Jane Jacobs

Urbanist Jane Jacobs passed away in Toronto yesterday:

In 1952, Ms. Jacobs got a job as an editor at Architectural Forum, where she stayed for 10 years. That gave her a perch from which to observe urban renewal projects. On a visit to Philadelphia, she noticed that the streets of a project were deserted while an older, nearby street was crowded.

“So, I got very suspicious of this whole thing,” she told The Toronto Star in 1997. “I pointed that out to the designer, but it was absolutely uninteresting to him. How things worked didn’t interest him.

“He wasn’t concerned about its attractiveness to people. His notion was totally aesthetic, divorced from everything else.”

Her doubts increased after William Kirk, the director of the Union Settlement in East Harlem, taught her new ways of seeing neighborhoods. She came to see the prevalent planning notions, which involved bulldozing low-rise housing in poor neighborhoods and replacing it with tall apartment buildings surrounded by open space, as a superstition akin to early 19th-century physicians’ belief in bloodletting.

“There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder,” she wrote in “Death and Life,” “and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”

. . .

Her seemingly simple prescriptions for neighborhood diversity, short blocks, dense populations and a mix of buildings represented a major rethinking of modern planning. They were coupled with fierce condemnations of the writings of the planners Sir Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard, as well as those of the architect Le Corbusier and Lewis Mumford, who championed the ideal of graceful towers rising over exquisite open spaces.

One of the mix of buildings she wrote about was 11th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues . . .

For New Yorkers, she lived on in the famous photo of her with a beer and a cigarette in the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village . . .

It’s worth noting that she talked a lot about bars in Death and Life of Great American Cities. Although she might have a problem with the glut of bars in, say, the East Village (where community boards are on the hunt — community boards, by the way, being one of Jacobs’ big suggestions in Death and Life), she definitely saw bars as key to a neighborhood’s diversity — something that helps keep neighborhoods lively and safe well into the evening.

The AP obit features this gem:

During the Depression, on days when job hunts went nowhere, she would invest a nickel in the subway and explore a neighborhood: the diamond district, the garment district, the meatpacking district.

This love of exploration is of course the guiding principle behind the Big Map, so we’re indebted to her in this way, too.

(Les Freres Corbusiers get a shout-out, too: “Her most famous confrontation came in the early ’60s, when she helped defeat a plan by New York City park commissioner Robert Moses to build an expressway through Washington Square, their rivalry immortalized in the 2004 play ‘Boozy.'”)