Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  —

  In the dozen years after publication of Death and Life, in schools of planning and architecture around the world, ideas were changing about cities. Years later, Nikolai Roskamm, an urban researcher at the Technical University of Berlin, would give it a name. He’d call it “the density turn,” referring to population density, as in so many dwelling units per acre, or people per square mile. Before Death and Life, high density was bad, period; you didn’t even need to think about it, you just reflexively imagined overcrowded slums. Then Jane Jacobs came along to say that density could be benign, a positive good; that cities needed high enough density to be vibrant places; that good neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Boston’s North End had higher densities, while some of the worst slums were low-density wastelands.

  In a thirty-page chapter, “The Need for Concentration,” she’d made a sustained, nuanced argument that unquestionably helped bring about a “paradigm shift”—an unsettling new way to see a subject that leaves you either holding on, futilely, to old truths or else forever and fundamentally changed. With Death and Life, Roskamm writes, “it became possible to swap the position ‘high density is evil’ with the position ‘density is urbanity.’ ” If you wanted lively streets, or a mass transit system that worked, or economic vibrancy, you needed people thronging together. This thinking, Roskamm allowed, hadn’t always made its way into urban planning regulations, which represented the old thinking. But among designers, planners, and architects all through the 1960s and into the 1970s, the great “turn” was evident. Jane’s arguments were taking hold and becoming part of what sophisticated people knew to be true. As the New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger would write a little later, Jane had become “standard urban theory.”

  —

  In St. Louis, the great experiment was over.

  A vast housing project—twelve thousand people, in thirty-three eleven-story buildings towering over fifty-seven acres on the north side of the city, acclaimed at the time of its construction in the early 1950s as a marvel of modernism, sure to benefit the poor people it would pluck from the slums—was, beginning one day in 1972, unceremoniously blown up. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, future architect of the New York World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, it had degenerated, with stunning swiftness, into a grim tableau of crime, vandalism, and despair. By the end it housed only the poorest of the poor.

  It was called Pruitt-Igoe and the footage of its last moments became a species of creepy urban porn: We see emptied buildings lined up, standing there, awaiting the firing squad, yet already lifeless. A moment of stillness. Then, in one building, on a lower floor, the first white puffs of the engineered explosions. And then, in rapid sequence, a succession of puffs, finally the whole building toppling to the ground in a paroxysm of smoke, thunder, dust, and debris. “Modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 pm,” the architecture critic Charles Jencks wrote of Pruitt-Igoe.

  Of course, things weren’t so simple. Modern architecture survived. And besides, Pruitt-Igoe did have its virtues. Its first residents had new apartments that were all anyone could want; “A poor man’s penthouse,” one of them called hers. Jane herself would write of Pruitt-Igoe, “I don’t think things should be blown up. I don’t think we can afford to be that wasteful. Instead of destroying them, we must learn to knit them back and make them part of the fabric of the city.” Still, for Jane, who had condemned New York’s own Pruitt-Igoes and the architectural and planning nostrums behind them, the dynamiting had to be an intellectually redeeming moment.

  —

  In a June 1974 letter to her mother, Jane apologized for not having written in a while. She excused herself because, first, “it is planting and weeding time and I have to hop to it to keep up with Nature, who has been giving us a glorious and incredibly beautiful spring”; and, second, because work on her book had left her so exhausted she could “hardly bring myself to hit those typewriter keys again until after a night’s sleep.” She went on to tell of the tomato plants on the roof, of tulips and lilacs past their prime, of how high and fast the bean plants had grown.

  Then, abruptly, the next paragraph: “A stupendous book has been written about Robert Moses.” The publisher had sent her a prepublication copy of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, all twelve hundred pages of it, so big that the prepub edition had to be bound in two volumes. She and Bob lay “in bed at night, propped up under the reading light with our twin volumes,” she wrote. “Jimmy says the sight is hilarious. Well, we always knew Moses was an awful man, doing awful things, but even so this book is a shocking revelation. He was much worse than we had even imagined.” Moses, long seen as the Goliath to Jane’s David, was now revealed, in damning detail, as bully and liar, destroyer of communities and lives.

  One more strike for Jane’s own more intimate and humane vision of city life.

  —

  In Toronto, you probably didn’t need to be aware of all these particulars to know that ideas about cities were changing and that Jane Jacobs had something to do with it. Over the years, Torontonians would lay claim to her, with friendly, familiar warmth, as “Our Jane”—as if to emphasize that she was no longer “Their Jane,” the Jane Jacobs of Hudson Street, New York City, USA. More and more she belonged to Toronto. She tried to keep her writing time sacrosanct, but that was hard when she was so often solicited for her advice, probed for her ideas, or sought out for her imprimatur on a project or petition.

  Soon after arriving in town, her husband’s employer, Eb Zeidler, who’d read Death and Life early on, consulted with Jane on a number of his projects. Like Eaton Centre, his firm’s vaulted, more-than-a-mall galleria in the middle of downtown Toronto and how it might better be stitched into the surrounding city, not walled off from it. Or his ambitious plan, never realized, for a complex of sixty thousand people sitting out on land reclaimed from Lake Ontario. Harbour City, it was called, and it represented, declared Jane at a press conference in May 1970, perhaps “the most important advance in planning for cities that has been made in this century.”

  Privately—and probably more comfortably—she prepared a memo on zoning principles to guide Harbour City. “Prohibitory” zoning forbade certain practices but left you free to do anything else. “Permissive” zoning allowed a few activities but barred everything else. Jane looked into noise and air pollution, inharmonious scale, ugly signs: The idea was to avoid “nasty, tacky collections of signs” but not standardize them or bar them outright. One strategy was to limit their area in square feet, another was to require approval of each one individually; neither approach was ideal. In any case, Jane wasn’t skating lightly over these tricky questions but digging down into them: nineteen pages on zoning.

  Partly through the Spadina Expressway fight, Jane drew close to a generation of young political figures who would grant her an entrée to city government she’d never had in New York. At the end of December 1972, she wrote Jason of the “fantastic election” just held in Toronto: “Many rascals out. Many unbelievably good people in.” The new mayor was David Crombie, who, as a young professor at Ryerson University, had actually taught Death and Life. Later, he’d be dubbed, in homage to his diminutive stature and immense popularity, Toronto’s “tiny, perfect mayor.” The new “reform” council included the community organizer and future mayor John Sewell, who, long before Jane arrived in Toronto, had battled, Jane-style, on behalf of a poor community. Both became Jane’s friends. Both brought energy, talent, and a dollop of ’60s idealism to the new Toronto.

  Before Jane arrived, Crombie says, Toronto still looked too much to the U.S.: “We need urban renewal and expressways, we need to learn from the U.S.,” was the attitude. Of course, when you looked across the border you might see Detroit in flames. But either way, “America was the constantly reminding background.” What Jane did for Torontonians of a certain urban bent “was not [so much] deliver her wisdom as legitimize our instincts…She gave a moral legitimacy to us.”

/>   To the suggestion, sometimes heard, that Jane’s personal influence on the city, apart from that of her books, was slight, Crombie doesn’t buy it: “If you could be any wronger than that,” he doesn’t know how. Alan Broadbent, a Vancouver-born philanthropist who came to Toronto in 1972, and a longtime admirer of Jane’s, allows that maybe you couldn’t draw an absolutely “straight line from her to any particular planning process” in Toronto, but “the power of her ideas was there,” and those ideas “became central tenets of Toronto planning.” Not just through her books but behind the scenes, in conversation, reviewing plans, recommending people, at public forums. And sometimes she was right there on the front lines.

  “This morning at 6:30 am,” Jane wrote Jason Epstein on April 5, 1973, “I helped knock down a lot of fences around some houses that were to be wrecked for a horrid apartment tower, thus staving off the wreckers, because they aren’t allowed to wreck without a fence up. Very satisfying.” Orchestrated by John Sewell, neighborhood groups had rallied at the corner of Dundas and Sherbourne streets, a shabby corner of the city just east of downtown. The day before, a high wooden fence—“hoardings,” in Canadian parlance—had been erected around the twenty old houses to be demolished. The houses were run-down, no question. But, fixed up, they’d be a lot better than the six identical apartment houses set to go up in their place; the province, the demonstrators felt, was imposing on the city something vacuous and impersonal. Those “gathered in the predawn dark that morning,” wrote Jane, didn’t at first know what to do. “But as they stood talking together and stomping their feet in the cold,” someone remembered that key regulation: no demolition without a fence.

  The remark was repeated from person to person, and group to group, and without another word everyone began taking action. You would be amazed at how rapidly and purposefully several hundred men, women, and children, with no one directing them, can dismantle a sturdily built fence and turn it back to neatly stacked piles of lumber.

  Their act of civil disobedience, Jane wrote, had left her almost giddy, primed for round two early the next morning. Of course, she added, “The schedule has its advantages. One can knock down fences and be back home, ready to go to work, at 8:30. Better than usual. Of course it makes you dreadfully sleepy by 10 at night.” The old houses were saved. Two days of fence whacking, together with Mayor Crombie’s pull, and they had the promise of a provincial loan that would permit building near the site without destruction of the old buildings.

  One of the first things Crombie did as mayor was set up a housing department to spearhead a new low- and middle-income housing project for downtown Toronto. A project? For poor people? Near downtown? Why, Toronto had one of those already. It was called Regent Park and, as Farewell Oak Street, an artful black-and-white film produced by the Film Board of Canada, attests, it was in 1953 still being offered as an example of modernist planning at its best.

  In the film we see an adolescent boy happily tossing a ball with his buddies in the new Regent Park; then, the grim past, as the same boys play amid slum rubble, the music’s disarming lilt yielding to dark, disturbing jazz notes. “This is how it used to be,” intones the narrator, “one of Toronto’s oldest streets, and not one of its best…Aged houses, crowded quarters, squalor. Not quite a slum, but close. Call it substandard. Life was unavoidably substandard, too.” Even around the supper table we see it—parents and children trading dark, menacing looks, only the clicking of utensils to break up the silence, the very air on edge. It’s the street’s fault, the film all but says, the street that bears the full load of slum pathology. In the new Regent Park, where “everything’s sparkling and new and tidy,” there is no street. No Oak Street or any other. The old blocks of two-story peaked-roof row houses have been torn down. In their place are mid-rise cruciform-shaped apartment buildings set in a superblock of lawns cut off from neighboring streets.

  Sound familiar? Altogether, a more modest, maybe more Canadian, version of George Washington Houses in East Harlem, built around the same time, in the same spirit—and a failure in the same degree. Just twenty years after it went up, Regent Park was on its way to becoming what some would call “the largest Anglo-Saxon slum in North America.” Ryan James, an anthropologist raised there, would observe at a Toronto urban history conference years later that it was perfectly possible to live a decent life in Regent Park. Certainly it was no Pruitt-Igoe. Still, in the early 1970s, Crombie and his housing head, Michael Dennis, wanted nothing like it for their new project.

  The plan was to house ten thousand people on fifty-six acres of underused industrial wasteland east of downtown and north of the railroad tracks paralleling the lakefront. But best to think of St. Lawrence, as it was named, as no “development” at all but as a skein of new cityscape knitted into the old, seamlessly worked into the existing street grid; in John Sewell’s words, it was “the new community downtown that felt like it has always been there.” Its central spine, Crombie Park, is lined by seven- to ten-story apartment buildings, their ground floors occupied by restaurants, grocery stores, hairdressers, schools. Behind them sit rows of traditional three-story townhouses. Mixed in are a few old buildings, vestiges of the area’s earlier industrial past. Well-off people live there, and not-so-well-off, in co-ops, condos, and private townhouses. New development has arisen spontaneously along its invisible edges. Thirty-five years after it went up, the local paper, The Globe and Mail, returned for an affectionate look back, taking the opportunity to pronounce St. Lawrence “the best example of a mixed-income, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly, sensitively-scaled, densely-populated community ever built in the province.” Altogether, the sort of neighborhood a Jane Jacobs could like.

  Christopher Klemek, a scholar of Jacobs and her work, calls St. Lawrence “a district-scale experiment inspired by Jane Jacobs’ urbanistic principles—and influenced by Jacobs’ presence as a Toronto citizen.” Yet Jane herself did not bring it into being. She didn’t put together the reform council whose energy ignited it. She was not herself a planner. She had designed none of the buildings. She had apparently not even attended most of the civic meetings leading up to its approval by the city. Yet in Klemek’s assessment, and as a walk through the neighborhood attests, her stamp lies upon it.

  Jane lived in this house on Albany Avenue, in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood, from 1970 to her death. Credit 25

  Across Albany Avenue from Jane in 1973 lived Michael Dennis, Crombie’s housing adviser, who sought an architect for St. Lawrence. Dennis went to Jane, who suggested a young man named Alan Littlewood. Did he know anything about planning? Dennis asked her. “I certainly hope not!” Jane famously replied. Littlewood got the job, which soon morphed into that of St. Lawrence’s de facto chief planner.

  An Irish architect in his thirties, Littlewood had recently worked for Eb Zeidler, where he was teamed with Bob Jacobs on a hospital project in Detroit. (Zeidler had a branch office and apartment in the old Ford Hotel building there. The two of them roomed together; Littlewood did most of the cooking, he recalls, Bob most of the smoking, offering up “perverse arguments about why smoking was not bad for you.”) Bound for the airport in a cab, Littlewood would pick up Bob on Albany Avenue, where Jane, on the porch, invariably saw him off with a zestful goodbye hug. But one time, as the cab pulled up, Bob wasn’t there, so Littlewood rang the doorbell. “Jane answered and embraced me, saying how nice it was to meet me at last.” She was so demonstrative! Soon the Jacobses and Littlewood and his wife were friends, getting together frequently for dinner. And that might have been that, a cozy friendship kept up over the years…except that big things were brewing in Toronto.

  Early in his new job with St. Lawrence, Littlewood found himself trying to navigate his way through competing visions of what, as a “facilitator,” much concerned with process, he was actually to do. Typical bureaucrat, Jane upbraided him one evening over dinner at the Littlewood place. Why didn’t he, he remembers Jane telling him, “get off my ass and get on with making a plan.”
Another thing: he needed to stop calling St. Lawrence a “project,” she said, or rather “yelled,” as Littlewood recalls it; it was a neighborhood. “What you call a thing,” he absorbed the lesson, “determines how you think about it.” He went to bed that night “mentally exhausted.”

  The next day, he stayed home from work, went back to his copy of Death and Life. “Like a recalcitrant sinner,” he recalls, “I knew exactly what to do. I didn’t even have to open the book,” but sat down and disgorged onto paper the site planning principles that ought to govern St. Lawrence. Homes would have normal street addresses. Public streets would run right through the community, which would thoroughly intermix housing types. Shops, schools, parks, and community facilities would be part of the mix, as would varied incomes, different developers, a royal mix of everything. He presented his proposal to Dennis, who “grilled me for an hour, as a lawyer might a hostile witness…during which I unashamedly cited Jane to bolster my [her] position.” He got Dennis’s support. St. Lawrence was on its way to making Toronto a better city.

  —

  Jane helped change Toronto in small ways and large and plainly relished the chance to do so. She “liked the accessibility to power,” says David Crombie. As in New York, it wasn’t just drudgery for her. “She was just as happy hatching plots against powerful people” as thinking and writing. “She really enjoyed the activist part. The strategy, the being on the streets.”

  Still, it would be hopeless to insist that it hadn’t deflected her from her writing. On December 15, 1974, Jane talked on the phone with Jason Epstein about her book. She was so badly stuck, she wrote him later that day,