Jacobs' Background:
"She was born Jane Butzner in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1916, and came to New York City in 1934 with a high school diploma, some secretarial skills and a surplus of ambition. Like so many seekers before and since, she soon found the Village and settled there. Over the next decade Jacobs launched a freelance writing career. The assignments she took on for Vogue and other magazines and newspapers--profiles of the flower market, the garment industry, the diamond trade--introduced her to the various niche economies she would later define as the heart of city life. During the war and just after it she worked for the State Department, penning articles about American life for overseas distribution. In 1944 she met a young architect, Robert Jacobs. They married and in 1947 bought a fixer-upper--an old storefront building with an upstairs two-story apartment--at 555 Hudson Street in the West Village. Aided by her husband and several assignments for the State Department, Jacobs began to nurture an interest in architecture and city planning. By 1952 she had landed an editorial position with Architectural Forum, where she found herself in the belly of the beast: the magazine was the country's leading advocate of the austere towers and open plazas that epitomized the midcentury Modernist style in architecture and planning.
Up until this point, Jacobs had few convictions about city planning. This began to change when she visited Philadelphia, where she found head planner Edmund Bacon more concerned with maintaining order and "view corridors" than with sustaining neighborhood life. Not long after, she met William Kirk, the head worker at Union Settlement Association in East Harlem. He and his colleagues had begun to question the impact of the public housing going up in the neighborhood they served. The new tower complexes were uprooting old neighborhoods, scattering community life, deepening racial segregation and spoiling a lively streetscape. Flint notes that Jacobs was influenced by Kirk but overlooks how she joined forces with Kirk and his colleagues, which helped them to develop and express a new vision for urban planning, one that would not only inform Jacobs's thinking as she refined her views but also propel the gathering revolt against urban renewal and Modernist planning. East Harlem is proof of the much larger current of dissent into which Jacobs was stepping. Flint, however, focuses on Jacobs rather than the larger movement.
Back at Architectural Forum, Jacobs became something of a black sheep. She began to question openly the blind faith so many of her colleagues placed in Modernist planning principles. In 1958 she won a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation that allowed her to take a leave of absence to begin work on a book. Here, Flint's story narrows to its point: the familiar Jacobs-Moses cage match. The feisty and outspoken Jacobs, set on a "collision course" with Moses, publishes Death and Life and then proceeds to defeat the "master builder" in a decade-long contest for the soul of New York City. Having changed how everyone thinks about cities, Jacobs then pulls up stakes and moves to Canada, fed up with urban renewal and the threat the Vietnam War and the draft posed for her teenage sons."Jacob's Work:
"At the heart of this story are the three efforts Jacobs joined or led in the years between 1958 and 1968. The first was a protest against Moses's campaign--the latest of several attempts over the years--to run a road through Washington Square Park. Jacobs signed up to stop the roadway, helping a local committee to foil Moses's plans for good. Then, in early 1961, just after she finished writing Death and Life, she discovered that the city was planning to launch an urban renewal plan for her neighborhood. She played a key role in founding and leading the Committee to Save the West Village, the organization that convinced Mayor Robert Wagner that he'd be better off abandoning the project. Finally, there was perhaps the best known and hardest fought of Jacobs's campaigns, the effort to stop one of Moses's most fervent dreams: the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Lomex, as everyone called it, was to be an eight-lane elevated highway that would cross the island in an east-west direction over Broome Street, cutting through an industrial neighborhood just south of the Village. The bout lasted six years, winding its way through several different postponements and a few variations on the original plan to a now legendary climax: a 1968 public meeting in which Jacobs exhorted her allies to destroy the record of the hearing, thereby voiding the meeting. "Listen to this! There is no record!" she reportedly shouted into the microphone. "There is no hearing! We're through with this phony, fink hearing!" Not long after that, the highway project was abandoned and Jacobs's reputation sealed."Related Books:
Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City by Anthony Flint
The Death and Life of American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs
The Power Broker (about Robert Moses) by Robert A. Caro
Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City by Christopher Mele
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