Birthday: Jane Jacobs, born this day in 1916

Jane Butzner Jacobs (1916-2006)

Author, activist

In the 1950s, urban planning was mostly about looking at places, and imposing something new and shiny and better on them. Jane Jacobs looked at places, saw what was actually there, and wondered, how can we keep it going?

As Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique  (1964) did for feminism, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) did for the environment, Jacobs’ 1961 book, The Death and Life of American Cities, shredded conventional wisdom and reshaped the future, all while spawning the most astonishingly vituperative and personal animus from the Establishment.

Like another writer of the era, John O’Hara, Jacobs was born in a small, religiously-stratified city. O’Hara was the son of a Catholic doctor in overwhelmingly protestant Pottsville; Jacobs was the daughter of a Protestant doctor in overwhelmingly Catholic Scranton. The Depression dented their aims in life; while both overcame them, O’Hara never let go of his grudge against home. Jacobs just let go and left home.

She moved to New York City with her sister in 1935. Riding the subway, she got off at Christopher Street because she liked the sound of the it. Above ground, she liked the neighborhood, too. It was old and quirky, Greenwich Village: the streets defied the surrounding city grid and were full of people and activity.

They got an apartment there, and Jacobs scraped out a living as a secretary and freelance writer. In the early Forties, she studied at Columbia for two years, happily pursuing what interested her rather than a formal curriculum.

Writing for a trade magazine, Iron Age, she saw an article she wrote on Scranton’s declining fortunes land the city a war production plant, and a light went off about the advocacy possibilities of journalism. After a stint in the Office of War Information- where she met her husband, a hospital architect called Robert Jacobs- she worked with a US State Department overseas magazine, Amerika. When it moved from New York to Washington in 1952, she landed a job writing for the Henry Luce magazine, Architectural Forum, and began to find her niche critiquing the postwar American lust for big, new, shiny and modern.

A 1958 article, “Downtown is For People,” was an early challenge to the ideas of the nation’s leading urban planner, New York’s Robert Moses, who saw the solution to everything in building highways through, in and out of, cities. She took aim at Moses’ plans to wipe out a thriving area he called “a slum” and replace it with the Lincoln Center cultural complex, empty all day and enjoyed by New York’s elites by night.

Jacobs’ work caught the eye of officials at the Rockefeller Foundation, who asked her to review grant proposals for urban renewal projects; impressed, they gave her one to write a book. The Death and Life of Great American Cities was the result.

The book painted a bullseye on the urban planning establishment, calling out its bias for leveling great swaths of old city neighborhoods as “blight” and replacing them with clean, orderly, largely empty public areas in which residents were stacked in tower blocks. She contrasted the safety and liveliness of adjoining neighborhoods- the new, rebuilt one with few amenities, and residents fearful of the empty streets, and the ungrazed older one with its mix of people and business and variety. She changed the very vocabulary of urban design, urging "respect – in the deepest sense – for the strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order." She  argued cities- neighborhood by neighborhood- develop their own, unique, vibrant character, out of a constantly changing mix of diversity, social capital, mixed building use, and eyes on the street- her term for the way streets with people are safe streets. In short neighborhoods that functioned well needed to be encouraged, not leveled.

She left Architectural Forum in 1962 to raise her three kids. A journalist no more, she became an activist, and spent the better part of the 1960s challenging, and ultimately, defeating, Robert Moses’ plan for a Lower Manhattan Expressway through the middle of Greenwich Village. It was a spectacular public rebuke to the man who had displaced 500,000 New Yorkers for his roads without challenge; within a decade he was powerless, out of office, and the subject of Robert Caro’s devastating 1974 biography, The Power Broker.

Critics called Jacobs the usual insults: she was “crazy”, a “militant dame”, a “housewife.” City planning god Lewis Mumford, who didn’t take kindly to spitballs from the back rows, published a savage review of Jacobs’ book he called “Home Remedies For Urban Cancer”, and later wished he had been harsher.

Jacobs carried on, her puckish demeanor masking a strong will and a keen sense for her opponents’ weak spots. “What a dear, sweet character she isn’t,” sighed one New York City housing commissioner.

The Jacobses became vocal opponents of the Vietnam War and in 1968 they moved to Toronto to make the point. Jacobs promptly became involved in urban planning controversies there, and wrote six more books on the ecology and economics of cities. She became a Canadian citizen in 1974 and so respected a figure in urban design and economics that she was awarded the Order of Canada in 1996. Toronto created the Jane Jacobs Prize for innovative urban projects; the Rockefeller Foundation launched the Jane Jacobs Medal. Mayor Bloomberg declared Jane Jacobs Day in New York in 2006; parks and streets- in places as improbable as Mount Pleasant, Snoth Carolina and Black Mountain, North Carolina, bear her name.

Like all visionaries, Jacob had her blind spots, and sometimes things didn’t come to pass as she foretold. She neglected the differential impact of race on urban redevelopment and dislocation. She argued older buildings should be preserved not for their historic value but for their lack of market value and so provide a new, upgraded stock of housing for low-income city residents. That idea was turned on its head by developers, and much of “The Death and Life” can  be critiqued as a blueprint for generations of low-rise gentrification and displacement in the decades since. Her own Greenwich Village home, over a candy shop in a charming old building, sold for $3 million early in this century.

Jane Jacobs was born one hundred years ago today, and died in 2006, just short of her 90th birthday. She lived to see most of the high-rise public housing towers the experts of the 950s said would solve everything torn down.