Read Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs Online

Authors: Robert Kanigel

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Women, #History, #United States, #20th Century, #Political Science, #Public Policy, #City Planning & Urban Development

Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (78 page)

“A poor man’s penthouse”
:
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.
“I don’t think things should be blown up”
: JJ, “Futility vs. Taking Chances,” manuscript, no date, no place, Burns, 13.
“I have to hop to it”
: JJ to her mother, June 12, 1974,
Matter
, p. 98.
“Our Jane”
: For example, Wellman.
consulted with Jane
: Interviews, Eb Zeidler, Max Allen, Jim Jacobs.
“the most important advance”
: “Randall Unveils Plan for $500 Million City in Toronto Harbor,”
Toronto Star
, May 20, 1970.
“nasty, tacky collections”
: Memo, JJ to Eberhard Zeidler, July 14, 1970, Burns, 13.
“fantastic election”
: JJ to Jason Epstein, December 29, 1972, Random House Papers, Box 1365, ColumbiaRare.
“the constantly reminding background”
: Interview, David Crombie. Sketch of this era drawn from interviews with John Sewell, Jim Jacobs, Alan Broadbent, Max Allen, Alan Littlewood, and Crombie.
Jane’s personal influence
: See Richard White. A more typical assessment comes from Ken Greenberg, in
Walking Home
, p. 67: “Jane Jacobs’ observations almost immediately resonated in Toronto…Her ideas quickly came close to being conventional wisdom.”
“This morning at 6:30 am”
: JJ to Jason Epstein, April 5, 1973, Random House Papers, Box 1365, ColumbiaRare. See also excerpt from apparently unpublished JJ article: “One cold early spring morning before dawn in 1973…” Burns, box 13.
“The remark was repeated”
: Jane Jacobs, “Can Big Plans Solve the Problem of Renewal?”
Regent Park
: See, for example, Mary W. Rowe; Laurie Greene;
Farewell Oak Street.
live a decent life
: Ryan James made this point at a conference of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History in Toronto in October 2013. See also Ryan James, “From ‘Slum Clearance’ to ‘Revitalisation.’ ”
St. Lawrence
: Account drawn from site visit; Sewell,
The Shape of the City;
Hume; David L. A. Gordon, “Directions for New Urban Neighbourhoods: Learning from St. Lawrence,” CIP/ACUPP Case Study Series, ca. 1993; Jane Jacobs, “Can Big Plans Solve the Problem of Renewal?”; interview, Alan Littlewood.
“the best example”
: Leblanc.
“a district-scale experiment”
: Klemek, p. 222, caption, figure 12.2.
“enjoyed the activist part”
: Gerard.
“I realize I have been inflicting”
: JJ to Jason Epstein, December 15, 1974, Random House Papers, Box 1365, ColumbiaRare.
“I write a little way”
: Jane to John and Pete Butzner, April 2, 1976, Burns, 41:1.

CHAPTER 21: FLUMMOXED

“When you ask”
: JJ to Jason Epstein, August 12, 1976, Random House Papers, RH 1365, ColumbiaRare.
“I always hit some point”
: Alexander and Weadick, p. 30.
“I feel strongly”
: Jason Epstein to JJ, February 2, 1977, Random House Papers, Box 1365, ColumbiaRare.
“There is a fight to be had”
: “Mary Rowe on Cities, Nature, and Chaotic Systems,”
http://www.citybuilderbookclub.org
, April 19, 2012.
“Islands seem to be wonderful”
: Sandra Martin, “An Urban Legend,” p. 85. See also Alexander and Weadick, p. 29.
“I’m very slow”
: Warren, p. 16.
“stand the boredom”
: Alexander and Weadick, p. 30.
“tightly imprisoned”
: For JJ to Ned O’Gorman, December 20, 1965, and February 20, 1966 [but probably 1967], Burns, 5:3.
“all around 200 words or more”
: William Talada, “Obfuscation Overload,” Amazon review, July 16, 2014.
“Oh, I’m so chaotic”
:
Matter
, p. 26.
“a caterpillar munching”
: Harvey, p. 42.
The Muqaddimah
:
CityWealth
, p. 237.
recollections of Higgins
:
CityWealth
, p. 240.
“in the form of a funeral description”
: JJ to John Butzner, April 5, 1974, Burns, 4:8.
extracting from the clergyman
:
SofS
, pp. 86–87, 224.
“ ‘such wonderful examples’ ”
:
Matter
, p. 26; see also Alexander and Weadick, p. 30.
“ ‘unaverage’ clues”
:
D&L
, p. 574.
“solid statistical evidence”
: JJ to Stewart Brand, January 17, 1994, Burns, 6:5.
“an admiring puzzlement”
:
Ethics
, p. 34.
“When I start exploring”
:
Ethics
, p. 34.
favored small entities
: “Perhaps the stagnation of the United States is irreversible unless and until, no doubt after great turmoil, what is now the United States has divided into a dozen or so separate countries,” Jane Jacobs, “The Responsibilities of Cities,” Queen’s Lecture, Amsterdam, September 1984, Burns, 13:1.
Norway’s from Sweden
:
QofS
, chapter 3.
“Here in Toronto”
:
QofS
, p. 51.

a tour de force

: Edgar Z. Friedenberg, “Splitting Up,” review of
The Question of Separatism
,
New York Review of Books
, November 20, 1980.
“practically no reaction”
:
QofS
, p. 137.
refuted “some of the weaker arguments”
: Mazer.
“dreams in very good prose”
:
Matter
, p. 154.

CHAPTER 22: ADAM, KARL, AND JANE

“a kind of overhaul”
: JJ to M. Marcel Côté, June 30, 1982, Burns, 5:10.
“For a little while”
:
CityWealth
, p. 3; ensuing pages follow chapter 1.
Bardou
:
CityWealth
, chapter 2.
We could beat our brains out
:
CityWealth
, p. 34.
“was not a demonstration”
:
CityWealth
, p. 128.
“The difference between a rich backward economy”
:
CityWealth
, p. 63.
“Faulty feedback to cities”
:
CityWealth
, p. 158.
“done a great service”
:
Matter
, p. 106.
“learned, iconoclastic”
:
Matter
, p. 106.
wasn’t high prices
:
Matter
, p. 108.
“hated” by economists
: JJ to Robert Brandes Gratz, June 10, 1988, Gratz papers.
“the mysteries of the trade”
: Warsh, p. 80. See Warsh’s book and his “The Road Since ‘The Mechanics of Economic Development,’ ” Economic Principals online, September 23, 2007.
“didn’t inquire too deeply”
: Warsh, p. 81.
His subject was economic growth
: Robert Lucas, “On the Mechanics of Economic Development,”
Journal of Monetary Economics
22 (1988): 3–42.
“The consequences for human welfare”
: Cited in Warsh, “The Road Since ‘The Mechanics of Economic Development,’ ” Economic Principles online, September 23, 2007.
as he’d later tell the story
: Martin Wolf and Robert Lucas, “Economies and Growth,”
Ideas That Matter
, 3, no. 3 (undated): 11–14.
“Is it because innovations are so unpredictable?”
: JJ to Graciela Chichilnisky, June 9, 1993, Burns.
“I will be following very closely”
: Robert Lucas, “On the Mechanics of Economic Development,”
Journal of Monetary Economics
22 (1988): 37.
compared Jane’s predictions
: Edward L. Glaeser et al., “Growth in Cities, “
Journal of Political Economy
100, no. 6 (December 1992): 1126–1152.
Canadian inventors
: Pierre Desrochers and Samuli Leppälä, “Opening Up the ‘Jacobs Spillovers’ Black Box: Local Diversity, Creativity and the Processes Underlying New Combination,”
Journal of Economic Geography
11, no. 5 (2011): 843–63.
“an economics guru”
: John Barber, “Jacobs Embraced as Economic Guru,”
Globe and Mail
, October 15, 1997. Examples of the literature on Jane Jacobs and economics include: Pierre Desrochers and Gert-Jan Hospers, “Cities and the Economic Development of Nations: An Essay on Jane Jacobs’ Contribution to Economic Theory,”
Canadian Journal of Regional Science
(spring 2007): 115–30; Clint Ballinger, “More on Jane Jacobs & Economics,”
http://www.open.salon.com/blog/clintballinger
, accessed October 10, 2012; Sam Staley, “Disequilibrium and Time in the Urban Economy: Reassessing the Contributions of Jane Jacobs to Development Theory,”
Market Process
7, no. 1 (spring 1989): 16–21. See also Brian Tochterman, “Theorizing Neoliberal Urban Development: A Genealogy from Richard Florida to Jane Jacobs,”
Radical History Review
(winter 2012): 65–87.
“Jane Jacobs Among the Economists”
:
Matter
, pp. 111–13.
“great novel of economic development”
: Robert E. Lucas Jr., “A Million Mutinies: The Key to Economic Development,” excerpt from his book,
Lectures on Economic Growth
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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