Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Oh, I know Gordie Howe…She seemed really interested in them. She turned them over while she was feeding one baby, read all the statistics. These are amazing cards. Let’s organize them. And he loved that. He was just thrilled to have the attention. I remember this so clearly. Because I saw the sun come up and it was the first time since the babies were born…the first time that I had silence. It was like velvet.

  Of course, the woman was Jane Jacobs, though it was a year before Gildner realized it, her husband pointing her out one day while shopping on Bloor Street.

  Never itself celebrated in any of her books, as 555 Hudson Street was in Death and Life, the Albany Avenue house became a place of pilgrimage; Jane would have abhorred the word, but it wasn’t far wrong. Mayors and other civic leaders, journalists and scholars, would come to work out political strategies, try out ideas, settle in to the bouts of intellectual combat she relished. “She had a droll, dry way of speaking,” remembers Bobbi Speck. “She never showed emotion…She was expressionless, like an ancient tortoise.”

  Meanwhile, Canada took with Jane. “I find all the threshing around that goes on here about a Canadian identity absolutely bewildering,” she told an interviewer as early as 1970. “When you come here from outside, as I did, you know immediately what ‘Canadian’ means.” To her, it meant common sense and less suspicion of government; Jane was much impressed with how calmly Canada opened its arms that summer to a threatened “hippie invasion.” She developed “faith in the Canadian character, in [its] whole lack of hysteria as a people, in [its] refusal to be caught up in what I call ‘righteous manias.’ ”

  In September 1974, six years after immigrating, Jane became a citizen. She went to a special court in Toronto, paid a $12 fee, filled out an application, submitted passport and birth certificate, and, a few weeks later, was summoned to appear before a federal judge. The judge was a woman about as old as Jane who had herself emigrated from Poland a quarter century before. At one point Jane volunteered that she liked Canada’s “mosaic” idea: immigrants and their descendants did not need to wholly assimilate but could retain their ethnic and linguistic roots, like brightly colored tiles contributing to the whole. That was better, it seemed to her, than the American “melting pot” idea, which looked to erase such differences. At this, the judge laughed. Wasn’t always like that. After first coming to Canada she’d worked in a factory where the manager forbade her to speak Polish with other Poles, warning she’d be fired if she did. She did, and she was. Sometimes, said the judge, Canadian women would say to her, “Oh yes, my mother had a Polish maid.” To this, she’d reply, “So did my mother, four or five” of them.

  A few weeks later, Jane appeared for her swearing-in and, with eighty-nine others from around the world, became a Canadian citizen. Each in turn approached the bench, placed their hands on the Bible, and vowed to “bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her heirs and successors.” The judge “listened with close attention to each one of the 89, not a sign of boredom or of his mind wandering, as if it were all just as important to him as to the person making the oath,” then shook hands with each and handed them the certificate of citizenship.

  —

  We know just how Jane became a Canadian because she wrote a long letter describing it. Its recipient was Bessie Robison Butzner, her mother, since 1946 living in Virginia, near her son John, and who, in her nineties now, was still in passably good health.

  In another letter to her mother, in 1971, Jane wrote about the vacation she’d just spent with Bob in the Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco: they’d spent time with old friends, a prosperous farmer and his family whose company shipped bananas, strawberries, and vegetables all over Europe. Jane told of their experimental bulb breeding, how the pigs lived mainly on rejected tomatoes, cattle on the cores of chopped-down banana plants. She described the farm’s water supply, how water ran from deep wells in the mountains, through rough country into aqueducts, reservoirs, and irrigation pipes; how the family planned to cultivate a wild-growing breed of cactus that required no irrigation and harbored a particular insect—cochineal, from which a valuable red dye could be extracted. The plan was to pick off insects from the plants by vacuum cleaner. Jane went into the family’s whole business and social philosophy, as well as the island’s extraordinary scenery—“wild mountains and great gorges with tiny valleys and here and there little, almost isolated, villages”—contrasting its tourist economy with those of the Caribbean.

  This and Jane’s many other letters to her mother from the 1970s, now housed at the Burns Library at Boston College, of course say something of Jane herself. In their number and frequency, they reflect, at least, a good daughter’s dutifulness. And they suggest she is not indifferent to earning her mother’s pride and respect—not when, seemingly in passing, she mentions being offered $2,000 to give the Dunning Trust lectures at Queen’s University, or that Death and Life had been named a “core book” for the American Association of University Women’s continuing education program: “Just thought you might be interested to see this,” she writes of that announcement. “Don’t bother to return it.” But that Jane could write to her mother letters so rich in ideas, insights, and personal experiences, in sometimes astonishing detail, reflects, in the first place, her confidence that Bess Butzner would care to hear them, would be interested in them. Plainly, this went back a long way.

  On May 1, 1973, Jane wrote her mother about her son’s ambitious bike project. At a Chinese export fair, Jimmy, then twenty-five, had inquired about whether he might import bicycles to Canada. Soon he’d bought thirty of them—Flying Pigeon was the brand name—for $19 each, planning to sell them for $60. The bikes dutifully arrived, in pieces. Actually, in many pieces. Putting them together was no matter of merely attaching wheels to the frame, or even building up wheels from hub, spoke, and rim. No, the hubs themselves had to be assembled. They came with bags of ball bearings that had each to be inserted in thick grease to hold them in place. Jim’s assembly team included his parents, who, he asserts, didn’t have to be begged or otherwise dragooned into service. “They were enthusiastic to do it.” The bikes arrived just before Easter, Jane wrote her mother. Jim had

  rented a little garage around the corner where he puts them together, weekends and at night. Bob and I spent the whole Easter weekend, just about, assembling wheels. It is quite wonderful to see a beautiful bicycle wheel form in your hand from a rim, a hub, a handful of wires [spokes] and a little pile of screws. They are quite tricky to put together properly, and Jimmy wrote out the directions for us, which he figured out from analyzing the wheel on his bike. Each bike has 408 parts which have to be assembled! No directions. Names of things in Chinese…The bikes are really beautiful, everything of such high quality and so well made. Beautifully machined, solid parts. Splendid seats, of thick, real leather.

  A few months later, on November 6, 1973, back from a trip to Kyoto, the old imperial capital of Japan, and Tokyo, where she appeared at an international congress on industrial design, Jane wrote her mother:

  The inn in Kyoto was so beautiful. Very simple, but serene and lovely. My rooms consisted of an entrance room; a main room in which a low table was set for my breakfast and dinner, then put aside at night when my bed was brought out of the closet (a thick pad on the floor, very comfortable), a little alcove, all glass, with a table and dressing table and a cushion on the floor in front of it; and a Japanese bath with a wooden tub always full of hot water, kept hot by a heating system around the tub. All the rooms except the bath were floored with thick, comfortable and beautiful straw matting, and the walls were sliding paper; on the outside, sliding glass. All this looked out into a small but beautiful garden. I was waited on by a very tiny lady in a blue kimono who could speak no English. We got along very well with pantomime.

  Among regular features of Jane’s letters during these years were gardening news; odd real-time snippets, as when she broke in to tell of “three black squirrels, all
racing around the yard, chasing each other like crazy”; and, of course, news of the grandchildren. During the early to mid-1970s, with America and Canada caught up in baby boom–fueled youth rebellion, this made for an especially rich vein of interest. In 1971, to pick a year, Jim was twenty-three and a graduate student in physics at the University of Toronto. Ned was twenty-one and all over the world, traveling in Europe, Asia, and western Canada. Mary was sixteen, embarked on adventures of young life and spirit.

  Just thirteen when the family arrived in Toronto, Mary was enrolled in Jesse Ketchum School, a public school within walking distance of the Spadina Road house. But school—she’d only recently escaped the untender mercies of the New York City schools—had always been trouble for her. “I was behind already,” she remembers back to that time. And it was so wildly different from New York; Canadians “did odd things, like field hockey.” Ultimately, she dropped out of high school. For a while she enrolled in a local “free school” inspired by A. S. Neill’s Summerhill ideology; she need take no particular courses but, somehow, was responsible for her own education. “We deprogrammed ourselves,” is what she says today. She put together some course, or experience, or something, in art, but soon, by age sixteen, feeling a little lost, drifted out west.

  Any drifting by Mary or the other Jacobs children didn’t seem to much worry their parents; whatever they wanted to explore was fine with Jane and Bob. When Mary wound up in a tiny town in western Canada, she says today, that was all right with them; the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities had “nothing against rural areas or small towns.” Jane wrote to her own mother in July 1972 about how Mary “went to a country fair run by a farmers cooperative, and they served up two roast pigs each weighing 200 pounds, and 200 pounds of baked potatoes and carrots. Guess who carved the pigs? Mary!!…She says, ‘a truly excellent weekend.’ ”

  But even Jane could fret about her youngest child most of the way across the continent. Or so concluded Jane’s friend and neighbor, Toshiko Adilman, whom she’d met at a neighbor’s tea soon after arriving on Albany Avenue. A Japanese-English interpreter married to a local journalist and herself a new mother, Toshiko was sometimes left slack-jawed by Jane’s laid-back parenting style. But then one day, as they spoke of Mary’s cross-country wanderings, Jane blurted out, “She’s too young, don’t you think?” You might expect to hear that from any parent of a teenager who’d left home. But hearing it from Jane, who “accepted everybody” just as they were, encouraging them in any direction they wanted to go, in whatever they wanted to do, this, to Toshiko, was actually comforting. “It was the only time Jane showed concern in a normal parental way.” Finally, she could conclude, “After all, she’s normal!” On one trip, Mary hitchhiked across Canada in the middle of winter, wearing a coat she’d made from a heavy sheepskin rug. “Jane was worried until she saw how bulky that coat made her look,” recalls Ned. “No one was going to mess with her.”

  For a while, Mary lived on Texada Island, up the Strait of Georgia from Vancouver. Ned, who’d missed his New York friends, found Toronto “socially cold,” and had earlier hitchhiked to Vancouver himself, visited her, and reported back, as Jane wrote to her mother, that Mary lived “in a little log cabin, with permission of the family that owns it, and she is really entranced with life in the wilderness…She reproved Ned for chattering too much; she told him that all that talking is a city trait.” She’d “fed Ned on clams, mussels, mushrooms, wild onions, huckleberries, all of which she had gathered, bread and porridge that she made, and bacon and eggs and potatoes that she bought.”

  Then, December: “Day before yesterday we had a grand surprise. Mary returned. She looks strong and healthy and beautiful, and is full of life and good spirits…You can imagine how happy we are to see her, and what a good time we have been having listening to her adventures.” Mary was with her boyfriend, Doug, with whom, it seemed to Jane, she was happily in love. Would they marry? Doug, at twenty-seven, was old enough to know his own mind. But Mary, it seemed to her, “is still awfully young for marriage.”

  Soon she wasn’t “Mary” at all.

  Her name, it seems, had long bothered her. It carried New Testament baggage and bore as blandly feminine a stamp as any name you could imagine, while she saw herself as almost beyond gender. So she cast about for a new name, one that better reflected who she really was. She chose Burgin, the maiden name of a relative of her father. “I really love that family connection,” she says; growing up, she’d heard it around the house, though she didn’t even know how to spell it. (“I’m not that big on spelling,” she says.) But she decided to try it; soon everyone was calling her Burgin, and Burgin she has remained.

  To one family friend, Burgin was going about as far as she could to slip from Jane’s shadow. Heading west at so young an age perhaps also reflected that impulse—or so another family friend, Toshiko Adilman, had heard it conjectured. For Riley Henderson, the husband of Jane’s niece, Jane Butzner, the switch to Burgin reminded him of how some black people rejected their old slave names and stared over with unusual new ones. As for Jane herself, she had some trouble adapting, occasionally slipping back into “Mary,” or, on a few occasions, misspelling it as “Bergin” or “Bergen.”

  —

  “Day after tomorrow,” Jane wrote Jason Epstein—this was June 1975—“Bob and I are off to Vancouver and the wilderness beyond to see our West Coast contingent. Mary and Doug will put us up in their second tipi, which fortunately they haven’t sold yet. We’ll be back July 7, and then, to work with a will.”

  To work, that is, on her third book, unfinished after five years.

  CHAPTER 20

  OUR JANE

  BE REGULAR AND ORDERLY in your life, like a bourgeois,” Flaubert once wrote, “so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

  Something like that goes for Jane Jacobs. Her life on Albany Avenue might seem all middle-class solidity. She maintained family traditions. Right there in her daybook you find her Thanksgiving grocery list: turkey, cranberries, stuffing, onions. Each year, like clockwork, she prepared the Christmas ham according to the same set schedule. Christmas cookies, too. And cookie cutters to make Christmas cookies. “We made a lot of new cutters,” she wrote David Gurin in December 1971, “including a (recognizable!) Venus de Milo, because the arms were always breaking off our cookie people anyway.” Only when she escaped to her study could she set her mind entirely free. There she read, indulged the play of her intellect, hammered out her ideas—crude, unformed ideas at first, caught up in wayward tangles of fact, theory, observation, and memory—into sentences, paragraphs, and books.

  Well, in principle, anyway. Because all through the 1970s and beyond a new book she wanted to call Free Cities, planned since at least 1970, hadn’t materialized. In June of that year, she’d written Jason Epstein, “At last I’m down to serious work…and am not going to get diverted any more. All this time I’ve really been sort of figuring things out.” Certainly she’d been thinking big. Jane’s son Ned recalls the two of them in a crowded Toronto subway car when “out of the blue she blurted out that she had plans for three more books.” Free Cities, she wrote Jason Epstein, was to be, with Death and Life and Economy of Cities, the third book in what she called “one coherent thing on the City.”

  The first signs of trouble, however, showed early on. In October 1971, responding to a preliminary draft of part of it, Epstein made it clear he didn’t like it. The pages she’d sent him would

  work well enough as an outline or précis for a book yet to be written, but I don’t think that they work quite well enough to serve as the beginning of the book itself. The argument is too abstract, too simply asserted and not sufficiently argued or demonstrated. For faithful converts like myself it will seem thin, obvious and repetitive; for the uninitiated it will seem obscure and willful.

  A week later, Jane wrote back. “You are absolutely right; your letter and marginal comments were wonderfully helpful; they set me on a
different tack which I might otherwise have groped for for a long time.”

  Two weeks later, Jane signed a contract for the new book. Now it was called Cities and Countries; it would later be published as Cities and the Wealth of Nations. In it, Jane would lay out a vision for the wealth of the world riding on the backs of innovative cities, economic decline the sad lot of places cut off from them. It was supposed to be fifty thousand words—short compared to Jane’s first two books—and was due at Random House on October 1, 1972. Needless to say, it didn’t get there.

  Back in July, Jane had written her mother:

  I’m working hard on my book these days, but there is a long way to go. If I think about the whole thing I’m appalled, and so mostly think about the part I’m at work on—which is enough to cudjel [a rare misspelling] my brains over. I’m not going to let anything more interfere with it, now that we’re moved, etc., and the expressway has been stopped.

  But she did let things interfere—or, rather, let us say, things interfered, whether Jane “let” them or not. Death and Life had, together with her activist notoriety, made her a public figure. The Economy of Cities only solidified her standing; she was no one-book wonder. In 1969, Vogue ran an interview with her that included a photo. “Mother,” she reputedly said to Mrs. Butzner, who had long lamented Jane’s lack of fashion savvy, “when was the last time your picture was in Vogue?” She wouldn’t have to put up with that nonsense anymore! Now, and all through the 1970s, Jane grew into the role of public citizen, and public intellectual, even as the times affirmed her ideas and ratified her sensibilities.