Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  The invitations went out. The Jacobses, of course, were invited.

  But Jane and Bob wrote back that they weren’t coming.

  PART III

  On Albany Avenue

  1968–2006

  CHAPTER 18

  A CIRCLE OF THEIR OWN

  THEY TOLD no one.

  Jane was still under indictment from the stenotype episode and couldn’t be seen as trying to elude the authorities. So it had to be a secret. And how is it a secret, Jim Jacobs asks today, if you tell people? Then it’s no secret. So they didn’t tell niece Jane Butzner, who was getting married the next day. They didn’t tell Pat Broms, Jim’s girlfriend and future wife. Didn’t tell family. Didn’t tell friends. Secrets didn’t come naturally to them. But this time the kids really had to keep their mouths shut, and so did Bob and Jane.

  They packed up the car, closed up the house, gathered their documents, and drove north. Jane immortalized the day, June 21, 1968, in her daybook: “GTC.”

  Go to Canada.

  They didn’t much trust their old Fiat Multipla, which, Jim says, was “breaking down every 40 minutes.” But some friends of Jane’s from her State Department days had an old VW bus—shipped to them at each new duty station from Cambodia to Copenhagen, family lore had it—and the Jacobses had bought it from them. It had no heater, it had a gazillion miles on it, and it was on its third engine, but it was more reliable than the Fiat, so that’s what they piled into for the trip.

  They aimed north for Lake Ontario, its eastern end, because it was closest. Mary and Ned sat in the back, singing the Bob Dylan song “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” collapsing in hysterics when they’d get to the last line: “I’m going back to New York City / I do believe I’ve had enough.” Neither of them had ever lived anywhere but New York City, and now they were leaving it, maybe forever. Was it especially hard for Mary, the youngest of them, just thirteen, leaving her adolescent social circle behind? Jim, for one, didn’t think so: “We were a circle of our own.”

  After four hundred miles through mostly rural upstate New York, they crossed the International Bridge spanning the St. Lawrence River, entering Canada at Ivy Lea, Ontario. Jane, Mary, and Ned, who for a few more days was still a minor, stayed in the car. Bob and Jim submitted their documents, applying for “landed immigrant” status, which is what Canada called permanent residents who were not Canadian citizens; one “landed,” as the Jacobses were doing, at an official point of entry. They were in and out in half an hour. No customs official or police officer so much as poked his head into the car. Soon they were on the road again to Kingston, thirty miles west along the north bank of the river, where they put up in a downtown hotel for the night. Next day it was on to Toronto, another three hours west.

  That night, Ned’s eighteenth birthday, they stayed at a campground outside the city. Bob and Jane slept in the car. The kids huddled in the tent, trying to keep dry in the ceaseless downpour that greeted their first days in Canada.

  —

  A year earlier, in 1967, Bob Jacobs had been in Toronto for a convention, staying at the venerable Park Plaza Hotel. At one point, he took time to look out over the city from the hotel’s famous eighteenth-floor rooftop patio, in those days a gathering spot for literary figures and bohemians; “If we think kindly of Toronto,” someone once said, “the Plaza roof confirms our opinions.” From there, below him, Bob would have been able to see the traffic splitting off around Queen’s Park, seat of the Ontario provincial legislature; to the east were the peaked and gabled halls of the University of Toronto; to the west, green swaths of playing field; two miles to the south, Lake Ontario—“the lake zinc in the distance,” as a character in a Margaret Atwood novel sees it from the roof’s balustrade. To a New Yorker, anyplace not New York could seem like the sticks, and thus unworthy of interest. But it didn’t seem that way to Bob now. He was due back in New York the next day, Jane would recount, but “he phoned me up and he said this looks like such an interesting city. Is it OK with you if I stay until tomorrow and see a little bit of it?”

  After walking around Yorkville, near the hotel, Bob took a bus downtown. By the waterfront, he bought a ticket for the ferry that took commuters and tourists to the Toronto Islands, several tiny rural enclaves located on small islands in the lake, less than two miles offshore. The ferry groaned away from the docks and gray industrial infrastructure of the Toronto waterfront, soon escaping its urban gravitational pull. Fifteen minutes later, it slid up to an island dock, clumps of cottages bordered by low wood fences swinging into view, country lanes, greenery…

  This was Toronto?

  This was Toronto.

  —

  Early the following year, as Bob’s son Ned moved inexorably toward his eighteenth birthday and, with it, vulnerability to the military draft, that day in Toronto stuck with him.

  Ned would soon be graduating from New York’s High School of Music & Art and had no particular interest in college (which would have “horrified” Aunt Betty and her husband, Jules, says his brother, Jim, but little troubled their parents). Mary was a sixth grader at Intermediate School 70, which she’d remember as a vast, awful, chaotic place, with two thousand students at a time crammed into the lunchroom and a “dean of discipline” who’d drag students through the halls screaming. As for Jim, after exhausting the science offerings at Bard College he’d transferred to Oberlin, where he’d be graduating in June. His adviser figured him for a doctoral program at Michigan State; but these days, physics research typically meant defense industry work, which he wouldn’t do. Without a student deferment, of course, he, too, would be liable to the draft.

  At the height of the war, America had more than half a million men under arms in Vietnam—more than it ever had in Korea, Iraq, or Afghanistan. The black stone walls of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington would be engraved with the names of the 58,000 Americans who died in the war. Deep inequities figured in who fought and who didn’t. College students and young men who snared occupational deferments (including me) avoided service. But unlike today, when all servicemen and servicewomen are volunteers, conscription touched everyone. At age eighteen, you had to register with the Selective Service System; this was “signing up for the draft,” and it was the law. Then, if health, educational, occupational, or other factors didn’t intervene, you’d be rated 1A, fit for service, inducted, and very likely shipped off to Vietnam.

  The Jacobs boys vowed they’d go to jail before they’d serve in a war that they, and much of the country, saw as immoral, senseless, and cruel.

  One evening, reading the paper, Bob thought, “A year from now I’ll be sitting in this chair and my boys will be in jail.” How would they survive it, locked up, vulnerable to unspeakable jailhouse cruelties? He couldn’t let it happen. “There’s a beautiful big country up north of us,” he said to Jane, “and I think we ought to go there.” He regaled her with what he’d seen that day in Toronto and was so enthusiastic she came around to the idea.

  Later, some wondered why Jane Jacobs, so long and deeply a New Yorker, had moved to Toronto. Or rather, why exactly, for there seemed no dearth of reasons. Jane and the family were exhausted from years of battling city hall; this was true. And with the war raging and soldiers in gas masks at the Pentagon, Jane saw America through a darker lens, her patriotism shaken; this was true, also. Meanwhile, American cities endured dark nights and days of racial tension and riot. All these and other factors could be heard to explain the flight of the Jacobs family, leaving one to conclude that maybe all of them—mixed all together, somehow, vaguely—were responsible.

  But no, that wasn’t it. It was simpler: the Jacobses left for Canada because Jane and Bob didn’t want to see their children go to Vietnam or, more likely, to jail.

  —

  June 1968, their third day in Canada.

  What do you do if you’re a New Yorker looking for an apartment in your city’s competitive housing market? Well, late in the evening you head for the nearest newsstand, pi
ck up the next morning’s papers, leaf through the classified ads for Apartments to Rent, circle the best prospects, and, early next morning, sit down at a phone and start calling. This was the only strategy the Jacobses knew and the first thing they did in Toronto was adapt it to their new circumstances. At a Kresge’s, which was not exactly a New York City newsstand, they bought papers, and set to work, having first stopped at the offices of the War Resisters League, a pacifist organization, for some rudimentary grounding in Toronto’s residential neighborhoods.

  The place they liked best, a ground-floor flat of a bow-fronted three-story house with a pitched roof at 58 Spadina Road, was vacant. But it couldn’t be rented right away, said one of the owners; he’d have to check with his sisters first. C’mon, Jim recalls his father insinuating, what kind of a man are you that you need to ask your sisters? Oh, all right, but there does need to be a lease. Bob helped him write one, a few sentences on a scrap of paper, so they could move right in. It was a little tight for the five of them. But they had a pocket-sized garden out back, complete with crabapple tree, insulated a bit from the traffic whizzing down Spadina Road. Next door was a nursery school, from which they could hear the shouts of children playing. Three days after leaving Hudson Street, they had a new home.

  Aside from this modest triumph, however, they got off to a wobbly start in their adoptive city: Toronto was tidier, and tighter, than the New York that had formed their habits and values. Jane, who in her plucky long-stridededness could be daunting as she crossed a busy street, was stopped for jaywalking. Bob was pulled over to the side for driving with his rearview mirror obstructed by furniture piled in the backseat. And Mary…well, Mary had the gall to step out at six o’clock one morning to explore the neighborhood; maybe that was a little too early, or maybe she was a little too young, but she caught the eye of two cops, who picked her up, brought her back to Spadina Road, and delivered a stern warning to her parents. All this within their first week in Toronto. “I don’t think we’re suited to this place,” Jane worried. At the least, it was going to be a big adjustment. “If you come from New York, Toronto doesn’t look like a city,” Jim recalls them feeling at first. It was a far cry from the ragged but familiar precincts of Hudson Street.

  From almost the moment they’d landed in Toronto, Bob had gone prospecting for jobs. He soon got an offer from the Toronto architect Eberhard Zeidler, whose firm had embarked on a big hospital project, the McMaster University Health Sciences Centre, in Hamilton, Ontario; seeking senior architects for it, Zeidler had heard about Bob from a trusted friend. By this point, Bob Jacobs was known as an expert in the design of surgical suites, was established enough to comment on “The Future of the American Hospital” for Architectural and Engineering News. Bob knew hospitals, knew everything that went into them. A doctor’s examination room needs space for an exam table, a sink, a cupboard, and so on; well, Bob knew the requirements for every arcane, out-of-the-way hospital space you could imagine, or couldn’t imagine. “He had an encyclopedic brain,” says a colleague from a few years later. Brought in as one of five or six top people on the McMaster job, Zeidler recalls Bob as “a great guy, funny, very clever, a good architect.”

  After Bob’s four-week “vacation” in Toronto, he had first to get back to his job in New York and give notice. But by summer’s end, he was working for Zeidler. Soon enough, he and Jane and Zeidler, an ex–German navy submariner who’d migrated to Canada after the war, and his wife, also named Jane, became good friends. Based on all he’d heard of Jane Jacobs, whose book he’d read, Zeidler figured her for something of a firebrand. But soon they were in and out of each other’s homes, trading recipes, Jane drawing particularly close to Zeidler’s daughter Margie.

  Soon after Jane’s arrival, probably late in 1968, Marshall McLuhan, the University of Toronto media critic, famous for his maxim “The medium is the message,” learned she was in Toronto. He asked her to lunch at the faculty club, then at one point visited her on Spadina Road. “You need a cleaning lady,” McLuhan pronounced. Well, yeah, maybe so, allows Jim, who tells this story. They’d just moved in, were exploring Toronto, getting used to things. “No one was thinking about cleaning. We were none of us clean-freaks.” McLuhan proposed his own housekeeper for the job, a Calabrian woman with limited English, Mary Malfara. “No, too dirty,” she said when she first saw the Spadina Road place. But she wound up working for the family for many years. In talking with her, Jane leaned toward vocabulary from the Latinate, “Italian,” side of English, and soon Mary could understand her. In time, built on their ongoingly imperfect conversation about children and other matters domestic, they became friendly, baby showers and weddings bringing the families together.

  Early in 1969, Jane sent her old editor at Forum, Doug Haskell, now retired, a kind of progress report:

  Bob is working on a large new teaching hospital, full of exciting new architectural ideas and procedures that I think would fascinate you, Doug. Jimmy…is working as a laboratory technician in the physics department at the University of Toronto, and says he is learning more than he would as a graduate student…Ned is writing a novel (!) in the mornings and has just gotten a job, about which he is very pleased and excited, in the afternoons as a kindergarten teacher to ten little boys whose energy and wildness were evidently too much for the regular, “elderly” (his report) kindergarten teachers. Mary is in the eighth grade at the same public school where Ned is working…My book is finally finished and will be out in May.

  In moving to Canada, the Jacobses were reenacting a scenario repeated thousands of times during the Vietnam War by draft dodgers, deserters, conscientious objectors, and others who judged America’s war in Southeast Asia immoral and unjust. Facing prison for resisting the draft or leaving their units, antiwar émigrés to Canada numbered at least fifty thousand. Many of them highly principled and well educated, they contributed much to their new country. Inevitably, some of them found their way to the Jacobs house.

  One was Cliff Esler, who’d been drafted around the time the Jacobses moved to Canada; he had spent the summer in basic training in New Jersey, then in advanced infantry training in Louisiana. Along the way he met veterans of the fighting back from ’Nam, “scary guys, telling scary stories” of killing and being killed, senselessly, brutally. For the first time, he thought, “Whoa, I’m not going to do this.” In October, he got his orders, for Long Binh, Vietnam, a big American base. But he wasn’t going. In his thirty-day leave before shipping out, he got the name of a Toronto contact, wrote a rant to be forwarded to the Army once he was gone, dumped a duffel bag full of uniforms into a trash can, boarded a plane for Toronto, entered the country with a visitor’s visa, and arranged to meet his Canadian contact at Rochdale College, a new experimental school near the University of Toronto. His contact’s name was Hester and she was a friend of the Jacobses’.

  The Jacobs family, he’d recall in an unpublished memoir, “welcomed me with open arms,” and soon he was a regular at the house, which softened his landing in Canada. “I was kind of surprised that they treated me as an equal,” he recalls. “It was, ‘Come on in and sit down.’ I loved going over there.” He often hung out with Ned, whom he thought voluble, enthusiastic, and cheerful; and Mary; and sometimes Jane’s nephew Paul Manson, Betty’s son, also much around the house during this period. One time, Cliff visited Jimmy at the physics lab where he worked and found himself agog—right there in front of him, Real Science! Ned and Mary, on the other hand, “were still in the teenage zone, not knowing what they were going to be, full of Love-is-in-the-air and Flower Power.” But always at the Jacobses there was the dinner table, the undisputed center of family life, gladiatorial arena for intellectual battle. Jane was forever challenging him: “ ‘You’re jumping to too big a conclusion there, Cliff,’ and invariably she was dead on.”

  He’d remember Jane, at fifty-two, as “a large haystack of a woman…with a thick, beaky nose and shoulder-length hair, dressed in the green mechanic’s coveralls whi
ch the whole family (particularly she and Jimmy) had adopted as their workaday uniform.” He’d remember her “owlish round tortoise-shell glasses”; her wry, ready laugh, her salt-of-the-earth mien, her approachability; her “drink of choice,” dry sherry, as well as the eggnog, spiked with apple brandy, that she’d make from scratch come Christmas. And he’d remember her traipsing down the street, “with two gigantic shopping bags, sagging,” stuffed with books, which for the next few days she’d retreat to her study to devour.

  One other impression stuck with him across the years: “She was not afraid of anything in the world”; it rubbed off on the children, too, “who tended to see things as exciting, as an adventure,” not scary. Jane, he says, was “genuinely fearless.”

  —

  Jane and the rest of the family had much to learn and absorb; spelling it “colour,” not “color,” was the least of their worries. They hadn’t immigrated to Somalia or Peru; Canada was different, but not very different—just different enough to catch you up. Local politicians ran for office in “ridings,” not districts. America’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was Canada’s “peace, order, and good government.” City, provincial, and federal relationships differed from their American counterparts just enough to leave you perplexed. Then there was the country’s French-English divide, with Quebec forever in tension with English-speaking Canada. And the peculiar relationship of Canada to the United Kingdom, with the queen of England the country’s head of state and the governor general her representative. From an American perspective, history could look quite upside down; those who’d fled the new United States for Canada after the American Revolution were now good guys, not unpatriotic Tories. Canadian dollars were normally worth roughly that of American dollars, but never exactly so. Canadians celebrated Thanksgiving, but not on the same day as Americans. Other holidays bore names like Victoria Day and Dominion Day. Then there was the first Monday in August, which, Jane wrote her mother, “is a holiday here, but Canadians don’t know what to call it.” None of this was intellectually daunting; unfamiliar street names, new maps to master, were the necessary work of every traveler. But still, it was all a little strange and new for a woman of fifty-two who’d spent her whole life in America, her adult life solely in New York City.