3
 
Home Remedies

Throughout the 1950s the ideas typified by the Radiant City reigned supreme. That they were eventually called into question is due in no small part to the influence of a single person, Jane Jacobs, who must be accorded equal footing with Charles Mulford Robinson, Ebenezer Howard, and Le Corbusier as a seminal figure in twentieth-century American urbanism. Unlike Le Corbusier, Jacobs was neither an architect nor a city planner; like Robinson, she was a journalist, writer, and activist; and like Howard—with whom she would vociferously disagree—she was largely self-taught. She was born Jane Butzner, in 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a doctor’s daughter. After graduating from high school and taking a secretarial course, she left the declining coal-mining city for New York. It was the middle of the Depression, and she found work as a stenographer, and later as a freelance magazine writer; during the war, she was employed by the U.S. Office of War Information and the State Department. She married Robert Jacobs, an architect, and in 1952, inspired by reading a magazine to which he subscribed, she applied for and got a job as an associate editor at Architectural Forum.

Architectural Forum was owned by Time Inc., which at the time was the most prestigious magazine publisher in the United States, perhaps in the world. Time’s founder, Henry Luce, who was interested in design and urbanism, had bought Architectural Forum in 1932 and turned it into the liveliest architectural periodical in the country (his financial support was crucial, since Forum never turned a profit). Jacobs was initially hired to write about hospitals and schools, but increasingly covered urban issues.1 Unlike architectural periodicals today, which consist chiefly of photographs, Architectural Forum included long articles on a wide range of topical issues. Jacobs’s reporting took her to different cities—Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Saint Louis, Fort Worth—where she visited urban redevelopment projects and interviewed planning officials.

In 1956, the editor of the magazine, Douglas Haskell, was invited by Harvard’s Graduate School of Design to speak at a conference on urban planning, but since he was on vacation, he sent Jacobs in his stead. She chose an unlikely subject for her ten-minute talk: the lack of stores in urban redevelopment projects. She described traditional shopping streets as “strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order.” She made the point that shopkeepers were important “public characters,” that corner stores functioned not just as shops but as neighborhood social centers, and that even vacant stores played a role as storefront clubs and meeting places. The new housing projects, with their massive residential slabs set in parkland, provided no such options. “This is a ludicrous situation, and it ought to give planners the shivers,” she said. She talked about how the chief social space of the inhabitants of a new housing project in East Harlem (where she served as a board member of Union Settlement) was a laundry room. “We wonder if the planner of that project had any idea its heart would be in the basement,” she observed caustically. “And we wonder if the architect had any idea what he was designing when he did that laundry.”2 Jacobs, lacking academic credentials, based her arguments on simple observation, but her conclusions were an unvarnished condemnation of architecture and city planning. Lewis Mumford, who was at the conference, later described the scene: “Into the foggy atmosphere of professional jargon that usually envelops such meetings, she blew like a fresh, off-shore breeze to present a picture, dramatic but not distorted, of the results of displacing large neighborhood populations to facilitate large-scale rebuilding.”³

Another participant in the Harvard conference who was impressed by Jacobs’s talk was William H. Whyte Jr., assistant managing editor of Time Inc.’s flagship business magazine, Fortune. “Holly” Whyte, whose bestselling book, The Organization Man, appeared that year, was a longtime student of cities who would write several influential books on city design, including The Last Landscape (1968), The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980), and City (1988). He shared Jacobs’s skepticism about urban redevelopment, and he invited her to contribute to a forthcoming series in Fortune on the American metropolis. Although Jacobs at first demurred—Whyte’s colleagues were distinctly unenthusiastic, seeing her as an interloper—she eventually agreed.⁴

The series began in September 1957 with an essay by Whyte provocatively titled “Are Cities Un-American?” He argued that after several decades of neglect American cities faced many challenges, not only physical decay and poverty, but also a loss of population to the suburbs, whose rapid growth was evidence of the middle class’s growing disaffection with city life. The 1948 Urban Renewal Act provided federal support to municipal governments to clear slum areas and sell the land to private developers. Like Jacobs, Whyte was not impressed with the results. “In the plans for the huge redevelopment projects to come, we are being shown a new image of the city—and it is sterile and lifeless,” he wrote, referring to the designs of architects firmly in thrall to the Radiant City. For Whyte, the key issue was “Will the city assert itself as a good place to live?”5

To answer this question, Whyte enlisted the considerable resources of Time Inc., contacting correspondents in various cities, commissioning national polls and opinion surveys, and convening panels of experts. His own article, for example, was accompanied by a preference survey of upper-income apartment dwellers, which highlighted the differences between high-rise and low-rise urban living and identified many downtown residents as what would today be called empty nesters, that is, older couples who had moved back to the city from the suburbs. Whyte’s article was illustrated with views of typical residential streets in a variety of American cities: Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, Russian Hill in San Francisco, shotgun houses in New Orleans. The Utrillo-like drawings, by Orfeo Tamburi, a Paris-based artist, reminded readers that American cities, no less than their European counterparts, have a tradition of urban living. Subsequent articles in the series, written by Fortune editors Francis Bello, Seymour Freedgood, and Daniel Seligman, as well as Whyte, covered transportation, city administration, slums, and urban sprawl. The reports are striking for their intelligence, detail, length—and sense of urgency. The common message was that American cities had a unique opportunity to renew themselves, but they had to get it right.

Jacobs’s article was the last in the six-part series, though not by design. Fortune’s publisher, C. D. Jackson, found her draft too controversial, causing a two-month delay while he, Whyte, and Jacobs argued back and forth.6 The article finally appeared in the April 1958 issue. “Downtown Is for People” was a scathing indictment of urban renewal. “What will the projects look like?” Jacobs asked. “They will be spacious, parklike, and uncrowded. They will feature long green vistas. They will be stable and symmetrical and orderly. They will be clean, impressive, and monumental. They will have all the attributes of a well-kept, dignified cemetery.”⁷ She singled out several redevelopment schemes for particular criticism: the underground concourses of Penn Center in Philadelphia; a suburban-style shopping mall in downtown Pittsburgh; the cultural superblock of Lincoln Center in New York (the target that had upset Jackson). The thrust of her argument was that while cities needed improvement, rebuilding should safeguard and reinforce traditional urban attributes, especially lively streets. The previous Fortune authors depended on surveys and roundtables of experts, but Jacobs relied on her own observations at ground level—sidewalk level—to appreciate how people actually behaved on city streets. She extolled density, complexity, and diversity and pointed out the advantages of narrow streets, short blocks, mixtures of old and new buildings, and mixtures of commercial, cultural, and residential uses. “Designing a dream city is easy,” she wrote, implicitly criticizing the urban visions of architects and planners, “rebuilding a living city takes imagination.”8 Jacobs saw urban rebuilding as piecemeal, governed less by professionals than by citizens, a foreshadowing of the community groups, review boards, and business groups that would, in fact, later play a major role in shaping city development.

The Fortune series was published as a book, The Exploding Metropolis: A Study of the Assault on Urbanism and How Our Cities Can Resist It, which was favorably reviewed by Harrison Salisbury on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. ⁹ The book’s editor, Nathan Glazer, was a thirty-four-year-old sociologist and coauthor of the influential book The Lonely Crowd. After meeting Glazer, Jacobs invited him to write an article about urbanism for Architectural Forum. The result, “Why City Planning Is Obsolete,” would influence Jacobs’s thinking. In the article, Glazer points out that the profession of city planning, rooted in the Garden City ideas of Ebenezer Howard, is ill suited to deal with the problems of large cities. “What passes for city planning today is fundamentally a rejection of the big city and of all it means—its variety, its peculiarities, its richness of choice and experience—and a yearning for a bucolic society,” he writes.¹⁰ Glazer makes the original observation that while in many ways Le Corbusier’s Radiant City was diametrically opposed to Howard’s Garden City—being vertical rather than horizontal—the two concepts shared a common assumption, “that the city could be improved by replacing its chaos and confusion with a single plan, different from the urban plans of the past in that it was not conceived as a general outline of streets and major public institutions, but as a placement of every residence, every facility, every plot of green.”11

Glazer argued that current American city planning was a fusion of Howard’s and Le Corbusier’s ideas, and he criticized the suburban character of such well-known projects as Louis I. Kahn’s Mill Creek housing in Philadelphia and Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park in Detroit, which combined apartment towers and freestanding groups of row houses in parklike settings. Glazer’s chief point was that big cities are not only larger and denser than suburbs and towns, but are actually different, experientially richer and culturally and economically more diverse. What was needed, he wrote, were planning concepts that would create and preserve “the character of a city rather than that of a suburb or a town.”¹² He disagreed with the suggestion that a disinterested party—the planner—could do a better job organizing the city than a multitude of self-interested individuals as represented by the market. He argued that individual decisions were responsible for the liveliness and variety of cities. Anticipating the historic preservation movement, Glazer also called for saving old buildings and old neighborhoods.

When Jacobs was approached by the Rockefeller Foundation with an offer of a grant if she would expand her Fortune essay into a book, Glazer introduced her to Jason Epstein at Random House.¹³ The result was The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The book elaborated on the various themes Jacobs had broached in her Fortune essay, her Harvard talk, and her Architectural Forum articles. She used examples chiefly from Greenwich Village (where she lived) and also described older city neighborhoods such as Back-of-the-Yards in Chicago and the North End in Boston, as well as developments she had visited in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. As before, she pinpointed busy streets as the key ingredient for successful urban neighborhoods, but to the attributes of liveliness and human interest she added public safety, a theme that runs throughout the book. Death and Life is a forcefully argued, jargon-free book aimed at a wide audience that benefits from Jacobs’s twenty years of practicing journalism—and twenty years of walking the streets of New York City.

Jacobs’s Fortune article had included a single disparaging reference to the “dated relics” of the City Beautiful movement, but otherwise had little to say about city planning. Not so Death and Life, whose first lines lay out the author’s position with characteristic bluntness:

This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to the Sunday supplements and women’s magazines. My attack is not based on quibbles about rebuilding methods or hair-splitting about fashions in design. It is an attack, rather, on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding.14

Jacobs’s provocative position was influenced by Glazer’s Architectural Forum article, but she went further, lumping the three Big Ideas together and sarcastically referring to them as “Radiant Garden City Beautiful.” She dismissed the achievements of the City Beautiful movement such as Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and San Francisco’s Civic Center, pointing out that not only did people tend to avoid these monumental spaces, but their effect on the city was generally negative rather than uplifting. Referring to the World’s Columbian Exposition, she wrote, “Somehow, when the fair became part of the city, it did not work like the fair.”15 She had nothing good to say about garden cities, either. “[Ebenezer Howard] simply wrote off the intricate, many-faceted, cultural life of the metropolis. He was uninterested in such problems as the way great cities police themselves, or exchange ideas, or operate politically, or invent new economic arrangements,” she wrote.¹⁶ She criticized not only Howard and Unwin, but also American proponents of regional planning and urban decentralization such as Mumford, Stein, and Wright, and the housing expert Catherine Bauer. She reserved her greatest scorn for Le Corbusier and the Radiant City. “His city was like a wonderful mechanical toy,” she wrote. “It was so orderly, so visible, so easy to understand. It said everything in a flash, like a good advertisement.”17 She excoriated the notion of eliminating streets. “The whole idea of doing away with city streets, insofar as that is possible, and downgrading and minimizing their social and their economic part in city life is the most mischievous and destructive idea in orthodox city planning.”¹⁸

Jane Jacobs in 1962, the year after she published The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Like Glazer, Jacobs objected to modern city planning on pragmatic grounds. “Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design,” she wrote. Why couldn’t city planners learn from these experiments? She felt that practitioners and students of planning should study the successes and failures of actual living cites, not historic examples and theoretical projects. She adamantly opposed what she called “architectural design cults,” which is how she characterized the City Beautiful and the Radiant City. She attacked a key assumption of modern planning: “A city cannot be a work of art. When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities.”19 She did not mean that beauty could not be a part of the experience of a city, but she was criticizing the diagrammatic plans made by architects, and the tendency of large projects to sanitize the urban environment, resulting in places that seemed to her entirely divorced from the “messy” nature of city life.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published in November 1961, to great acclaim. Excerpts appeared in Harper’s, the Saturday Evening Post, and Vogue, and the book was widely reviewed, with the popular press generally liking it, and professional journals expressing a degree of skepticism. Yet everyone recognized the book’s importance. Lloyd Rodwin, an MIT city planner writing in the New York Times Book Review, took exception to some of Jacobs’s criticisms of his profession, but called Death and Life “a great book.”20 City planners might have been expected to react more strongly to Jacobs’s attack, but most didn’t. Perhaps they were disarmed by her commonsense observations, perhaps they secretly agreed with her conclusions, or perhaps they were simply glad to see the subject of city planning in the public eye, no matter the message.

Death and Life was a finalist for the 1962 nonfiction National Book Award, which went to another book on urbanism, The City in History, by Lewis Mumford. Mumford, sixty-seven, had long been active as a literary critic, essayist, historian of technology, urban reformer, and architecture critic. Since 1931, his “Sky Line” column in the New Yorker had provided a national platform for his ideas about urbanism, and thanks to The Culture of Cities (1938), and now The City in History, he was widely recognized as America’s leading thinker and writer on the subject. Like Jacobs, Mumford opposed Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, but he had long been an advocate for Garden City planning, so he might have been expected to respond publicly to her book. Respond he did, a year later, in a scathing New Yorker review sarcastically titled “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies.”

Mumford’s negative reaction to Death and Life was partly the result of pique. He had befriended Jacobs, corresponded with her, and encouraged her book writing, and she reciprocated by ridiculing the work of men he admired and calling The Culture of Cities “a morbid and biased catalog of ills.”21 The differences between Mumford and Jacobs were substantive. He shared her views about the complexity of cities and the need to avoid simplistic solutions, but took issue with many of her sweeping generalizations. For example, in the review he disagreed with her blanket condemnation of urban parks as dangerous; a native New Yorker, Mumford was old enough to remember when Central Park had been perfectly safe (as it would again be by the late 1980s). He also took issue with her claim that high-density housing, pedestrian-filled streets, and a mixture of economic activities were sufficient to combat crime and violence, pointing out that Harlem, then New York’s least safe neighborhood, had all three conditions to no avail. He questioned her acerbic characterization of suburbia. “It is millions of quite ordinary people who cherish such suburban desires, not a few fanatical haters of the city, sunk in bucolic dreams,” he wrote.22 He also violently disagreed with her claim that cities do not involve artistry. “What has happened is that Mrs. Jacobs has jumped from the quite defensible position that good physical structures and handsome design are not everything in city planning to the callow notion that they do not matter at all.”²³

Lewis Mumford, whose views on urbanism clashed with those of Jane Jacobs.

Although Mumford conceded that Jacobs was a perceptive observer of urban life—“no one has surpassed her in understanding the reasons for the great metropolis’s complexity”—he was irked by her categorical rejection of city planning.24 He had a lifelong commitment to planning, having personally known the great Scottish pioneer of city planning, Sir Patrick Geddes, who laid the foundation for the city-planning profession, just as Olmsted had for landscape architecture. A supporter of the Garden City movement, Geddes (1854–1932) expanded Howard’s ideas to include the urban region and, trained as a biologist and botanist, was an early advocate of ecology and nature conservation. His influence was far-ranging and included on not only Unwin and Nolen, but even Le Corbusier. In 1923, to advance Geddes’s ideas in the United States, Mumford, Stein, and other urban reformers founded the Regional Planning Association of America, which promoted developments such as Radburn, New Jersey, and Sunnyside Gardens in New York City. Thus, many of the planned communities that Jacobs criticized were projects that Mumford had personally supported. For ten years, he had lived in Stein and Wright’s Sunnyside Gardens. “Not utopia,” he observed, “but better than any existing New York neighborhood, even Mrs. Jacobs’ backwater in Greenwich Village.”25

Mumford characterized Death and Life as “a mingling of sense and sentimentality, of mature judgments and schoolgirl howlers.”²⁶ That may have been unkind, but it was not entirely untrue. Jacobs was trained as a journalist, not a scholar, and she tended to dramatize and exaggerate for effect, picking and choosing evidence to support her arguments. Her knowledge of urban history was limited. She did not recognize, for example, that the City Beautiful movement was not only about monumental civic centers and parkways, but also about piecemeal improvement. Her potted chronicle of the influence of the Garden City movement in America simply skipped over the fecund pre—Second World War era, and she seemed unaware of Burnham’s Chicago Plan, with its comprehensive descriptions of a rich and varied city life, or of developments such as Forest Hills Gardens, which, with its mixture of uses and its density, was close to what she espoused. She also tended to draw large conclusions from small examples, citing high 1958 crime rates in Los Angeles as proof that automobile-oriented cities are inherently dangerous, which is a dubious proposition, as the future would show, for crime rates in pedestrian-oriented cities such as Baltimore, Saint Louis, and New York City would soon soar. Her analysis of urban decline was likewise flawed. Cities were not in trouble because of poor planning, but because, since before the First World War, the middle class had been decamping for the suburbs, leaving behind poverty, rising crime, and racial tensions and abandoning precisely those dense downtown neighborhoods that she extolled.

That Jacobs was neither a sociologist nor an urban historian is a weakness of her book, but also its strength. She approached her subject quite differently from professional planners; instead of formulating a theory of what cities should be, she tried to understand what they actually were, and how they worked—and didn’t work. As a result, where planners saw confusion, she discovered an intricate web of human relationships; where they perceived messy chaos, she found vitality and liveliness. She rejected planners’ attempts to define cities as simple structures, whether biological or technological, and instead offered her own striking analogy: the city as a field of darkness.

In the field, many fires are burning. They are of many sizes, some great, others small; some far apart, others dotted close together; some are brightening, some are slowly going out. Each fire, large or small, extends its radiance into the surrounding murk, and thus it carves out a space. But the space and the shape of that space exist only to the extent that the light from the fire creates it.

The murk has no shape or pattern except where it is carved into space by the light. Where the murk between the lights becomes deep and undefinable and shapeless, the only way to give it form or structure is to kindle new fires in the murk or sufficiently enlarge the nearest existing fire.27

Jacobs considered cities not to be “simple problems” that could be solved with one-dimensional solutions, such as separating pedestrians from cars, or putting everyone in tall buildings, or building parks. Nor were cities so chaotic that they required radical reorganization, such as isolating housing, commerce, and industry though zoning. She described cities as “complex problems” in which dozens of variables are subtly organized into an interconnected whole. “Their intricate order—a manifestation of the freedom of countless numbers of people to make and carry out countless plans—is in many ways a great wonder,” she concluded.28