Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (52 page)

In the beginning (in the beginning, that is, after much reading,
observing, and thinking) came the idea, in all its temporarily delicious clarity. Then, immediately, came a questioning of it. Jane once offered this example: “
Islands seem to be wonderful places for building great cities.” Think New York or Hong Kong. But “then you think of all the islands that don’t have great cities and then you think of all the great cities that aren’t on islands and then you say, ‘Wait a minute.’ ” As soon as she’d hit on an idea, confusion and doubt followed.

Progress normally came only with fitful slowness.
Death and Life
might seem the exception—less than three years from start to finish. Except that the start didn’t really come in 1958, when she got the Rockefeller grant, but in 1954 or 1955, when she began to harbor doubts about urban renewal in Philadelphia and East Harlem; or else in 1952, when she was first thrust into the professional world of buildings and cities as an editor at
Architectural Forum;
or maybe in 1949, when she first wrote about city planning for
Amerika;
or perhaps in 1935, when the New York cityscape first swung under her microscope in those four articles for
Vogue.

Even with
Death and Life
, then, it all came slowly, so much needing to marinate and stew. And yet to listen to her over the years, Jane never quite accepted this; it seemed always to bother her how long it took. “
I’m very slow and full of trial and error and plodding and I wish I knew some faster, more efficient way to work but experience hasn’t taught me any.”

She was forever taking on ambitious subjects from new directions, marching imperturbably into all she didn’t know. She’d never understand, she told an interviewer once, how other authors could “
stand the boredom of just writing down everything [they] already knew.” But she paid the price for indulging her insatiable curiosity. With each new book, she would tell Bob’s niece Lucia Jacobs, “I always get scared to death.” Caught up in complexities of a new field not at first fully apparent, “I realize it’s too deep for me, but I have to keep on with it.” Until she gets it.

The same went for getting the words right. In 1965, a letter from Jane to a New York poet, Ned O’Gorman, included this assertion: The new architecture and planning were “
tightly imprisoned in the old paternalistic visions, and at the bottom of them is a simple-minded notion of people as passive domestic animals, who will flourish like well-kept domestic animals if their environment is well kept.” A little more than a year later, she returned from a trip to Europe to find that O’Gorman planned to publish part of her letter. She was incensed. When she’d earlier written
to him, she wrote him now, she’d given no thought to it being published. She “would not have written as I did, if I had,” and did not wish to see it published now. She’d just thrown out an idea, one perhaps useful to him as he worked on his own book, but that was all. “It is badly written. It makes assertions that I would never make for publication without attempting to support them and to explain them.” She went on: “I do not like to lay myself open gratuitously to being misunderstood, and I would take it very hard if that letter…saw print.” Actually, you can see why O’Gorman wanted to use her plucky letter. But still, who would want one’s half-cocked ideas made public? Jane certainly didn’t. As much as anyone, she knew the difference. Much of her working life was spent refining or eliminating language that, in early form, was awkward, crude, silly, or just plain wrong.

As it is, examples of clumsy language did sometimes make it into print under Jane’s name. As much as
Death and Life
was lauded for its literary virtues, it had its lapses, plenty of them, the reader sometimes caught up in thick undergrowths of abstraction. One snarky online review of an audio edition of the book made fun of sentences “
all around 200 words or more comprising a multitude of phrases and clauses, remarking on several feelings, digressing, couching her terms, and presenting ‘on the other hand’ arguments…always adding exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions.” Laughing at Jane at her worst (exacerbated in the spoken word), he wasn’t being entirely fair. But he wasn’t entirely wrong, either. Working on
Death and Life
, Jane was no longer moored by the restraining hand of a good magazine editor, normally more tightfisted with editorial space than a book editor and more bent on eliminating windy excess.

How could a mind like Jane’s, known for delivering rhetorical flourishes that lingered in the mind—
cities-before-agriculture, eyes-on-the-street
—spew out so much that was fuzzy or embarrassingly awkward? Well, she could. “
Oh, I’m so chaotic,” she’d tell one interviewer, regarding her writing process. “I just scramble as best I can.” Her mind might recognize a departure from clarity, yet actually
achieve
clarity only with enormous effort. As a boy and later, Jim Jacobs remembers hearing his mother work, periods of silence punctuated by rat-a-tat machine-gun bursts from her manual typewriter. But those bursts, as propulsive as they sounded, didn’t always produce great prose. They were part of Jane’s
process
of writing. They expressed an almost physical need to
utter.
But that didn’t mean they expressed her point—even if, just then, she knew what her point was. Given Jane’s reports of how much paper, in an age before word processors, she crumpled up in the course of writing, it’s safe to conclude that much of it wasn’t very good. Before the pungency and clarity readers admired came the muddle.

Muddle borne not alone in the errant vagaries of her brain but in all the perplexities and confusions of the world. If there was a common denominator to her books it was,
How does the world work?
How do cities or successful economies work? What explained why greengrocers and Mafia dons, say, held to such wildly different values? When she looked out at the world, the evidence often seemed contradictory, threatening to overturn any fragmentary idea she might hold. Yet she sought such evidence compulsively. She looked, she observed, she listened, she read voluminously, she took in popular articles and scholarly ones. In the Jacobs Papers at Boston College stand folder upon folder, stuffed with yellowed clippings, all labeled with the distinctly unromantic heading “material used,” giving evidence for the case histories she developed, the stories she told, the conclusions she reached.

In
Death and Life
and
The Economy of Cities
, Jane included no notes, no bibliography, no scholarly apparatus—maybe an occasional lonely footnote. But in the early 1970s, Jim Jacobs recalls, she came upon a book with notes in the back but nothing about them in the body of the book to undercut reading pleasure or involvement. She liked that. Perhaps by now more mindful of her role as public intellectual, in
Cities and the Wealth of Nations
she included such a section, as she would in her subsequent books. And from them, we can draw insights into what Jane read, to whom she listened, the broad gamut of those influences-of-fact upon which she relied.

She read
The Wall Street Journal
,
Scientific American, Natural History
,
The New York Times
,
The Globe and Mail.
But these and other such mainstream publications were just the overlay atop her deep reading and fact gathering. She read
Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village
, by Ronald P. Dore, published in 1978. A memoir of Catherine the Great. Henri Pirenne’s book, from her student days at Columbia,
Medieval Cities.
Stories of pirated software supplied by a visiting scientist at a conference. A New York City agency’s list of white-collar crimes. A book about chivalry. The Code of Hammurabi. Jane read of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, of biomimicry, the efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor, viruses, cybernetics, fractals, and the obsolescence of recording
technology. As she’d one day describe herself, she was like “
a caterpillar munching, munching, munching, munching away in a forest, digesting all kinds of leaves, and in the process being informed of what’s there.”

Her family could be counted on for stray, intriguing bits of information, too. For
Cities and the Wealth of Nations
, her niece Carol, Betty’s daughter, drew her attention to an Arabic-language book,
The Muqaddimah
, dating to 1381. To confirm her
recollections of Higgins, the remote mountain town where she’d lived in 1934, she turned to brother Jim, then living with his wife in North Carolina. In April 1974, she wrote brother John about what she suspected was a well-known quotation she just couldn’t lay her hands on. It was from the turn of the century and was

in the form of a funeral description summarizing the economic paradox of the South at that time. The corpse, the speaker says, was buried in cotton land but his shroud was woven in New England, near a pine forest, but his coffin was made somewhere else in the north—this is the gist—and so on and so on.

Could John help?

Ten years later, there it was on page 36 of
Cities and the Wealth of Nations
, exactly on point to her theme—how poor regions, bereft of vital cities, were reduced to importing most of what they needed: “The grave was dug through solid marble, but the marble headstone came from Vermont,” said Henry Grady of Pickens County, Georgia. “It was in a pine wilderness but the pine coffin came from Cincinnati. An iron mountain over-shadowed it but the coffin nails and the screws and the shovel came from Pittsburgh.”

Jane’s personal experience figured in her book research as well: A tour of the jade market in Hong Kong. An old boss at
Iron Age
who’d dismissed the prospects for plastics. A pet store in San Francisco founded by a distant relative. Making it into one of her books was, of all things, Bob’s trouble
extracting from the clergyman who performed their wedding just how much he was owed. All this supplied grist for developing her ideas or even inspiring them in the first place. “People say, ‘You
use such wonderful examples to illustrate what you’re saying—how do you find them?’ It’s just the opposite. The examples come first. I think from the concrete. I can’t think from the abstract.”

In 1985, Richard Carroll Keeley lured Jane to a conference at Boston
College built around her work. In the conference’s published proceedings, he wrote of his attempt to characterize her “method.” He started from her assertion near the end of
Death and Life
that understanding best came from working inductively, from particulars to the general, not vice versa; in particular, one sought “
‘unaverage’ clues involving very small quantities, which reveal the way larger and more ‘average’ quantities are operating.”

What, pray tell, was an “unaverage” clue?

In a 1994 letter to Stewart Brand, founder of the
Whole Earth Catalog
, Jane would observe that the usual division between “
solid statistical evidence,” on the one hand, and “random, highly suspect anecdotal evidence,” on the other, was too wide and too crude. Left out was a third species of evidence, “systematically illuminating cases” that shed especially revealing light on a topic.
Death and Life
was littered with them. But how, Keeley wondered now, did she find the clues that would ultimately come to seem so illuminating? “I am left with
an admiring puzzlement: How
did
she do that?”

Keeley’s questions inspired a long response from Jane: “
When I start exploring some subject, I hardly know what I think.” Again she referred to what sounds like a kind of intellectual pain as she wandered through the misshapen byways of her own confusion. It was all “very messy,” she wrote, and “very uncomfortable. I don’t like all this confusion.” But she endured it, pushing through it, only to finally reach the patterns, ideas, and conclusions that held up.

“If I wanted, I could go on and on and on,” she concluded her letter to Keeley, “but that would only be tiresome and repetitive and perhaps self-indulgent in displaying my industriousness and labor!” There was, however, “a different type of self-indulgence” to which she succumbed: “While I’m not an artist, I do feel bound to try, as far as I’m able, to produce a work of art as well as a piece of truth.”

—

Two-thirds of the way through this difficult period, as she struggled to complete
Cities and the Wealth of Nations
, Jane was pulled away by another project. Coming when it did, when she was already so late with the book, is it best seen as a distraction to which, unfortunately, she gave in? Or as a welcome and refreshing detour, an opportunity too good to refuse?

It came in 1979, when Jane was approached by Max Allen, a prominent Canadian broadcaster representing a group charged with selecting that year’s Massey Lecturer. The Massey Lectures—radio lectures without, in fact, a live audience, broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation—were named for former governor general Vincent Massey and were immensely prestigious; past lecturers included Paul Goodman, Martin Luther King Jr., Willy Brandt, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Jane could speak on any subject she pleased. Architecture or planning, for sure, Allen figured. But no, Jane wanted to talk about Quebec separatism.

Canada was just then embroiled in a great national dialogue about the fate of French-speaking Quebec, whether it should remain within Canada or define its national destiny outside it. The British defeat of the French on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec in 1759 had hardly resolved the question once and for all. Recently, the leader of the separatist Parti Québécois, René Lévesque, had issued an impassioned argument for Quebec independence—which, duly translated into English, could scarcely be found in Toronto bookstores. A few months hence, a referendum was to be held in Quebec, presumably to settle the issue. And now Jane, a Canadian citizen for barely five years, was determined to weigh in on it, too, in a series of five half-hour radio addresses she would later flesh out in book form as
The Question of Separatism
:
Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty
, published in 1980.