who “came absolutely hating me…and determined to do me in,” needling her, goading her. She responded by simply lapsing into “funny stories about Higgins, North Carolina.” Worked like a charm. “Sir Robert left madder than ever, I suspect, but I for one had a good time. This will be my policy henceforth. I get a bang out of my own stories, fortunately.”

  She’d largely succeeded, she continued, at avoiding tours of dreary projects and reviewing student work. She still owed an appearance at several cocktail parties and dinners, but she’d managed to see something of Edinburgh on her own—especially its glorious castle, “complicated and wonderful, with keeps within keeps, and strategic points superimposed upon strategic points,” the whole edifice “intricately incorporated into and upon the great rocky outcropping on which it rises.” She’d visited a bagpipe shop, too, talking for an hour with the instrument maker about the wood used for the pipes, a bagpipe lesson from the next room sounding all the while.

  It was February 9. Soon she’d be off to Glasgow, then Belfast on the 13th, Dublin on the 14th, and, after close to a month away from her family in the great cities of Europe, a 6:45 p.m. arrival on the 16th in New York.

  CHAPTER 17

  GAS MASKS AT THE PENTAGON

  ON APRIL 10, 1968, after a noisy disturbance at a public hearing, Jane was arrested, packed into a squad car, and driven to the local precinct house. Later she would be fingerprinted, photographed for mug shots, and charged with riot, inciting to riot, criminal mischief, and obstructing government administration; each alone could get her a year in jail. It was not the first time Jane had been arrested. The earlier incident stemmed from her opposition to the war in Vietnam; this one from her opposition to a highway. No napalm and carpet bombing here, just off-ramps and asphalt, jobs for construction workers, a few minutes lost or gained in getting to New Jersey—infrastructure, for goodness’ sake.

  It was called the Lower Manhattan Expressway. It was to have been two and a half miles long, connecting two East River bridges at the lower tip of Manhattan to one Hudson River tunnel. Today, it doesn’t exist. If it did exist, reminisced Jane’s editor, Jason Epstein,

  the building I live in would be gone. There would be no mozzarella in the morning, no Chinatown, no garment industry with its thousands of entry-level jobs, no grandmothers taking their children to school, no De Sica films on warm summer evenings and no SoHo with its lovely cast iron buildings, its cobbled streets, its restaurants, its galleries and shops and its millions, indeed billions of dollars of taxable property.

  At least in broad brushstrokes, the Lower Manhattan streets the expressway meant to erase look today much as they did then, only better.

  We speak today of habitat preservation, of protecting natural resources, virgin for
est, and family farms against the ravages of sprawl, each properly seen as precious, worthy of strong feeling. For those who opposed the Lower Manhattan Expressway, there was also a precious habitat at risk, only not a natural one. It was a product of human hands, a patch of tightly textured city. Someone encountering it for the first time, newly arrived from, say, a Phoenix suburb or a Kansas farm, might be hard-pressed to see it as a distinct thing at all, much less one inspiring nurture or affection. But this crowded urban landscape harbored homes, whole communities, businesses representing many lifetimes’ work, and, more broadly yet, a way of life.

  —

  In Death and Life Jane had much to say about highways and cars, especially in the chapter “Erosion of Cities or Attrition of Automobiles”:

  Today everyone who values cities is disturbed by automobiles.

  Traffic arteries, along with parking lots, gas stations and drive-ins, are powerful and insistent instruments of city destruction. To accommodate them, city streets are broken down into loose sprawls, incoherent and vacuous for anyone afoot.

  And so on, a litany of sins that today can seem overfamiliar or self-evident. But then, Jane, being Jane, had the nerve to take an abrupt turn: “But we blame automobiles for too much.” Soon she was taking us back to London, circa 1890, a hell of horse manure, mud, and stench, of metal-rimmed wheels grating on granite, “the creaking and groaning and chirping and rattling of vehicles, light and heavy,” all raising a din beyond imagining. This, noted Jane, was Ebenezer Howard’s London; small wonder he saw city streets as unfit for human beings. “Stop telling ourselves fairy tales,” wrote Jane, “about the suitability and charm of nineteenth century streets for horse-and-buggy traffic.” The automobile, with its internal combustion engine, could even be seen as a force “for liberating cities from one of their noxious liabilities.” Jane herself didn’t drive, normally getting around New York on foot, by bike, on the subway, or by cab. But Bob did drive and the family did have a car, kept in a garage on Greenwich Street and used mostly for vacations.

  The car, in itself, then, was not the problem. However, “we went awry,” Jane wrote, by replacing each horse “with half a dozen or so mechanized vehicles, instead of using each mechanized vehicle to replace half a dozen or so horses.” Too many cars was the problem, cars with every provision made for them, cars taking up space, crowding out everything else. Cars eroded cities; this was the word Jane used, with its intimations of a good thing worn away: a street widened here, roaring one-way traffic there, parking lots, more and bigger parking lots, a bridge double-decked. And finally, as Jane wrote, “an expressway is cut through yonder, and finally whole webs of expressways.” So that in the end there was nothing left but highways, cars, and parking lots, once-bustling city centers worn down into nothing, reduced to “a great, thin smear.”

  But in the 1960s, Manhattan remained the exception to all this.

  A trio of early-twentieth-century suspension bridges linked Manhattan Island to Brooklyn. Several more modest spans across the Harlem River tied it to the Bronx and beyond. Two tunnels had, since about the time Jane moved to New York, connected it, beneath the Hudson, to New Jersey, supplanting a network of ferries. The George Washington Bridge, opened in 1931, at the northern end of the borough, made for a third trans-Hudson link. Traffic circulated up and down Manhattan’s spine along west- and east-side highways.

  But, and here was the difference, little of this network actually penetrated Manhattan’s interior. That is, cars coming in through the bridges and tunnels didn’t feed into expressways but rather perfused into the city’s dense capillary street grid, leaving its twenty-three square miles, in a sense, pristine, the city’s fine-textured tissue relatively intact.

  Since the war and on into the 1960s, car ownership had climbed in New York, as elsewhere in America. But once your car or truck got onto Manhattan Island—bound for New Jersey, say, or for a delivery in Lower Manhattan—it all but stopped, its speed through streets clogged with people, buses, cabs, trucks, and carts dropping to single digits. For Robert Moses, Jane’s antagonist intellectually, socially, politically, and every other way, the Lower Manhattan Expressway would cure all that. It needed to be built, if movement and commerce in the great metropolis were to be preserved. All this was obvious to Moses; so much was so obvious to Robert Moses.

  The expressway, which would run mostly along Broome Street, skirting Greenwich Village to the north and Little Italy to the south, had a long history in Moses’s plans for leaving the nineteenth-century city behind. Over the past thirty years, he had built the Belt Parkway around the perimeter of Brooklyn, pushed the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Cross-Bronx Expressway through once-intact neighborhoods of those outer boroughs, linked the city to Long Island through the Long Island Expressway, Manhattan to Brooklyn through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. But several cross-Manhattan expressways bruited about since as early as the 1920s, including the Lower Manhattan Expressway, had so far come to nothing.

  At various times, the new expressway was imagined to pass behind the buildings fronting Broome Street, or at various heights above it, as a skyway. In some schemes it was tied to housing, or maybe a school, in some even dropped beneath the street, there to be slipped in, around, and through the existing tangle of subway tracks, pipes, conduits, steam lines, and water mains. In its details, the design was forever changing. But by the time Jane got involved, it was established that LOMEX, as it was sometimes called, would be a Y-forking, eight-lane thoroughfare channeling traffic from the East River bridges across Lower Manhattan to the Holland Tunnel and New Jersey. Established, too, was that it would take with it the homes of two thousand people and ten thousand jobs—and these were the estimates of its proponents.

  In October 1961, a local real estate man, Stephen Freidus, wrote the owners of buildings along the expressway’s right-of-way. Demolition and relocation being inevitable, he advised them, they’d need to “consider [their] present space requirements.” If, as he expected, they planned to relocate soon, he’d be glad to help. Call him at the office, he urged them, or call him at home: “[I] prefer to offer my services on a 168-hour per week basis.” Mr. Freidus, it seems, was a high-energy fellow, if maybe too much so for his own good. He wrote Jane’s old nemesis, New York Department of City Planning head James Felt, of his plans, adding, “Please do not regard me as being too forward.” That was just how Felt regarded him: “The methods that you have used distress me and do not reflect creditably upon you.” But the expressway was inevitable, anyway, Freidus might have replied.

  Certainly it seemed inevitable when, in 1962, Jane was dragged into the fight against it. For the moment, she was still at Forum. Her book was out. She had helped hold off the urban renewal octopus in the West Village; locally, she was famous for it. “Now,” she remembers, “I could get along only with my job and with my domestic duties and interests as a wife and mother. My, wasn’t life calming down?” And then—this was probably early spring—Father La Mountain showed up at her door. Could she help?

  Father Gerard La Mountain was the young pastor of the Church of the Most Holy Crucifix, which served a poor parish at the edge of Little Italy. The church itself, with its ornate, brick-fronted exterior tucked in between residential and commercial neighbors, fronted on Broome Street, directly in the crosshairs of the expressway. Father La Mountain faced the loss of his home, his church, and his parishioners, who by now had mostly surrendered to lethargy and fatalism. Parts of the neighborhood had already been condemned, including the church itself. People like Stephen Freidus were busy trying to make a buck out of the situation. It was a classic case of a neighborhood’s vitality sapped long before the first wrecking ball crashes down on some antique treasure of a building.

  Could Jane help?

  Her first reaction was no, she couldn’t.

  Oh, she wanted to help. The expressway would be every bit the disaster Father La Mountain said it would be—for the church, for his parishioners, for Broome Street, for
all of Lower Manhattan. It would all but destroy Little Italy. Its ramps and interchanges would slice through the west and east sides alike. The Village, too, was threatened; Broome Street was just seven blocks south of Washington Square. Still, “I felt very resistant to getting into another fight. I wanted to work on my work,” the city economics book. The expressway was not her work.

  But she relented. “Oh well,” she’d tell an interviewer years later. “Couldn’t be helped.” In the earliest stages of the expressway fight, she was uninvolved, Father La Mountain being the key figure. Likewise at the tail end, by which time she’d left New York. But during the vital middle period, from about 1962 to 1968, Jane was in the thick of it.

  Was the Lower Manhattan Expressway by now just more of the same for Jane Jacobs, like an orthopedic surgeon’s 117th hip replacement operation? After all, as she’d say later, Father La Mountain approached her hoping that “some of these seasoned fighters” from the West Village wars could help him. And he was right—Jane was by now a seasoned street fighter, a pro, with established methods, worked-out ideas. In a sense LOMEX would be second nature to her; there’d be hearings to attend, strategies to devise, supporters to mobilize, media to cultivate, morale to keep up. And, it seems, songs to write: “Listen, Robert Moses” spoke out against Moses’s bulldozers and highways. Its author was Bob Dylan, living in the Village since early 1961 and still largely unknown, his first album not yet released.

  Jane and the joint committee, of which she was co-chair, faced opposition from Moses, but also from much of the city’s political and planning establishment. James Felt liked to call the neighborhood broken up by the expressway Hell’s Hundred Acres—“making us sound,” recalled Jane, “as if we believed in fire traps and dilapidation.”