Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

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  She was sorry to be so slow to respond to his letter, Jane wrote one correspondent in February 2000, but she’d suffered a serious accident. She’d caught her foot in a telephone cord, slipped, broken her hip, and ever since had been “learning to walk again.” More than ever now, she resorted to language like must reluctantly decline. Her life, fuller of doctors, was more constrained, more dependent on others, pulled this way and that by the vicissitudes of age. “I’m taking the glucosamine,” she wrote a friend who’d recommended an arthritis book, “and while I’m not yet in shape for skateboarding (the book does say to be optimistic) I have a distinct feeling that it is making the joint and leg stronger.” She would soon see a specialist to determine whether some muscle or blood vessel “has fallen down on the job.”

  The following month, Jane managed to make an appearance at the New York Public Library. “You were as poised as a queen when the auditorium gave you several minutes of applause when you came on stage,” Margot Gayle, one of her West Village friends, wrote her. She added, “It was good to see your son looking after you so well.”

  A year later and it was Jane’s knee that was the problem. She could walk well enough with the help of “a nice wheeled walker on the level, and a cane and railing on stairs.” She was in no pain when standing or sitting still. But while no worse recently, she was no better, either. She’d been advised against surgery: “This would be very chancy and could leave matters worse.”

  Jane needed help to travel, make public appearances, just get around. She often had dinner with Jim and Pat, at their house a few doors down Albany Avenue, Caitlin sometimes delegated to walk her grandmother back home. Or else Jim and Pat would go over to Jane’s, bearing a cooked meal; “Meals on Feet,” Jane liked to call it. During these years, too, neighbors would drive her around parts of Toronto she’d not much seen; Jane dedicated her last book to two of them—“merry leading-edge explorers” who bore her on “discovery jaunts” to such exotic locales as Toronto’s industrial suburbs or the Hong Kong–flavored malls on the edge of the city.

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  On November 26, 2003, Jane wrote David Ebershoff to say she’d sent the corrected page proofs for her latest book, Dark Age Ahead, about troubling symptoms of cultural collapse, to the Random House production editor. She’d “worked day and night” to meet her deadline, in part so “I could have the luxury of thinking for a few days about the next book.” At age eighty-seven, the next book. Indeed, she was including a preliminary table of contents for it, which she proposed to call A Brief Biography of the Human Race. Of course, she couldn’t get to it right away. There was the book tour for Dark Age Ahead, a Toronto civic battle in which she was embroiled, and “the speech for City College which has been a great trouble because I confused my book-writing mode with my speech-writing mode.” City College was City College of New York, and the speech was the Lewis Mumford Lecture she’d agreed to give in May 2004, four days after her eighty-eighth birthday.

  That was the second paragraph of her letter to Ebershoff. The third began, “Now (don’t scream!) I am also seeing my way to the next book after A Brief Biography…a sort of self-anthology” of her economics writings, “with some added introductory and interstitial material. This,” she added brightly, “ought to be quick and easy!”

  Jane seems to have been entirely serious about these plans. Dark Age Ahead, though not Jane at her best, showed glimmers of the Jane who was. “Crisp, entertaining, scholarly, scary,” one early review called it. And when the book came out in May 2004, she was game for the promotional tour on its behalf. It wasn’t quite Jane’s last hurrah, but it was getting there: New York for a couple of days, including the Mumford Lecture. Back to Toronto for three days of interviews and photo shoots with Time, The Globe and Mail, and Maclean’s at her home. Taped interviews with CBC at their broadcast center. Then off to San Francisco and Vancouver with Ned; and Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, with Alana Probst. Roberta Gratz picked her up in Portland to bring her back to Toronto. At a college in Portland, Gratz recalls, they entered a campus building, Jane in flowing scarf, hobbling along with her walker down the corridor and into a crowded room where Roberta heard someone whisper, “Oh, it’s Jane Jacobs. This is better than a rock star!” When Jane gave a talk at UC Berkeley, niece Lucia Jacobs visited her in her hotel room. A chance Whaddya think about this…? and they were lost in what Lucia recalls as “another marathon discussion” like those she remembered from Albany Avenue years before.

  As for the new books Jane had in mind, according to Anne Collins, her Random House Canada editor, she meant the title, A Brief Biography of the Human Race, without the slightest irony. “It was dead straight. A title very descriptive as opposed to a joke.” In the Mumford lecture she delivered on May 8 before a packed auditorium at City College, and in a New York Times essay based on her talk a week later, she offered a preview: humankind had lived through, and needed to transcend, what she called its long Plantation Age, with its “serfs, feudal tenants, indentured servants, outright slaves, or sharecroppers shackled by discrimination and debt,” along with bankrupt notions of industrial, spatial, and political order. What, after all, were modern American suburbs but “grotesque parodies of plantations. Look at them: Monocultural residential tracts on ever-larger scales, like so many endless fields of cabbages. Standardized shopping centers, multiplying like so many flocks of identically pedigreed sheep.”

  While in New York, a talk with Adam Gopnik for a piece in The New Yorker gave Jane the opportunity to tell a favorite story. New York, she said, still had its old pizzazz, for it changed every day—unlike neatly designed New Urbanist communities, everything built in from the get-go. It reminded her of the preacher who warned children that in Hell there would be much “wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth.” But what if, as a child wonders, you have no teeth? Then teeth, too, would be provided: No way out. Everything thought out from the beginning. This, said Jane, was the overdesigned city—all done, just so, with none of a vital city’s inner messiness.

  As for Jane’s other new book, the economics anthology, she was perfectly serious about it, too. By late 2004, she’d sent Ebershoff in New York and Collins in Toronto a chunk of it that promised “the first theoretical explanation for normal expansion of economic life”—in particular, those sudden, sporadic growth spurts she saw as the essential marker of great cities everywhere. The book had started out more modestly, Jim Jacobs recalls, as a kind of best-of anthology. Once she began going through it, however, she was “appalled. Some of her explanations missed so much. How,” she lamented, “was anyone to understand them?” Now, in full cry, she’d remedy those old lapses, advance new ideas.

  Did she figure to just go on and on?

  She was old now and had medical problems too numerous to count. But it is hard to discern in her plans, ideas, and proposals any doubt about completing them. And why not? Her mother had lived to 101. If you were the least bit susceptible to magical thinking, you could read her correspondence, survey the evidence of this time in her life, and doubt death would ever take her. Indeed, Anne Collins had chosen to act as if this were almost literally so; call it a gesture, but it was a gesture in lawyerly black and white—formal contracts drawn up for the two books, submission dates extending three years into the future that would leave Jane pounding away at her typewriter well into her ninety-first year. Says Collins, “I thought she would be with us forever.”

  “Thank you very much for the first terrific pages of Uncovering the Economy: A New Hypothesis,” Ebershoff wrote Jane in response to her twenty-eight-page piece of it.

  If the rest of the book reads as Part 1 does—and why shouldn’t it!—you’d have done just what I was hoping for; and what your many readers will want. I’m very pleased that this isn’t merely an anthology of your greatest hits. You’ve hit on a new but profound idea about cities and economies…Please keep writing. Please keep sending me pages. I hope you’re healing swiftly and that you ha
ve many long hours to write and think.

  Jane’s decline in her later years, before 2005 or so, did not extend to her mind. If it did, we might expect to find it in her correspondence, closer to her raw, unmediated self. But it’s not there. Not in her spelling. Not in the organization of her thoughts. Nor in their characteristic energy and spirit. In 2005, she apologized to a correspondent for not replying earlier: “You must think that I was swept silently into the Grand Canyon.” She’d had another accident, fallen and broken her leg “badly enough that I’ve had to try to relearn how to walk…This is a boring tale of woe—but what is upsetting, rather than boring, is that no, I haven’t done the blurb you were expecting for your U. of Michigan Press book on development.”

  “Don’t send me a Get Well card,” she added. “I am getting well; it’s just slow.”

  Back in 2002 Jane had suffered a serious stroke. It happened in the middle of the night. She called Jim, who got her to the hospital, where she stayed for a couple of weeks before entering a rehab unit. Half her body was paralyzed. She had trouble swallowing. She couldn’t type, couldn’t write. But she could think just fine. It was there, as Jim tells it, that she conceived Dark Age Ahead. She was in a hurry, “determined to get as much done as she could, before the deadline.” After leaving the hospital, “from outward appearance unscathed,” she wrote with uncharacteristic nervous energy, rushing it through. “It was the only book she wrote out of her head, without notes.”

  Ned, in from the coast, helped Jane with the index and entered her text into the digital form her publisher required. The two of them sat “at the screen together,” as he remembers, going over a word choice here, an idea there. “It was a wonderful learning experience for me,” he says. As Jane acknowledged, he contributed to the “Unwinding Vicious Spirals” chapter, pushing her for ideas about “how to get out of this mess,” the sad, cultural decline that was her subject. Otherwise, the book was her own. But it came slowly, at great cost. Jane relied on family and friends in ways she hadn’t before. Her signature, normally rounded and clear, was now jagged, angular, and scratchy. Every little thing came harder.

  Until near the very end, at least, her mind remained clear. More than clear—engaged, eager for any bit of life she could still grab hold of. But finally, sometime late in 2004, maybe around Christmas, David Ebershoff began to realize that the hope he’d voiced for Jane “healing swiftly” was unrealistic; the seesaw battle between recovery and decline was settling in one direction only. After the Mumford Lecture in May, he recalls, she seemed to be struggling. As the months went by and he checked in with her, “she’d say she was trying to write, but I could see how hard it was for her.” In some of their later phone calls, “I couldn’t have the same kind of conversation with her.” Ebershoff’s counterpart in Toronto, Anne Collins, noticed much the same: what had seemed almost regular cycles of weakening and renewal now ebbed permanently into decline. Sometimes Anne would drop by the house for tea. But now there were no “So, how’s the writing?” questions for Jane. It was just tea.

  Jim Jacobs, of course, had seen it coming earlier, following his mother’s return from the Dark Age Ahead tour: “Pat and I noticed that something was seriously wrong.” This woman who spoke in perfect paragraphs now could hardly speak at all. Sentences drifted. Jane realized it, too. “She knew there was trouble.” Her doctors found evidence of mental slippage now but, to Jim’s taste, were too inclined to say, Well, it’s about what you’d expect for a woman her age, we have to let nature take its course. Looking for a way out, he thought he saw improvement when she happened to be on an antibiotic regimen and suspected infection was worsening her mental condition.

  In late summer of 2005, Jim took a leave of absence from the company he’d cofounded to care for Jane himself. “But it was more than I could do,” so they brought in round-the-clock nursing care. Late that year and early the next was the worst of it. Jane would slide into unpredictable outbreaks of anger, affection, and despair. “What was I thinking?” she’d say as she came out of one of them. It was hard for her, hard for everyone.

  It was not a happy time for those who loved Jane Jacobs. She had broken her hip the year before, was confined to the house, increasingly isolated. There were times, relates Jim, when “she was in no condition to see people,” which upset some of her friends, who felt that maybe she was being kept more isolated than need be. It seemed to Roberta Gratz that Jane “hungered for company.” When friends did visit, they honored Jane’s voracious sweet tooth. Margie Zeidler would come by with butter tarts. John Sewell and his wife, Liz Rykert, started bringing her Saturday meals. They’d show up, march into the kitchen, get things organized, lay out a meal, break out the Basque tarts that were one of Jane’s favorites, and sit down and talk. “She had lots of opinions about the world,” says Sewell. But rarely did she reminisce; this was one old-timer who took no refuge in the past, at least in public; who knows what she whispered to Ben Franklin or one of her other old friends?

  Jim, his daughter Caitlin recalls, was desperate for “a solution that would make her well,” delving into medical science, looking “for what he could do to save her.” Early in 2006, with Jane on a regimen of antibiotics Jim had prevailed on her doctors to prescribe for her, Jane seemed to rally, her mental acuity, speech, and emotional stability improving. For a time she found her way back to work again, mainly on the economics book. She’d never much talked about work in progress, but now she seemed eager to tell Jim about it. Up until March, maybe April, she was still at the typewriter.

  Finally came the sudden turn for the worse; Jim took her to the hospital, stayed with her almost nonstop until, three days later, on April 25, 2006, she died. The family issued a statement: “What’s important is not that she died but that she lived, and that her life’s work has greatly influenced the way we think. Please remember her by reading her books and implementing her ideas.”

  And if you don’t, Ned Jacobs was supposed to have joked, “there’s a Dark Age Ahead.”

  Jane was cremated, her ashes laid to rest in Creveling Cemetery, down the Old Berwick Road from where her mother had grown up in Espy, in the Butzner family plot, beside Bob, their common stone recording their names, dates, and nothing else.

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  “When someone like that dies, she doesn’t go anywhere,” says Jason Epstein. “She’s not dead. She’s so vivid, you can’t imagine her dead, like Shakespeare.” Maybe so, but we are enjoined to consider her legacy, what the example of her life holds for us. The word itself carries some stuffy baggage, but I don’t think Jane would have dismissed the question or, with false modesty, scolded us for raising it.

  Jane’s legacy was, first of all, more than The Death and Life of Great American Cities, more than any of her individual books. This might seem heretical to assert for a woman who was author first of all and who said so time and again. “I am quite an ordinary person, I assure you,” she wrote in 1997, “who has led a happy ordinary life, the only perhaps notable things about it having occurred in my head as I sit undramatically at a typewriter; and those things are already in my books.” Still, Jane was wife, mother, and friend, too. She was social activist, gadfly, rogue, and rebel. She was an economist of sorts, and something of a philosopher, and, one hears it said, an expert on cities, too.

  These clumsy qualifiers nod to Jane’s uncredentialed relationships to the very fields and disciplines to which she contributed most. Similar reservations might apply to Jane-as-scientist, which she was, too, in a way. “She was a great theoretician,” says Lucia Jacobs, tenured professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. “She identified with Darwin.” When people complained about the absence of hard data in her work, Jane would reply, “Darwin didn’t have data either.” Professor Jacobs deems Darwin quite the creditable comparison for her. “Darwin went his own way, knew he was right, and had unbelievable intuition.” Like Jane.

  Professor Jacobs means “theoretician” as praise, certainly when uttered in the same breath as Charl
es Darwin; so did Robert Lucas, the Nobel-winning economist, in applying the word “theorist” to her. And yet, the more Jane was theoretician, the less she was the kind of writer she’d arrived in New York to become. In those early articles she wrote for Vogue, Jane was rooted in fact, datum, and incident, in sidewalk and street, leather, flowers, and furs. But in the years after Death and Life, lauded as an important thinker, she might be excused for slipping back from the rough-and-tumble of the world and into the cosseted realm of ideas: Economics. Morals. Ecology. As age and physical frailty kept her more at home, retreat to the abstract and theoretical probably became easier, even inevitable. She became less the maker of vivid images and scenes, more the intrepid explorer of ideas. Of course, the two were always in her, locked in creative tension; Death and Life is stocked to the brim with ideas. But as the years passed and the public intellectual in her bloomed, Jane did find it harder, or maybe less important, to rid her prose of generalization and abstraction—leaving more of it behind to sometimes thwart or entangle her readers.

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  In the years leading up to her death, and then after it, critics began to notice that within the space of a few years in the early 1960s, three women wrote three classic books, launching three social movements that changed the world: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and Jane’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. All three women identified primarily as writers, not as credentialed experts in the fields about which they wrote; Carson, with a master’s degree in zoology, was a partial exception, but by age thirty, long before she wrote Silent Spring, she was making a living as a writer, her childhood dream. All three were popularizers; that is, just as they were not themselves traditional scholars or scientists, they did not write for scholars but for ordinary, nonexpert readers. Mostly, they avoided specialized vocabulary, used language intended to draw in, not exclude. And, rather than hide their deepest convictions beneath a patina of objectivity, they expressed themselves with intensity and feeling.