Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  But while Jane could be dismissive, a thoughtful letter from out of the blue could sometimes excite her interest, luring her into lengthy correspondence. Early in 2000, she received a long letter from a PhD student, Timothy Patitsas. “These past six months,” it began,

  I have been considering the question you pose at the end of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, about the kind of problem a city is, in connection with a doctoral thesis I am undertaking for the department of Theology at the Catholic University of America. I am trying to place the New Urbanism in a broader philosophical and theological context through a study of the modern antipathy toward liturgy.

  From this not entirely promising start, Patitsas launched his argument. For the Le Corbusiers and Ebenezer Howards of the world, he wrote, “the City is dead matter to be manipulated by the reasoned plans of a single will, for the benefit of a unitary gaze, while nature is a dumb garden to be manipulated cutely.” Jane’s approach, on the other hand, could be seen as “liturgical.” In this provocatively unfamiliar sense, the city could be appreciated for its “openness to the unknown, built around recurrent cycles of death, rebirth and risk,” the product of “many actors freely relating and contributing their own dreams and vision.”

  If maybe a bit of a stretch, still it must have flattered Jane to see her work of four decades earlier the object of such fresh thinking. Thoughtful engagement was what she lived for. Patitsas’s ideas were so surprising and original—which was what it took to get Jane in gear with you intellectually. “Thanks so much for your astonishing and enlightening letter,” she replied. She’d never thought much about liturgy, she said, owning up to her own almost nonexistent religious feeling. And with at least one of Patitsas’s key arguments, she agreed entirely: conventional city planning didn’t worry much about the passage of time, and that went as well for the New Urbanism. Its communities didn’t develop organically but were built whole, from scratch: you planned your charming little town, you realized your plans, whatever they were, and that was that—done, finished. But this indifference to the workings of time, Jane wrote Patitsas now, “means almost everything important is left out: trial and error, risk and dreams, birth, death, success, failure, celebration, regret, relationship…the whole chain of being. You’ve put it beautifully.” Not surprisingly, this was not the end of their intellectual relationship, which stretched across Jane’s remaining years.

  The attention to Jane during this period came to her as a Canadian. While her first two books were conceived and written in the United States, she wrote more books, over a longer time, in Canada than she did in the U.S. She’d come to love Canada and seems never to have seriously considered leaving it. Her three U.S.-born children and their families, spread out across the breadth of the country—Jim in Toronto, Burgin in rural British Columbia, Ned in Vancouver—all lived as Canadians.

  In the cases of the Spadina Expressway and the St. Lawrence project, as we’ve seen, Jane exerted a marked influence on Toronto. Later, the resurgent health of two former industrial districts along east and west King Street in downtown Toronto, together known as “the Kings,” also owed much to her. Out of meetings between Jane and local planners and architects in the mid-1990s emerged a plan to free these two loft districts from most zoning restrictions; within their four hundred acres, you could do pretty much as you pleased, so long as you didn’t raze sound old buildings. It would “allow the city to organically define itself,” says Ken Greenberg, a friend of Jane’s and one of the scheme’s champions. The experiment spewed forth new businesses, bustling entrepreneurial laboratories, new residences. In 1996, virtually no one lived in the Kings; today, thousands do. Over the years, it’s been estimated, the Kings downzoning injected $7 billion into the city, 38,000 jobs. “It’s magical, it’s wondrous,” Jane told an interviewer in 2001, “how fast those areas have been blossoming and coming to life again.” Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociologist and another transplanted American, noted that whereas Jane “saved one neighbourhood in Manhattan she saved many more in Toronto by word, deed, and inspiration.”

  Take the elevator up to the observation deck of Toronto’s signature CN Tower, look out over the city from a thousand feet up, and you see Corbusian towers, hundreds of them, condos and offices, parading north along Yonge Street as far as the eye can see. Below, the elevated Gardiner Expressway, slipping around and through the downtown lakefront, pulsing with traffic, reminds you of nothing so much as the Futurama exhibition at the New York World’s Fair. In short, Jane Jacobs didn’t singlehandedly transform Toronto into a twenty-first-century Greenwich Village. Still, in its vitality, Toronto stands as an affront to struggling American cities like Buffalo and Detroit on the other side of the border. It is dense with new immigrants, its streets bustle with life, it boasts enormous cultural vitality. “The mere fact Jane Jacobs chose to live in Toronto,” wrote the local journalist Kelvin Brown at the time of her death, “came to be an endorsement for the city’s brand. She was synonymous with the notion of a livable city and her Toronto residency was proof that we, in Toronto, inhabited a special place.”

  During the thirty-three years she’d lived in Toronto, Jane said in 2001, “so many parking lots and gas stations in valuable locations have been replaced by dwellings, working places, and cultural institutions that it’s hard to buy gasoline or park on the surface in the center of the city.” She meant this to celebrate the flowering of a more vital, less car-oriented—yes, more Jacobsean—city. But some Torontonians never wanted that at all. “The first hit our city took was the arrival of Jane Jacobs,” declared one eighty-year-old blogger and self-described former “repairman, mister-fix-it and mechanic” made livid by the daily gridlock of Toronto traffic. For this he blamed Jane, who, once in Toronto, “started selling her snake oil. Which amounted to her proclamation that cities are for people not cars. It is a grossly stupid idea and appeals to dreamers.” The master plan for new highways in Toronto, he pointed out, went back to 1948; stopping the Spadina unraveled it, “twenty years of work went down the drain,” and it was Jane’s fault and that of the cabal around her.

  John Downing, a longtime local journalist, also faults Jane, whom he labels a classic “shit disturber.” Years ago, Downing took an urban geography course at the University of Toronto; “they might as well have had a statue of Jane in the front of the room,” so closely did it track her ideas. Those ideas, he says, did the city grievous harm. The Spadina would have benefited more people than it would have hurt. So would the enlargement of the little airport on Toronto Island, which Jane successfully opposed in part for its air and noise pollution. John Downing knows his Jane Jacobs: “I don’t believe in ‘eyes on the street,’ ” he says, “but I’ll never forget that imagery” from her book. And he’s glad for people like her “who express strident views.” Even so, he reckons Toronto worse for her influence: Traffic inhibited. Truck suspensions bashed up and gas wasted by traffic-impeding speed bumps installed at the behest of Jane’s anti-car cronies. Jane a guru? No, he wrote in a 2006 column, she was more “a sentry outside the urban camp, challenging everyone from generals to privates, insisting only she knew the password. The tragedy in her adopted city is that many of us liked it the way it was before she came.”

  True, Jane’s friend Max Allen sums it up, some in Toronto did see her as “an old fogy, standing in the way of progress. And they said it was hard to argue with her.” (Because, he adds, “she was right.”) And yes, he allows, a kind of cult did form around her, where to criticize her made you practically an apostate. But, blame or praise, it was “immaterial to her. She was absolutely sure of herself and absolutely not full of herself.”

  Mostly, Jane’s affection for Canada was abundantly reciprocated. Her friend Toshiko Adilman tells of Jane on the eve of a trip to Japan, realizing at the last minute that she had no visa, at which point the whole Canadian government, so it seemed, was enlisted to get her one. In 1991, Toronto held a Jane Jacobs Day of public appreciation, w
ith an afternoon symposium and a formal dinner that evening. “Through it all,” the Toronto author Robert Fulford would recall, Jane “smiled benignly, a tall, stooped woman with the look of an ancient hawk.” In 1996 Jane was awarded the Order of Canada. “You are now entitled to use the initials O.C. after your name, and to wear the lapel pin,” an official of the order’s council advised Jane that July, enclosing two pins together with guidance on “the Order of Precedence for the Wearing of Orders, Decorations and Medals.”

  All this was just a preview for the conference, celebration, lovefest, or whatever it was, held in Jane’s honor across five days in October 1997—lectures, debates, and tours going on into the night on subjects dear to Jane’s heart. Conceived by Alan Broadbent, John Sewell, and others among her friends, the earliest discussions bloomed into an advisory committee, the hiring of staff, and the selection of speakers. “Ideas That Matter” is what they called it, and it was probably the only thing they could have called it: for Jane, ideas were most of what mattered to her. And it was her ideas that mattered most about her to Canada and the world.

  At first, Jane had mixed feelings. But once the program, listing its substance-stuffed phantasmagoria of events, came out, she sent it to her brother John, taking care to assure him and his wife that they needn’t feel obliged to come. “I agreed they could do this, with three stipulations,” she explained, maybe a little defensively—“that I wouldn’t have to be involved in organizing it, wouldn’t have to make a speech, and that they wouldn’t invite any windbags.”

  Eighteen months and half a million dollars in the planning, Ideas That Matter was all a-bubble with intellectual ferment: Livable cities, human ecology, and self-organizing systems. The future of Toronto’s Yonge Street. The Magic of Local Currencies. Biomimicry. “So bedazzling were the array of ideas presented here,” wrote one attendee, The Globe and Mail’s Don Cayo, “so rapid-fire did they fly, my head still spins.” Inevitably, Death and Life was well represented, as in a session on “Why We Love Density, Congestion and Crowding.” Each afternoon at 5 p.m., Jane held forth in a one-hour public conversation with one or another prominent interviewer. With one of them, Peter Gzowski, she told of her visit to Hong Kong, marveled at how its residents started up tiny hotels by combining apartments, how with a washing machine or two they’d start up a laundry. “They have all kinds of improvisations on how to make a living…all kinds of little manufacturing things going on that are ostensibly just residences.” Onstage, sitting back in an armchair, she enjoyed herself, a laugh sometimes sweeping through her whole body, gleeful eyes scrinching into slits, cheeks alive with color.

  Soon after Ideas That Matter, Jane was treated to a hot air balloon ascension. “Have you ever been?” she wrote Ellen Perry afterward. “Do, if you get a chance. Absolutely the only sounds coming from earth were the barking of dogs, and they were as clear as could be.” This was her news—along with word that her latest book, The Nature of Economies, was coming out soon.

  Jane at the Ideas That Matter conference in Toronto in 1997 Credit 31

  III. OBEDIENCE TO NATURE

  The last chapter of Death and Life, “The Kind of Problem a City Is,” had looked at cities in a way bordering on the biological. “At some point along the trail,” Jane wrote in a new 1992 foreword to it, “I realized I was engaged in studying the ecology of cities. Offhand, this sounds like taking note that raccoons nourish themselves from backyard gardens and garbage bags,” as apparently they did in Toronto. That’s not quite what she was getting at. The ties between natural and urban ecosystems, however, were myriad. Both featured intricate webs of connection. In both, diversity developed organically. Both are “easily disrupted or destroyed.” This, in brief, was Jane’s thinking about urban ecology around 1992. Now, with The Nature of Economies, she was developing these ideas, particularly in relation to healthy economies. Economies grew, or didn’t, said Jane, largely in obedience to laws of nature like those governing biological systems.

  Early in 1999, Jason Epstein, now past seventy, invited a younger colleague, David Ebershoff, to become involved in Jane’s latest book project. Just twenty-nine at the time, he was still “pretty green,” he says today. At that point, he’d not yet even read Jane’s Systems of Survival, nor much of Plato—both confessions of a sort because for the new book Jane had reprised her Platonic dialogue technique from Systems of Survival: Armbruster and the rest of the gang were back for new bouts of intellectual repartee.

  Ebershoff didn’t at this point become Jane’s new editor. But that’s how it worked out. “Read this,” Epstein said to him one day, referring to a draft of Jane’s new book, “and tell me what you think.” What he thought was, “I kind of loved it. Because it was so original to me.” It was hard to write about ideas, and Jane did that so well. But he wasn’t won over by the “characters” she had brought over from the earlier book. “They weren’t like five characters you’d see in a novel.” On the other hand, in how ideas were volleyed back and forth among them, amended, revised, and polished smooth, it was a book that “literally embodied the writing process.” That in itself made it a coup of sorts. “I knew I’d never seen anything like that coming across my desk.”

  Said Epstein: “Let’s go to Toronto and meet Jane.”

  CHAPTER 25

  CIVILIZATION’S CHILD

  EPSTEIN AND EBERSHOFF flew up to Toronto and met Jane at Canoe, a restaurant on the fifty-fourth floor of a downtown tower with fine views of the city, patronized by bankers, businesspeople, and others comfortably well off. In came Jane wearing her customary shapeless poncho and carrying a papier-mâché ear trumpet Burgin had made to help her hear better. “Almost every head in the restaurant turned as she made her way to the table,” Ebershoff recalls; the last time he’d seen that was with Norman Mailer.

  It was June 9, 1999. Jane’s manuscript was all but done; they had it there in front of them. Ebershoff told her how much he liked it. They talked about the publishing schedule, went over the dust jacket design. Any anxiety he might have felt about meeting Jane fell away. They ate. They spent a couple of pleasant hours together. Then, the same day, the two men flew back to New York.

  At lunch they’d brought up no misgivings with Jane’s dialogue technique. “The form was really Jane being herself,” says Ebershoff; they weren’t going to mess with it at this point. As for Jane’s “characters,” they’d evolved little since Systems of Survival, their speech patterns grown no more distinctive. On the other hand, if you gave them their head, as Jane had, they had plenty to say. One of them, the sole newcomer to the group, Hiram, an ecologist, declares that his personal project “is to learn economics from nature.” Indeed, the whole book bears just this stamp. “I’m convinced,” Hiram says a little later, “that economic life is ruled by processes and principles we didn’t invent and can’t transcend whether we like that or not.”

  Take, say, embryonic development, where you could see up close what Jane took as a cardinal principle, “differentiation emerging from generality.” A fertilized egg divides, “forming a blob of multiplied generality”; that is, the cells, though more numerous, are still identical. But then, depending on their locations in the blob, they differentiate into distinct types of cells. Those differences morph further into the animal’s tissues—intestines, heart muscle, fur, and so on. Jane argued that the branching rivulets of a river delta or the proliferating clauses and subclauses of a legal code exhibit the same overarching principle. So do many facets of economic life. “Our remote ancestors,” says Hiram, “started developing tools and weapons with nothing that was of their own making”; the sticks, stones, and bones they found around them became spears, scrapers, pokers, and hammers. And across the long tide of human history, each became a new “generality” that could potentially—and usually did—differentiate further into hammers, say, of a hundred different kinds, each expressing human ingenuity and economic drive.

  This, broadly, was Jane’s strategy—through her conversations among A
rmbruster, Hiram, and their friends, to venture back and forth across the divide separating nature from economic life, learning from thermodynamics, control theory, fractal geometry, evolution, and other sciences. And always, at the root, the book’s central premise—that “human beings exist wholly within nature as part of a natural order.”

  The book didn’t work for everybody, just as Systems of Survival didn’t, and for kindred reasons; the dialogue technique, however satisfying it was for Jane to write, left some readers cold, or bothered. One critic was annoyed enough to aim a full, hilarious broadside at the book. “Those insufferable yuppies Armbruster, Hortense, and Kate are back: slicing kumquats into their Perrier as they pretentiously discourse about bifurcation, feedback controls, and bonobo chimpanzees,” Mike Davis began a review in The Village Voice in 2000.

  No, this is not a Saturday Night Live skit or a new Doug Coupland novel. It is Jane Jacobs—the Mother Teresa of neighborhoods—writing about the ecology of wealth…Jacobs, as usual, is intent on intellectual heavy lifting and obviously thinks [the dialogue technique] lightens the load for her readers. I wonder. Staggering through the pompous dinner conversations (in which the women, as in real life, seldom get a word in edgewise) that make up The Nature of Economies, I kept hoping that someone would toss hemlock with Armbruster’s radicchio.

  Others, less distracted by Jane’s technique than warmed or exhilarated, praised the book as, for example, “fresh and provocative.” A British champion of Jane’s work, Peter J. Taylor, guessed it would “come to be seen as her most important work.” Another observed that, beyond having so much to say, Jane’s characters embodied an almost forgotten standard of civilized discourse. They actually listened to one another.