“The city planner gets a problem and he has to start from scratch. The architect usually asks for a program,” Rosenfield observes. Working either as a consultant or architect, Rosenfield uses the city-planner approach, does his own studies right down to digging out the facts on family income in the community. His facility with this kind of research comes out of his three years’ training as a social scientist. He is suspicious of all rules of thumb and initial assumptions.
—Jane Jacobs, 1952
In June 1952, the same month in which Jacobs’s first article for Architectural Forum was published, Douglas Haskell announced his plan to redouble the magazine’s efforts on the problems of cities. Haskell explained that, unlike its rivals, only Forum’s writers had recognized “the potential in urban redevelopment and the new instruments given private enterprise by the Redevelopment Section of the 1949 Housing Act,” which, “for the first time, gave private interests a major chance to operate in large sections in the middle of the city which formerly could not be assembled.”1
Like most Americans, including Jacobs, Haskell believed that the urban redevelopment powers extended to city housing authorities by Title I of the U.S. Housing Act of 1949 had the potential to improve cities that had remained in a state of deferred maintenance after the war. The nation’s housing stock, which was already inadequate and aged before the war, had deteriorated further due to wartime material rationing and domestic construction restrictions. And with millions of military servicemen and -women returning from overseas ready to begin new lives, the country’s postwar enemy was a nationwide housing shortage. As the country singer Merle Travis crooned in his 1946 song “No Vacancy,” “Now the mighty war over there is won, / Troubles and trials have just begun, / As I face that terrible enemy sign, No Vacancy.”2
With the Marshall Plan put in place to assist the rebuilding of Europe in 1947, and construction restrictions lifted, the United States mobilized for an equally ambitious and long-awaited postwar rebuilding program at home. As part of the “Fair Deal” launched by President Truman in his 1949 State of the Union address, the new federal initiative would finance slum clearance and urban redevelopment (Title I of the Housing Act of 1949), guarantee mortgages through the Federal Housing Administration (Title II), and provide funds for the construction of one million affordable public housing units by 1955 (Title III). With support from city planners, the home-building industry, and public housing advocates, the bill addressed the interests of diverse constituencies, who sometimes had very different visions for the future of the American city. There were those who believed in building new towns and others who advocated modernizing cities, and, among these, many questioned whether the city could, or should, survive in its present form.3
Skyrocketing automobile ownership, extensive highway construction, the mass production of suburban housing stimulated by guaranteed home mortgages, the age-old lure of suburban life, and Cold War fears of nuclear attack on urban centers combined to make decentralization a buzzword of the early 1950s. Although the idea of planned decentralization dated back at least to Ebenezer Howard’s To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), in the postwar period, Clarence Stein and other advocates of Howard’s Garden Cities movement believed the time was “ripe for complete change in the form of the urban environment.” In Toward New Towns for America (1950), Stein predicted that the coming decades would see “a new era of nation-wide decentralization” for reasons of defense and better living. The editor Harold Hauf, Haskell’s counterpart at Architectural Record, agreed. Hauf believed that the “growing congestion and concentration in urban areas is no more desirable in peace time than in war.” But with the added threat of nuclear attack, in a December 1950 editorial “City Planning and Civil Defense,” Hauf explained that every slum clearance project should be considered an opportunity to advance the strategic depopulation of cities. “Today urban dispersal appears to be the only fully effective means of minimizing the effects of atomic bombing,” he wrote. “If we are alert to the implications, we can identify this means of defense with measures for making our cities better places in which to work and live.”4
In other words, during the Cold War, and especially during the height of the Red Scare, Forum’s support for the modernization of central cities— despite being targets for bombs—was not to be taken for granted. Covering stories on urban redevelopment, which became known as urban renewal after the U.S. Housing Act of 1954, was an expression of support for the continued existence of the city in both a physical and an existential sense. It was, moreover, a sensibility that was not unrelated to the fact that Forum and its staff were based in Manhattan. If one believed in the possibility of nuclear attack, then, deep down, their survival and the city’s were one and the same. And there was no better place than a New York-based architectural magazine from which to follow urban redevelopment and renewal projects.
In this light, it should not be surprising that Jacobs sided not only with cities, but also with the urban redevelopment and city planning initiatives that supported them. In fact, although she later came to regret her role in supporting urban renewal, Jacobs was initially an enthusiastic advocate of urban redevelopment and the city-planner approach. In the years before the failure of urban renewal was apparent, this was almost necessarily true for those who supported cities over decentralization. For Jacobs, the same commitment to cities that led her to become Forum’s urban redevelopment specialist, and ultimately the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, initially included hopes for the improvement of cities through redevelopment and renewal.
In the years around the passage of the Housing Act of 1949, the belief that American cities were “beyond mild measures” was widely shared and invasive “slum surgery” was widely considered to be the “progressive” approach. Architectural Forum’s early articles on urban redevelopment, most often written then by Walter McQuade, Ogden Tanner, and Mary Mix Foley, usually supported heavy-handed and large-scale slum clearance. Their articles, written while Jacobs was still working for Amerika and also writing articles on the subject, give a sense of what was considered acceptable and of how ideas were changing. In 1951, for example, the magazine praised the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, still in its design phase. In 1952, however, some of Forum’s writers began to question the large project approach, categorizing it as the “Robert Moses method.” In other words, by the time Jacobs joined the magazine, there was a precedent for criticism of what McQuade called the “neighborhood leveling techniques of planners like blockbusting Bob Moses.”5
FIGURE 23. Titled “Bomb vs. Metropolis,” this image, which superimposed the Bikini Atoll Baker bomb test cloud onto the Manhattan skyline, sought to show both the relative scale of an atomic explosion and the fragility of cities in such an attack. Images like these, and fears of Soviet nuclear attack, contributed to arguments for urban decentralization during the Cold War. Operation Crossroads: The Official Pictorial Record (New York: Wise & Co., 1946), 215.
For Architectural Forum, the story of urban renewal began with “Redevelopment of Norfolk,” which documented the “first full-scale try-out” of Title I slum clearance and urban redevelopment in May 1950. First in line for Title I funding in August 1949, beating even New York’s Robert Moses to the punch, the head of Norfolk, Virginia’s Redevelopment and Housing Authority, who had served as the president of the National Association of Housing Officials, would set a precedent for how Title I funds would be used.6
Comprising a third of Norfolk’s downtown area, the city’s plan was unprecedented in scale, a first in size and kind. Comparing the undertaking to Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town, the previous benchmark for postwar slum clearance and housing projects, Forum’s (unbylined) writer observed that “Stuyvesant Town is the biggest housing project erected anywhere since the war, but its 75 acres of slum-cleared land is little more than a third of the 207 acres now scheduled for redevelopment in Norfolk.” The first phase of the Norfolk redevelopment plan alone, a third of the total acres designated for redevelopment, made it “the biggest [slum-clearance] program ever.”7
Typical of urban renewal projects to come, the part of Norfolk’s downtown planned for reconstruction was also home to the city’s African American community. Racism, segregation, and poverty had combined to make this part of the city one of the worst slums in the country, where “inside toilets [were] practically unknown and running water indoors the rare exception” and whole families were frequently crowded into a single room. Although the writer did not go so far as to condemn the underlying social injustices, he did observe that housing for whites in the city had kept pace with population growth related to military production during the war, while “the only new units erected for Negroes since 1940 were two public housing projects for a total of 1,200 families,” despite a population increase of 20,000 in the black community.
Anticipating James Baldwin’s famous 1963 description of “urban renewal” as “Negro removal,” only a fraction of the formerly African American neighborhood would be rebuilt for its residents. Along with a road-widening and -straightening program and the construction of a new belt highway, most of the downtown neighborhood would be rezoned for commercial and industrial uses in the interest of economic development. The twelve thousand displaced “slum-dwellers” who qualified for public housing would be relocated to four new “Negro projects” and one white public housing project to be built beyond the downtown area.8
A few months later, an almost identical story was told in Forum’s August 1950 issue. In this case, “Chicago Redevelops” described the Lake Meadows area of South Side Chicago as “America’s biggest slum.” The plan would match perceptions. The redevelopment proposal, the author observed, “is no gentle therapy; it is drastic surgery. But cities like Chicago are beyond mild measures.”9
Similar to the situation in Norfolk, while Chicago’s South Side African American population had almost doubled between 1930 and 1950, segregation crowded people into “blocks of miserable old mansions, inhabited sometimes in shifts.” Redevelopment would dislocate 85 to 90 percent of the neighborhood’s residents, although few would be able to afford the moderate-income rents of the Lake Meadows housing project. Moreover, only an estimated quarter of the displaced residents would be eligible for public housing elsewhere. The remaining evacuees would be relocated (“slum shifted”) by Chicago’s Land Clearance Commission into “equivalent dwellings” elsewhere in the designated slum district.
Despite the great need for housing, the new neighborhood would be mostly open land. With suburbanized urbanism thoroughly entrenched as the prevailing planning paradigm, 92 percent of Lake Meadows’s ground would be left unbuilt. Designed by a blue-chip architectural firm, the project was defined by two facing “horizontal skyscrapers,” each twenty-three stories high, one apartment deep, and one-third of a mile long. With relatively small footprints, the gigantic apartment blocks would leave “vast stretches of open green area.” In this way, the project sought to “compete with the suburbs” by creating a new “suburb” just minutes from downtown. The proposal, later critiqued by Jacobs in Death and Life, perfectly encapsulated the principles of “Radiant Garden City” planning.10
“Slum Surgery in St. Louis,” published in April 1951, described the redevelopment plans for approximately 40 percent of downtown St. Louis in a similar pattern. Years later, in 1972, the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe, the proposed housing project at the center of the city’s renewal scheme, would symbolize the failure and death of modern architecture and modernist urbanism.11
FIGURE 24. Published in April 1951, a year before Jacobs arrived at Architectural Forum, “Slum Surgery in St. Louis” was an early article on urban redevelopment. It set the stage for Jacobs’s writing on the subject in the following years. The article also introduced designs for the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project. AF (Apr. 1951), 128.
Although many factors—social, financial, and physical—contributed to Pruitt-Igoe’s downfall, its failure resulted largely from the expectation, typical of the prevailing paradigm, that an architectural solution could solve a larger urban problem. “Slum Surgery in St. Louis” described a “vertical neighborhood for poor people in a city which up to now has lived 90% in single houses,” with no regard for the residents’ experiences, let alone desires, of living in single-family houses or in a neighborhood of such houses. By contrast, the project’s architectural success was judged by the fact that the Pruitt-Igoe building’s skip-stop elevator plan was 16 percent more efficient than the typical cross plan of New York City public housing. On this account, the unbuilt Pruitt-Igoe housing project was described as having “already begun to change the public housing pattern in other cities.”12
Within only four years of the project’s completion, as Pruitt-Igoe began to decline, “Slum Surgery in St. Louis” become a quiet source of embarrassment for Architectural Forum. Although she was careful not to name the project or cite the source of the accolades it had received (her own magazine!), in Death and Life, Jacobs contributed to the “Pruitt-Igoe myth” by opining that the “expert praise” that the project had initially received was evidence of the bankruptcy of urban redevelopment and design theory. While obviously flawed, some residents found the housing project to be better than the homes they left, at least until larger systemic problems— among them, racism, minimal architectural and maintenance budgets, and a declining city—took their toll.13
Despite Jacobs’s hindsight, the St. Louis plan was regarded in the early 1950s as a “rescue pattern” to preserve a shrinking city. The author of “Slum Surgery” reported that while “today everybody wants to move out” of the city, the mayor wanted to “preserve” St. Louis, with the hope that the St. Louis plan “might well set a new rescue pattern for other tight-collared U.S. cities who are watching their substance disappear to the comfortable suburbs.” In this sense, Forum’s editorial position remained urban and opposed to decentralization and suburbanization. The author observed that some “social planners in St. Louis think the population should be allowed to disperse, that even public housing projects should be built outside the city.” But then, he asked, “what happens to the city?” The answer seemed to be “progress or death.” Quoting a representative civic leader in St. Louis, Forum asked its readers to imagine that “the whole city did turn itself inside out and disappear to the suburbs…. [O]nce that had happened completely, the implications of the life of the city as a whole, including those suburbs, might be something to worry about. You don’t go on walking without a heart.” Jacobs would have agreed.14
Although Haskell committed magazine resources to covering redevelopment stories, when Jacobs started at Architectural Forum in 1952, there were still not many projects to write about, for better or worse. No Title I projects had been completed, and, in the interest of keeping real estate prices from spiking and to keep critics at bay, redevelopment plans were typically kept quiet, if not secret, until all funding and other agreements were in place.
In New York, for example, the first seven urban redevelopment plans— two projects in Greenwich Village, two in Harlem, and three more located in Williamsburg, Corlears Hook, and on Delancey Street—received little notice. People, reporters included, were slow to grasp the significance of Title I slum clearance or of Moses’s appointment as chairman of a new Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance. (Moses also held the titles of construction coordinator and planning commissioner.) However, as Robert Caro wrote in The Power Broker, “on the landscape of New York’s history, that appointment stands out like a mountain.” With the combination of Title I’s powers of eminent domain and Moses’s new power, “his control was complete at last.”15
Typical of Moses’s approach and such projects in general, Moses avoided presenting his projects until they were done deals—sites selected and mapped, design proposals drawn, and federal financing assured. Indeed, in 1951, the Slum Clearance Committee’s plan to raze twenty-six blocks (fifty-four acres) south of Washington Square had attracted only a passing mention in the New York Times, despite the fact that it would remove almost “every familiar landmark” in the process. It was not until March 1952, when a significant but relatively small part of Moses’s Greenwich Village redevelopment plan was ready to move forward, that the avant-garde among protesters began to mobilize the community. In response to a subsequent report in the Times, Shirley Hayes, the Parks Committee director of the recently established Greenwich Village Community Planning District, formed the Committee to Save Washington Square Park in order to fend off Moses’s proposal to extend Fifth Avenue through the park and create a Parisian-style traffic circle around the Washington Square arch. Still virtually unknown were Moses’s intentions to connect these new roads to a newly created boulevard, Fifth Avenue South, which would be developed with two superblock housing projects, Washington Square South and the South Village, on the razed twenty-six blocks.16
Although opposition gathered against the reconstruction of the park, the widening of existing roads bisecting the square, and the extension of Fifth Avenue, this was not true of the proposed slum-clearance projects for Greenwich Village itself. In August 1952—some years before Jacobs joined the fight for the park—Lewis Mumford voiced his support for the Hayes committee’s counteroffensive to stop the reconstruction of Washington Square by eliminating all traffic through the park. However, Mumford advocated a renewal plan even larger than that proposed by Moses. Apparently unaware of the two housing projects already proposed, he wrote that the “area south of the Square, a ramshackle one at best, is ripe for a large-scale housing development.” He believed that a plan was needed “for the redevelopment of the whole area south of the park, right down to Canal Street.” Consistent with widely held beliefs about functional city zoning, such a plan would include “the ultimate removal of all industrial functions from the area.” Without a comprehensive plan of this scale, Mumford argued, “nothing can save Washington Square, much less redeem it.”17
Indeed, in the early 1950s, a “progressive” approach to city redevelopment meant avoiding a “piecemeal” approach and renovating large sections of the city from the ground up. It meant destroying more slums to build more modern housing, even if this meant displacing more people. In an August 1952 Forum article, “What Is Urban Redevelopment?,” Mary Mix Foley accordingly editorialized in favor of a plan for Washington, DC, that would displace three-quarters of the existing population, as compared to a more “conservative” plan that would displace only one-half. Privileging redevelopment for the middle and upper incomes by moving poor people out of the city center was seen as part of this progressive approach. Siding with private redevelopment against the public housing-oriented position of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Foley presented overtly class-based, and not so subtly race-based, arguments for the “high-class residential areas” and “top-rank investment” for a “well-to-do tenancy” that would allegedly ensure the success of the redevelopment project. This, in Foley’s eyes, was “bold use of the redevelopment title of the 1949 Housing Act” and like what was familiar in Norfolk and New York.18
The “Robert Moses approach” to slum clearance was not the only kind of urban redevelopment, however. Indeed, the so-called conservative approach that Foley rejected for Washington, DC, had spokesmen well before Jane Jacobs. As part of their contribution to the Southwest Washington redevelopment plan, the architects Louis Justement and Chloethiel Woodard Smith described a diversified community plan that would avoid dull “islands of families with similar income levels, interests, and ages”; keep the “old corner grocery”; and use public and semipublic buildings to provide “welcome breaks in design and scale.” They valued the social, economic, and physical diversity of the city in ways like those articulated by Jacobs some years later. Challenging the architects’ plan for diversity, Foley expressed the position of those who were drawn to the clarity of standardization and segregation: “To provide this variety within a large redevelopment is to take the hard way in planning. It is particularly difficult in southwest Washington,” she opined, “because this area is predominately a Negro slum.”19
Nevertheless, other city planners besides Smith were willing to take the hard way. In Forum’s April 1952 issue, published just before Jacobs started with the magazine, another alternative to the “Robert Moses approach” was described in “The Philadelphia Cure: Clearing Slums with Penicillin, Not Surgery.” Viewed as a “conservative” but “startling new way” to rebuild the city, “the Philadelphia cure … escapes the violent postwar redevelopment pattern in our largest cities—the neighborhood leveling techniques of planners like blockbusting Bob Moses of N.Y., who smash enormous rundown areas off the map, and then hand the aching sites to single large agencies or insurance companies for slide-rule housing solutions.”20 This critique was very similar, both conceptually and rhetorically, to what Jacobs articulated later. Indeed, she wrote a very positive follow-up article to “The Philadelphia Cure” in 1955 and adopted many of the Philadelphia School’s planning ideas as her own.
As developed by the City Planning Commission director Edmund Bacon and the chief coordinating architect-planner Louis Kahn, the Philadelphia cure emphasized six points of the Philadelphia approach—most of which were later explicitly advocated by Jacobs.
FIGURE 25. “The Philadelphia Cure,” published in the month Jacobs sought employment at Architectural Forum, was another early article on urban redevelopment and a precursor to Jacobs’s writing about Philadelphia. AF (Apr. 1952), 112.
First, smaller redevelopment areas were defined to avoid “monstrous single-project solutions” that depended on “big insurance company financing,” like New York City’s Stuyvesant Town.
Second, rebuilding sought to minimize the dislocation of present inhabitants for their own sake and in order to avoid the “political headaches” experienced, for example, in Chicago, with evictions and the threat of them.
Third, community meetings were conducted prior to drawing redevelopment plans in order to foster “democracy and good feeling” and avoid “the friction generated in such cities as New York when a planning boss such as Bob Moses confronts the neighborhood at a ‘hearing’ with a plan already cooked in total disregard of [local] feelings.”
Fourth, the preservation of local institutions such as churches, schools, and clubs was regarded as protection of “the social structure of the area as a neighborhood held together by an institutional structure which other cities in their redevelopment and housing projects have unwittingly destroyed.” Treating “only the spots of worst infection, Philadelphia expects the cure to spread” naturally.
Fifth, to coordinate development and make “whole city areas harmonious” while avoiding monolithic approaches to urban order, the Philadelphia cure would engage “architects skilled in urban design (as distinguished from spot architecture) to co-operate with the various architects hired by the separate builders of the separate projects.”
Finally, sixth, the Philadelphia approach sought to “preserve the historical past of the area,” its landmarks and “depth in time.” Despite the greater expense, this plan maintained “strong spiritual values in giving a sense of continuity of life from generation to generation.” According to Bacon, “There is a structure of institutions (in all neighborhoods) which has vitality … which ties the people together. Redevelopment, whenever possible, should give these institutions new strength and validity.”21
In their physical design, Kahn’s master plans—developed with the architects Kenneth Day, Louis McAllister, and Anne Tyng; the landscape architect Christopher Tunnard; and Bacon—generally avoided superblocks, instead arranging buildings with reference to existing city blocks. Although they continued to advance the modernist idea of space planning, influences came equally from traditional urbanism, making the scheme a notable interjection of architectural history into a field that had sought for decades to deny it. Influenced by Kahn’s 1951 trip to Greece, the proposed organization of “promenades leading to open spaces” was described “as old as the oldest Greek towns.” Bacon was also a student of city planning history. In Design of Cities (1967), he would trace the history of urban design from Greek and Roman cities to Philadelphia.22
Despite perpetuating the sick city metaphor, the Philadelphia cure reversed the widely held “medicine vs. surgery” argument, a motif of urban theory prescribed decades earlier by Le Corbusier in a similarly titled chapter in The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning. In addition to accepting a less radical and invasive approach, the physical, social, and procedural aspects of the Philadelphia plan were the beginning of the shift away from modernist urbanism. In the next ten to fifteen years, various aspects of the Philadelphia plan would develop into disciplines and specialties in their own right: community planning, in-fill development, historic preservation, and urban design. When she later followed up on “The Philadelphia Cure” article, Jacobs quickly recognized the plan’s virtues, and she absorbed the innovative aspects of Kahn’s and Bacon’s city planning ideas into her own urban theory.23
Jacobs’s first article as a full-time staff member was a profile of the architect Isadore Rosenfield. But even while working the hospital and schools desk at Forum, she thought about the city. Thus, rather than write a typical hospital-of-the-month story, she decided to write an article about an architect she considered exemplary for approaching his projects like a city planner. Indeed, in contrast with her frequently negative opinion of architects and city planners in Death and Life, her September 1952 article is evidence that Jacobs idealized the city planning profession in the early 1950s.24
Jacobs met Rosenfield in July 1952 as part of her early hospital research and liked him immediately. Rosenfield was a Harvard-trained architect and the designer and consultant for more than sixty hospitals, as well as the chief architect of the New York Department of Hospitals and of the city’s Department of Public Works. He also consulted for other architects, including Kahn, who designed the Radbill Building of the Philadelphia Psychiatric Hospital, which likely led to Jacobs and Kahn’s first meeting, in advance of her January 1953 article “New Hospital Type.” (In that article, Jacobs praised both the design and functionality of the building. “Kahn has given his building gentleness and joy,” she wrote. “[But] there is nothing namby-pamby about the gentleness of Kahn’s design, no homogenized simplicity. ‘I like my buildings to have knuckles,’ he says. The bend in the slab at the knuckly corridor intersection is primarily to express different functions of the short wing on first and third floors and to give variety to [the] second-floor interior vista. The bend also makes best use of slope and garden space for [the] ground-floor dining room.”)25
As with Kahn, it was less Rosenfield’s aesthetic sensibility than his nondogmatic way of thinking that Jacobs found most compelling. Anticipating themes and rhetoric in Death and Life, she described his “inquisitive and independent approach to social thinking” as “unorthodox” and “like nothing taught in schools of architecture.” Rosenfield, Jacobs related, had moved from the study of social ethics and settlement-house work into the study of architecture in the 1920s, but he had maintained in his work his sensitivity to the human element. She approved of the way Rosenfield made hospital service “dignified” and made patients “feel they are really considered as individuals.” This sensitivity extended from physical aspects such as site specificity to an “elastic definition of function” that included “not only the machinery, but the emotional content.”26
FIGURE 26. In “Rosenfield and His Hospitals,” Jacobs’s first article as a full-time staff member of Architectural Forum, she praised the architect’s “city-planner approach.” AF (Sept. 1952), 128.
What particularly distinguished Rosenfield’s methodology from that of “academic” architects was his city-planner approach. In her idealized view in 1952, this meant not unquestioningly accepting the client’s program or secondhand knowledge, but engaging the design problem with empirical and user-oriented research. Setting out her expectations of architects and city planners for years to come, she praised Rosenfield’s method (see the epigraph for this chapter).27 Although her ideas about city planning changed, Jacobs saw and projected the empirical, inductive, and people- and context-oriented methodology that she advocated in Death and Life as important habits of thought for studying cities already in one of her first articles as an architectural critic, which also demonstrated her determination to write about cities and urban redevelopment, despite her initial job description.
Jacobs’s writing focused on hospitals and schools for the next year, but it was not long before she reviewed larger design projects that provided a bridge to writing about urban redevelopment. Her first break came in late 1952, as Forum’s editors prepared for the “New Thinking” theme for the magazine in 1953, in the form of the regional shopping mall, a new building type that had a significant relationship with the city and suburb. By her own account, “New Thinking on Shopping Centers,” published in March 1953, was the first in a list of articles that she considered most relevant to her self-described “interest in writing about the nature of cities.”28
“New Thinking on Shopping Centers” was a twenty-four-page feature meant to rival the special issue on shopping centers published by Progressive Architecture a year earlier. It examined four case studies of the new building typology, which had been largely invented by the architect-planner Victor Gruen to replace or compete with traditional downtown shopping districts. Jacobs argued that “the time has come for downtown to begin borrowing” ideas from such successful shopping centers. It was an idea that she may actually have also heard from Kahn, who, in his 1953 article “Toward a New Plan for Midtown Philadelphia,” proposed “stimulat[ing] more imaginative development of [the city’s] shopping areas, along the lines of the new suburban shopping centers, which already provide a pattern of movement sympathetic to the pedestrian and the motor.”29
The four case studies in Jacobs’s essay were Gruen’s Southdale Shopping Center in Minneapolis; Mondawmin in Baltimore, Maryland, developed by James Rouse and a design team including the MIT dean of architecture Pietro Belluschi and the landscape architect Dan Kiley; Parker Square in Wichita Falls, Texas, by Ketchum, Gina & Sharp Architects; and Stonestown in San Francisco, by Welton Becket and Associates. In preparing the article, Jacobs got to know Gruen and Rouse, both of whom she later cited in Death and Life.30
FIGURE 27. Jacobs visiting the Mondawmin shopping center in Baltimore with the developer James Rouse in October 1952 while conducting research for her March 1953 feature “New Thinking on Shopping Centers.” Jacobs Papers.
Indeed, all four shopping centers meant to compete with Main Street, USA. Unlike the more homogeneous retail venues that shopping centers have become, these were all multiuse developments, planned with adjacent middle-class housing projects, medical centers, supermarkets, office buildings, community centers, and upscale restaurants designed to pull in shoppers “who might otherwise go downtown.” Although located three miles from the center of Baltimore, Mondawmin was specifically designed to be “a second ‘downtown.”’ As in Southdale, a broad “buffer” zone— containing offices, a medical center, a large new residential subdivision, and miles of new roads—was designed to control so-called parasitic competition and create an atmosphere conducive to shopping. In addition to being monopolistic, these developments wielded the suburban version of the urban renewal tool known as “excess condemnation,” through which the developer or authority profited from the anticipated spike in neighboring real estate values.31
Although she came to regret her early writing about urban redevelopment, Jacobs uncritically repeated the real estate boosters’ arguments. Describing Gruen’s Southdale development, she reported that the “town-plan conscious” developers had created a “blightproof neighborhood to increase and stabilize the value of the site.” To forestall decay, she continued, “the land plan protects residential areas from center traffic; uses office buildings, apartment houses and landscaped strips as transition zones between commercial and residential areas; and protects other residential borders with parks.” The Dayton Company, she continued, “will get the benefit of higher land values created by the shopping center.” These ideas were aligned with the centralized, functionalist, monopolistic, and suburban approach to urban redevelopment that Jacobs would later attack, not that of the integrated and multifunctioning city she later championed.32
Indeed, through at least 1954, Jacobs made the case for the position she would later condemn. She advocated applying the lessons of suburbia to downtown, city planning, superblock redevelopment, and urban renewal. “Since the war, almost nothing had happened downtown. There has been no big store construction,” she wrote. “Now the shopping centers are so far ahead, the time has come for downtown to begin borrowing back.”33
Likely influenced by Gruen here, Jacobs argued that city planning was essential for urban redevelopment. “The first—the most elementary— lesson for downtown is simply the importance of planning,” she wrote. “Every unplanned suburban strip losing out to a planned shopping center is a lesson in survival that cannot be ignored.” By this she did not mean just avoiding competitive anarchy or visual blight, but the very type of controlled planning—with condemnations and the clearance of all “nonconforming (as residential) buildings and blighted structures”—that she later excoriated. In Chicago, these lessons were being applied by the city’s Planning Commission to rehabilitate two shopping districts north and south of the Loop. Jacobs wrote approvingly of the creation of superblocks with “one-way traffic perimeters, elimination of most interior streets, and removal of blighted and irrelevant buildings” to “help save the city’s core.”34
Real estate developers also offered lessons in realistic and community-oriented planning. In order to protect their investments, the best shopping center planners, Jacobs reported, have “become community planners in self defense.” A year of planning preceded Southland’s zoning approval, and it included the distribution by the developers of more than five thousand “attractive little brochures to everyone in the area, explaining exactly what they proposed to do and why, showed slides of the project, invited and answered questions.” At the crucial town meeting, three hundred voters turned up, and only three persons voted against rezoning. City planners, she concluded, could learn something from the real estate developers: “The developers explained their purposes to the citizenry and won zoning changes in a way to give experienced city planners pause. Here is the idealism of town planning actually become reality—not another buried report— because it fits the cold facts of good merchandising. Frightened downtown merchants, please take note.”35
Jacobs’s favorable attitude toward current trends in city planning persisted into 1954, as evident in a review of Gruen’s Northland Regional Shopping Center in Detroit. Although she later condemned Clarence Stein’s planning ideas as being fundamentally anti-urban, at this time she actually praised Stein and Henry Wright’s design for Radburn, New Jersey, a “suburban Garden City for the motor age.” Northland, Jacobs wrote, “is a classic in shopping center planning, in the sense that Rockefeller Center is a classic in urban skyscraper-group planning, or Radburn, N.J. in suburban residential planning.” It was “a new thing in modern town planning.”36 Indeed, Northland was truly a “classic” suburban mall—it was a giant suburban building surrounded by a sea of twelve thousand parking spaces and a ring of highways. Blind to its inadequacies, Jacobs saw its best attributes, and probably what Gruen wanted her to see: “a city within a city,” a modern version of the traditional city. Gruen’s charm on her was clear. Northland, she wrote, “is a rediscovery rather than an invention.” Jacobs reported that the most frequent comment by visitors—up to fifty thousand a day—to the shopping mall was “you wouldn’t know you were in Detroit.” Nevertheless, she saw in Northland the architectural imitations of the city: The ground floor simulated “Main Street.” The basement level provided “what side streets are to the downtown area.” And the “strong, clear, overall architecture” was designed “to permit downtown variety.”37
Writing about Northland must have reminded Jacobs of her first essays about the city, as well as her reading of Henri Pirenne’s books on the rebirth of cities and commerce in the Middle Ages. Despite the cars and the acres upon acres of parking lots circling the mall, Northland had “old roots.” She saw within it an echo of medieval market towns, like old Ludlow in Shropshire, a plan of which illustrated her point. Northland had an “urban-character” that was different than the typical American attitude toward open space, which she described as having the “rural-character” of the minimally defined village common. It was also unlike the typical vehicle-oriented Main Street: Although one could only get to Northland by car, within the mall, “Shopping traffic has come full circle. It is right back where it started—with the pedestrian.” Northland was thus “a planning classic because it is the first modern pedestrian commercial center to use an urban ‘market town’ plan, a compact form physically and psychologically suited to pedestrian shopping.”38
These were lessons that Jacobs believed could be naturally applied within the city, and in this sense, Jacobs’s interpretations may have influenced Gruen in turn. Suggesting an approach to urban redevelopment, she wrote that Northland’s “flexible market-town use of open spaces looks like a natural for coping with rehabilitation of blight-spotted decaying shopping districts.” Whether she suggested this to Gruen, or vice versa, is uncertain. However, prior to Northland, Gruen was a forceful advocate of decentralization, and his shopping centers were specially designed to compete with downtowns. In Mall Maker, the historian Jeffrey Hardwick indicates that Gruen began applying the “market-town” idea to decaying downtown shopping districts around December 1954. But regardless of who influenced whom, Gruen’s plan for the redevelopment of Fort Worth, Texas—which sought to stem the flight of commerce out of the city that he had helped to accelerate with the invention of the suburban shopping center, and which Jacobs praised in a 1956 review—would attempt to apply the old “market-town” ideas to the redevelopment of the modern city.39
Jacobs later condemned the displacement of local stores by supermarkets and chain stores, and she bemoaned downtowns that were “lackluster imitations of standardized suburban chain-store shopping.” She characterized shopping center planning as a form of “monopoly planning” and “repressive zoning” that created not just commercial monopolies but civic ones. “Monopolistic shopping centers and monumental cultural centers cloak, under the public relations hoo-haw, the subtraction of commerce, and of culture too, from the intimate and casual life of cities,” she wrote. This type of planning, she explained, “artificially contrives commercial monopolies for city neighborhoods … [but] although monopoly insures the financial success planned for it, it fails the city socially.” Jacobs’s experience as one of the first architectural critics to review shopping centers made her especially sensitive to the deployment of shopping-center planning principles within the city.40
In fact, Jacobs’s doubts about top-down, monopolizing, segregating, and suburbanizing planning approaches appeared soon after “New Thinking on Shopping Centers,” but in another unexpected venue—her favorable review of a modern elementary school in New Orleans.
In the April 1953 article “Good-by Neighborhood Schools?” (a pun on good-bye, to do good by, and good buy), Jacobs took aim at decentralization, arguing that a plan by the City of New Orleans to consolidate city schools into a new suburban school complex for financial reasons was bad for social reasons. Prefiguring her critique of shopping centers in Death and Life, she observed that the planners had “hit, at least economically, on a plausible solution to the intolerable poverty of the public schools in many of our big rich cities.” However, she regarded the city’s proposal for busing city children to a centralized, suburban “school village” as a substitution of bureaucratic regimentation and standardization for local participation in neighborhood affairs and influence over the school. Although the suburbs, she argued, were thought to advance physical and social decentralization, the opposite was actually true: “It has become fashionable to call shifting anything to the suburbs ‘decentralization.’ But the school village idea, suburban or no, is centralization. It makes a homogenous big thing out of diverse little things. It carries the potential (perhaps inevitable?) flaw of centralization: loss of ‘amateur’ community participation, increase in remote and ingrown bureaucratic control.”41
The so-called school village in the suburbs, Jacobs believed, was “inherently unfitted to play the easy, intimate role in community life” that the neighborhood school could play in the city, and it would do nothing to meet the needs of a community that lacked in “almost any sort of meeting hall, banquet room, exhibit gallery, library and clubrooms.” She regarded the neighborhood school, in other words, not only as embodying community participation and control, but also as functioning as a multipurpose community building that served everyone in the neighborhood, not just students.
On these grounds, Jacobs argued against the suburban superschool and in favor of a new neighborhood school design. Jacobs had many good things to say about the Thomy Lafon Elementary School—a long, corridorless, modernist bar building raised on piloti, built in 1954—whose architects, Curtis & Davis, became known for their regional modernism and received an American Institute of Architects award for the project. However, she was certainly less interested in the design than in the building’s social function in the community context. She recognized the validity of the arguments of New Orleans’ reformers, who felt that the children bused to the new “school village,” mostly African American children from a slum known as “Back-A-Town,” would have an opportunity to spend their school day away from “a pretty nasty environment” known for high illiteracy, disease, crime, and delinquency rates. Nevertheless, she offered that one needed to look beyond the superficial appearances of the disenfranchised neighborhood and recognize its underestimated community values. Rehearsing her arguments about the hidden order that could be found under the superficial chaos of cities, she stated:
the tangible beauty, charm and spaciousness of good schoolhouses
are easy to recognize as excellences. The queer, complicated excellences
that are able to abide with happenstance ugliness and
inefficiency—but not with imposed perfection—are harder to see;
and how are they to be valued? What is the worth of a PTA that
aggravates a principal as much as it supports him? What is the
worth of a paper boat in a sidewalk puddle between home and
school? It takes some mighty delicate scales to find the answers,
but the answers are vital.42
With these remarkable questions, which suggest the return of Jacobs’s independent voice after the constraints of The Iron Age and government work, Jacobs saw the city’s virtues through the veneers of ugliness and inefficiency in the years just before the proliferation of urban renewal projects.
A month later, Jacobs wrote more on the topic of local knowledge and self-determination. Although again not directly concerned with city planning, her May 1953 article “Marshall Shaffer: Teacher-at-Large of Hospital Architecture,” which was part of the feature “New Thinking on Hospitals,” provided the opportunity to discuss her changing views of the design and planning professions. Whereas her profile of Rosenfield had praised his city-planner approach, her ideas now had much more in common with the critical views that she would articulate in Death and Life.
Marshall Shaffer was the director of the Hospital Facilities Division of the U.S. Public Health Service and a former associate of Richard Neutra. In Shaffer, Jacobs found an exemplar of good government and a teacher unencumbered by dogmatism. His philosophy, which Jacobs quoted in Death and Life, was summed up in a sign that hung above his desk: “A fool can put on his clothes better than a wise man can do it for him.”43
Shaffer expressed the wisdom that Jacobs later used to criticize paternalistic city planners. Rather than set up a centralized federal hospital authority, with its own hospital design staff or list of approved firms, Shaffer created a “decentralized” regional network designed to train local architects to build hospitals for their own communities. “When the government prepared to parcel out money for locally owned hospitals [under the Lanham and Hill-Burton Acts of 1941 and 1946],” Jacobs wrote, “he could have argued convincingly that the hinterland was not ready to cope with the design problems.” This would have been the “logical” thing to do, she acknowledged. But when it came to hospital design, Shaffer asserted, “These jobs must be done by any architect the local community or hospital board chooses. If he [the architect] doesn’t know how to design hospitals we will help him learn. … You can’t legislate good design. Let’s have no cut-and-dried answer. Let’s keep booby traps out and red tape down. Good design has to come up from the architects, not down from the government.”44
Shaffer, like Jacobs, rejected paternalism. “He runs a government office,” Jacobs underscored, ‘’that does not duplicate anything that outside individuals or organizations can be taught to do for themselves.” Redefining the slogan concerning regional “decentralization,” she believed that this approach required “imagination, gregariousness, ingenuity, and a passionate belief in decentralization.” Embracing the overarching principle that “all architects are created equal,” Shaffer set up a regional and state network to assist local architects during six key stages of the design process. In doing so, he regulated only “an absolute minimum, a floor; there never would be a design ceiling or even … ‘suggested standards’ or ‘ideals.’ “ Rather than overdesigning, he found that the most common problem was “design that skimps too much at the expense of reasonable quality.” “One of the best things about this job,” Shaffer told Jacobs, “has been watching the architects rise to the occasion, and I mean especially the men nobody had ever heard of outside their own town…. They’ve done a magnificent job, better than Washington could possibly have done for them.”45
Shaffer was clearly cut from the same cloth as Jacobs, and years later, when Jacobs wrote Death and Life, she recalled his approach as she thought through the problems of public housing. City, state, and federal housing authorities had set qualitative and quantitative caps on public housing, she observed, but there was no logical reason for the government to dictate so severely the use of public housing subsidies. Government did not, as a rule, take over the running of museums that receive public subsidies, nor did it run subsidized hospitals, she argued, with the late Marshall Shaffer’s—and perhaps others’—ideas about decentralizing decision making in mind.
Nineteen fifty-three was a year of firsts for Forum’s writing on cities. It was during that year that Forum would write about Kitimat, British Columbia, “the first complete new town in North America.” It was the year Forum reviewed the first completed Title I slum clearance and redevelopment project, Pittsburgh’s Gateway Center. And it was the year that Haskell first came to recognize Jacobs’s abilities as a writer on cities and redevelopment issues: Within a year of her start at Forum, Haskell picked her to write the feature on Kitimat, telling the executive editor Perry Prentice, “It seems to me the only writer we can assign to this is Jane Jacobs. She alone will have the capacity of giving it the human touch while digging into the details.”46
In the end, Albert Mayer, who designed the town with Clarence Stein, wrote the Kitimat story himself, although Jacobs edited the piece for publication in July 1954. Nevertheless, working on the story offered an opportunity to study Stein’s prior housing and town plans—Sunnyside Gardens, Radburn, Chatham Village, Baldwin Hills village, and the Greenbelt towns—all of which she would criticize in Death and Life for being fundamentally anti-urban. Although it would be about a year before she had another chance to write a major city feature, editing the Kitimat article exemplified how her day-to-day work at Forum provided part of the education necessary to write her great book, even when she wasn’t writing the articles.
Meanwhile, writing at Forum passed another new threshold of architectural criticism, setting the stage further for Jacobs’s future writing. In this case, the author was Haskell, who described his review of Pittsburgh’s Gateway Center, “Architecture: Stepchild or Fashioner of Cities?,” to his friend William Wurster as “the first piece of architectural criticism that has been so direct and outspoken since around 1928, when two or three magazines retreated in the face of libel suit threats.”47
FIGURE 28. Gateway Center was one of the first major postwar urban redevelopment projects. In an article, Haskell praised planning concepts attributed to Le Corbusier, and he argued for greater participation of architects in the urban design process. AF (Dec. 1953), 112-13.
Located at one of the points of Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle, Gateway Center was a slum clearance redevelopment project first reviewed by Haskell in September 1950, not long after the passage of the Housing Act of 1949, when the project was being prepared for construction. Although Forum reviewed only important projects before completion, Gateway Center deserved special attention. It was an early urban redevelopment project, and it was being orchestrated by large, pre-Title I public-private redevelopment interests in New York, including the real estate giant Robert Dowling, the Equitable Insurance Company, and the architectural firm Eggers & Higgins, who were also architects and consultants for a number of Robert Moses’s slum-clearance plans. Irwin Clavan, the project architect, had been a job captain for the Empire State Building and a key member of the “Board of Design” for Williamsburg Houses, Parkchester, and Stuyvesant Town— projects whose site planning and building forms bore a resemblance to Gateway’s design, as well as Le Corbusier’s Radiant City ideas of the late 1920s. However, as Haskell had indicated in “Pittsburgh and the Architect’s Problem,” his preconstruction review, “Perhaps no other project dramatizes so clearly the problem of the architect at mid-century.”48
The problems of the architectural profession at midcentury, and of Gateway Center, were indeed complicated, but in ways unfamiliar since Jacobs wrote Death and Life. When Gateway Center was completed in 1953, Forum’s December 1953 review was headlined “Le Corbusier Made This Prophetic Sketch in 1922: Now, at Last … Office Towers in a Park” and was accompanied by an image of Le Corbusier’s City for Three Million. The article said, “Some may see in Gateway not much more than three rather undistinguished buildings. To planners, however, Gateway is surely something more important: Here, for the first time in US city planning, the concept of office towers in a park has made good sense in economic terms. It has made sense to men who may have never heard of Le Corbusier’s ‘Ville Radieuse.’ And having once made sense to these eminently practical men, the concept can no longer be shrugged off as the dream of some unrealistic visionary.”49
Decades after Le Corbusier’s original idea, Gateway Center played out a scenario from the architect’s thirty-year-old proposal to rebuild the city center to ensure its economic and productive success. This, however, was not seen to be a problem. Haskell described the project, which replaced a twenty-three-acre derelict industrial district with a park adorned by three cruciform office towers (similar to Le Corbusier’s Cartesian skyscrapers), as making “good sense.” His words were written without cynicism. On the contrary, as Haskell wrote in 1950, “The basic concept of big city office buildings widely spaced in a 23-acre park is indeed noble—the first realization of Le Corbusier’s generation-old dream.” Although he had reservations about the buildings’ design, which he repeated in his 1953 editorial, the underlying city planning concept made the completed project a “major accomplishment.”50
In contrast with Jacobs’s criticisms in Death and Life, what Haskell and others regarded as the problem was that Gateway Center’s planning and its similarities to Le Corbusier’s Radiant City were accidental. As revealed in discussions with Robert Dowling, despite an architectural tradition dating back millennia, site planning, or “plot design,” was not regarded as part of the architect’s purview. Plot design, Dowling asserted, “has to do with economics. It is basically an economic question.” Only after the financial structure and the rentable space were accounted for were architects brought in, and, “if they have any better ideas, it is too bad, because the basic plan has already been worked out.”51 The idea that the architect was excluded from the planning stage, and only brought in to “clean up” the design, was so dissatisfying to Haskell that he organized a roundtable on the subject “The Need for Better Planning” in order to discuss the problem and the project.
In the discussion, which Jacobs edited for publication, Haskell asserted that an architect had contributed to the project’s basic design. The credit for this, Haskell argued, had to go to Le Corbusier. “One reason that Mr. Dowling got the plot plan that he has for his Gateway project in Pittsburgh is because of ideas thought out by that great man, Le Corbusier, in France, many years before. He maintained that you should put your cities into parks instead of putting parks into cities,” Haskell explained. “If it hadn’t been for that architect’s idea, Mr. Dowling’s plot plan would bear no resemblance to what it now is.” To this Dowling replied, “Despite Le Corbusier, with all his greatness, we were not conscious of his influence.” Gruen, a roundtable participant, retorted, “Either consciously or subconsciously, that is where it came from.”52
This discussion, in other words, revealed that, thirty years after their conception, the modernist city planning ideas of the 1920s—what Jacobs later called “orthodox” modernism—still had tremendous momentum, were still considered novel and experimental, while being tested for the first time. Nevertheless, architects were not making the planning decisions: Haskell’s complaint, although misguided, was that architects were not the direct agents of the plan. As Jacobs later observed in Death and Life, possibly with Gateway Center in mind, “Bankers and government administrative officials who guarantee mortgages do not invent planning theories nor, surprisingly, even economic doctrine about cities. They are enlightened nowadays, and they pick up their ideas from idealists, a generation late.”
Moreover, although Le Corbusier and other idealists may have set these ideas spinning, as Jacobs later charged, by the time Gateway Center was built, Le Corbusier had abandoned his machine aesthetic and other principles of the 1920s, thereby contributing significantly to the impending breakup of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), which had already begun to fracture over dissension about CIAM’s city planning principles. CIAM’s eighth meeting in July 1951, held in England and focused on the theme “The Heart of the City,” was a forum for postwar postmortems of prewar ideas and various doubts and attacks on the Functional City ideas of the 1930s.53
In 1953, however, the dissolution of CIAM, and the collapse of orthodox modern architecture that it symbolized, was still some years off. Thus, although the tipping point was on the horizon, at the time Gateway Center was completed, Haskell felt no need to criticize the underlying modernist planning concepts that were visible in the Pittsburgh project, and he focused his critique on the architectural design and the architect’s absent role in site planning.
In the architectural critique he later boasted of, Haskell decried Gateway’s stainless steel-clad buildings as “painted-on” architecture and a “weak modernique, lacking in proportion, texture, and dignity, let alone the mystery or power that would differentiate them from ‘up-ended diners.’ “ This was not a completely new line of criticism for him, or of Irwin Clavan. It echoed two of his earliest pieces of architectural criticism: his 1930 appraisal of the “modernique” Chrysler Building and his 1931 review of the Empire State Building, in which he described Clavan’s mooring mast design for the Empire State as among the building’s worst parts. The criticism connected the “vulgarization” of modernism in the Art Deco period with that of Late Modernism; it also raised new failures of functionalism. The architect’s problem, Haskell stated, would “not be resolved until everyone abandons the hope that naïve functionalism is any guarantee of beauty.” Although this aspect of his critique was not well articulated, Haskell and his contemporaries, including Jacobs, recognized that vulgarized modernism was beginning to have an impact on the city through new urban redevelopment, and, in order to solve the crisis of modern architecture, “naïve functionalism” needed to be replaced by a more meaningful modern architecture.54
While Haskell did not object to the tower-in-a-park concept, he made a few important arguments. First, he advocated for a greater role for the architect in the site and city planning process. In Gateway Center, he felt that the plan was uninspired and that this was because the architects had been “[left] out until the last minute,” until after “the basic pattern had been set.” As a consequence, the architecture was “not up to the genuine poetry of its ideas” or its site; the “arrangement of the towers in their park [was] purely mechanical”; and “the landscaping between them [made] no fresh statement about our grand new world.” Haskell emphasized that “a great architect working with the planners from the very start could have contributed … the inspiration to make the whole greater than the parts, the creativeness to make the buildings really sing.” Dowling confirmed that it was real estate developers and other economic interests, not architects, who were defining postwar city planning.55
Finally, Haskell made a general argument for city building in the remainder of his editorial, which would open the door to Jacobs’s later criticism and urban theory. Citing Florentine and Venetian civic spaces, Haskell argued that architecture had a city-building function and that Gateway Center had missed an opportunity to create a “civic center” that would be “the crown and focus of urban life.” As such, his argument was part of the widely felt stirrings of the revived field of “civic design.”
In this sense, when Haskell told Wurster that his 1953 editorial was an important, even historic, advance in American architectural criticism, he had some justification. As he wrote Wurster in January 1954, “Even Lewis [Mumford] is compelled by The New Yorker to work very carefully around such situations.” Indeed, despite Haskell’s caution, Gateway Center’s developer subsequently contacted Forum’s executive editors, indicated previous talks with their lawyers, and expressed the “unmistakable suggestion that we lay off him.”56
Jacobs returned to Gateway Center in Death and Life in part because it was a memorable project from her work at Forum. In the book, she described Gateway Center more or less as Haskell had done—as “a Radiant City office and hotel project with the buildings set here and there in empty land”—although for her this was exactly what was wrong with it. Based on a better understanding of how cities worked, Jacobs would see Gateway Center in a very different way from the way Haskell did. Quoting Richard Nelson, whose studies of urban behavior preceded Holly Whyte’s similar work, she observed that on a typical September afternoon, Nelson counted only three people using Gateway Park: “one old lady knitting, one bum, one unidentifiable character asleep with a newspaper over his face.” Contrasting Gateway Park with downtown Pittsburgh’s Mellon Square, where there were too many people to count, she concluded, “City park users simply do not seek settings for buildings. They seek settings for themselves. To them, parks are foreground, buildings background, rather than the reverse.”
Gateway Center, in other words, would become emblematic of Jacobs’s own “paradigm shift,” which, as Thomas Kuhn described it, was a new way of looking at the same thing, like “a change in visual gestalt [where] the marks on paper that were first seen as a bird are now seen as an antelope, or vice versa.” However, it took time to resolve the image, and although Jacobs has received well-deserved praise for her powers of observation, in 1953, she did not see things as clearly as she did later in that decade.57
