FIGURE 35. The cover of Progressive Architecture’s August 1956 special issue on urban design, which reported on the 1956 Harvard Urban Design Conference and included a transcript of Jacobs’s speech at the conference.
We are greatly misled by talk about bringing the suburb into the city. The city has its own peculiar virtues and we will do it no service by trying to beat it into some inadequate imitation of the noncity. The starting point must be study of whatever is workable, whatever has charm, and above all, whatever has vitality, in city life, and these are the first qualities that must find a place in the architecture of the rebuilt city.
—Jane Jacobs, 1956
Jane Jacobs’s career as an architectural critic coincided with not only the critical, early years of federally supported suburban development and urban renewal that followed the U.S. Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, and the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, but also the exploding interest in all things urban, including the emergence of the field of urban design. As Douglas Haskell, Jacobs’s Architectural Forum boss, remarked in 1956, “From now on Forum will tend even more to be an urban magazine rather than a buildings magazine only.”1
However, as late as 1958, when Jacobs began writing Death and Life, “urban design” was still considered a new term, although it was a postwar modernization of an ancient practice whose twentieth century can be traced back to the “civic art” movement of the turn of the century and the “civic design” movement that emerged in the following decades. Although the term “urban design” was used in the 1930s, and then already associated with urban redevelopment and project housing, urban design was generally seen as a modernization of civic design in the postwar period. As Lewis Mumford stated in his introduction to Clarence Stein’s Toward New Towns for America (1951), “Except for colonial times, hardly a beginning has been made, up to now, on the history of American city development and urban design.” This emphasis on American history emerged from a consciousness about the historical moment and from the opportunities to rebuild U.S. cities after World War II. As Stein wrote in Toward New Towns, “As a result of the Redevelopment powers under the Housing Act of 1949, the way is now open for large-scale rebuilding of decaying sections of old cities.” In the spirit of Ebenezer Howard, he saw the time as ripe for a new era of nationwide decentralization, with the creation of new towns “widely separated from each other” for the added benefit of Cold War defensive measures and the wholesale rebuilding of great cities.2
By 1952, when Jacobs joined Architectural Forum, “urban design” appeared with greater frequency. The American Institute of Architects had formed a Committee on Urban Design and Housing in 1951, which, as noted in the article “The Philadelphia Cure,” advocated for historic preservation to maintain the “depth in time” (neighborhood coherence in place and time) threatened by large-scale redevelopment. However, urban design remained enough of a new concept that the author (probably Walter McQuade) of “The Philadelphia Cure” felt compelled to distinguish it from “spot architecture” and to make an argument for balancing individualism with civic form. As he wrote, “By pulling in architects skilled in urban design (as distinguished from spot architecture) to co-operate with the various architects hired by separate builders of the separate projects, Philadelphia has evolved remarkable new expedients for making whole city areas harmonious. This harmony does not destroy the individual freedom of the individual operator, but it restores the kind of over-all coherence that has all but disappeared from modern city districts.”3
With the Housing Act of 1954, which transformed the urban redevelopment policies of the 1949 act into much more aggressive urban renewal practices, urban design was seen as a way for architects to expand their role beyond so-called spot architecture. As suggested by an American Institute of Architects (AIA) roundtable titled “The Architect and Urban Design and Urban Redevelopment,” held in Washington, DC, around the time that urban renewal legislation was being debated for inclusion in the Housing Act of 1954, urban design aligned itself, and opportunities for architectural work, with the new legislation. (The roundtable was organized by Louis Justement, the codesigner of the Justement-Smith redevelopment plan for Southwest Washington, reviewed by Jacobs.)4
The shift from civic design to urban design took a few years. In 1954, Kevin Lynch—a pioneering researcher on cities and the author of The Image of the City, which emerged from the same Rockefeller Foundation research initiative as Death and Life—was still hesitant to use the latter term. At an American Collegiate Schools of Architecture conference in June that year, Lynch, then a junior professor in city planning at MIT, described his work as “a new look at civic design.” Similarly, when the University of Pennsylvania established a civic design program in 1956, its founding director, David Crane, later called it “the progenitor of graduate programs in ‘urban design.’ “ However, in 1958, Crane described urban design as a neologism. “Urban design is a new phrase,” he wrote, “at least too new or too ambiguous for any metropolitan classified directories to list any practitioners of the art.” Explaining something about the term’s nature, he continued, “The phrase has been used in a rather timid reawakening of professional interests in the conscious esthetic choices in city development. Those who use the term have often been careful, self-consciously so, to avoid the pre-New Deal term ‘civic design,’ which came to have grandiose connotations from its associations with works of Haussmann in Paris, Burnham in Chicago, or Burnham’s other associates in the American ‘City Beautiful Movement.’ ‘’5
In this way, urban design was gradually accepted for best reflecting the modernization of the American city that was already under way. At the same time, as suburbia grew, architects, landscape architects, and city planners, whether advocates for cities or for Garden Cities, were concerned about urban sprawl and the urban environment, and urban design was meant to create a forum for their uncoordinated roles in postwar building. As urban designers, they often acknowledged, sometimes explicitly, the mismatch between disciplinary knowledge and the complex needs of the landscapes and cityscapes being rapidly transformed by suburban growth and urban redevelopment.
From her observations of built work in the mid- to late 1950s, Jacobs was among those who were most aware of this mismatch between theory and practice and a simple lack of knowledge. With no hesitancy in saying so, in writing and speeches that increasingly blurred the lines between her work and activism, she made these facts famously public.
More than simply a critic, however, Jacobs contributed significantly to the development of the field of urban design, despite the fact that she didn’t like the term “urban design” and never used it in Death and Life, preferring “city design” instead. The Death and Life of Great American Cities would become a canonical book on cities and urban design, and, in ways little known, developed with Jacobs’s thinking about not only urban redevelopment and renewal, but urban sprawl as well.
In April 1956, a few months after Jacobs came to understand East Harlem’s plight, she presented an enthusiastically received paper at the first Urban Design Conference at Harvard University. Although she hated making speeches, the “Harvard Planning Conference”—as those who had not yet embraced “urban design” called it—would make Jacobs’s name familiar in architectural and planning circles. “A few years ago, Mrs. Jacobs stepped into prominence at a planners’ conference at Harvard,” Lewis Mumford recalled in his mostly bitter review of Death and Life in 1962. “Into the foggy atmosphere of professional jargon that usually envelops such meetings, she blew like a fresh offshore breeze to present a picture, dramatic but not distorted, of the results of displacing large neighborhood populations to facilitate large-scale rebuilding.”6
Like other serendipitous events in Jacobs’s life, her presence at the conference was a lucky accident. In January 1956, around the time that Jacobs followed up on the East Harlem story, Josep Lluís Sert, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), sent Haskell an invitation to be part of a distinguished gathering of planners, architects, and landscape architects who would seek a “common basis for joint work of the three professions in urban design.” Although Haskell initially accepted the invitation, after the conference co-organizer and GSD professor Jaqueline Tyrwhitt telephoned to confirm, he sent Sert regrets that he would not be able to attend due to a trip to Europe. In his stead, he recommended Forum’s redevelopment specialist. “If another woman beside Miss Tyrwhitt would not be out of place,” he wrote, “might I suggest that my substitute be Mrs. Robert Jacobs—Jane Jacobs on our masthead. She has handled more of our redevelopment stories than anybody and will be fresh back from Ft. Worth.”7
Despite her unanticipated participation in the conference, with her eyes recently opened to the effects of urban renewal “on the ground,” Jacobs was one of the most knowledgeable people present. Having no professional training or credentials, she was condescendingly described as Haskell’s “assistant” and a “layman,” but her talk was nevertheless among the conference’s highlights, and the reaction to it testified to both the novelty of her presence and the soundness of her ideas. A conference summary in June 1956 noted among the high points “the warm and direct appeal of Jane Jacobs …, who pointed out that a supermarket may replace thirty little stores but doesn’t replace thirty little storekeepers and their social place in the community—and a lot of other things that only a layman of considerable feeling could tell a group of planners and architects.” In a letter, Victor Gruen told Haskell that Jacobs was the best of the conference’s speakers:
The conference was an interesting one, but it suffered under the weakness of all professional conferences—that too many high-hat words are used which, because they are worn out by now, are ineffective. Everyone was using the expressions “human scale” and “warmth” but Jane was the only one who really talked about it, without ever using any of the big words. She was like a fresh wind in the airless room. It must also be stated that not only what she had to say was excellent, but also the way in which she said it. She’s an excellent speaker. Her simplicity and her sincerity and her thoughtfulness swept everybody off his feet. There’s no doubt that she was the “star” of the show.8
Like new civic design studies and programs in development at Yale, MIT, Penn, Washington University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and other places, the Urban Design Conference aimed to serve the need for better education in the wake of the new urban renewal legislation. Like his counterparts at other schools, Sert was aware of the new federal legislation; he was one of the participants at Louis Justement’s October 1953 “The Architect and Urban Design and Urban Redevelopment” roundtable, where he delivered a paper titled simply “Urban Design.” In 1954, Sert hosted an American Collegiate Schools of Architecture conference focused on architectural education and civic design, where Lynch observed that “a great number of individuals, a number of schools, a number of practicing architects have become extremely interested in the subject of the sensuous form of the city and are beginning to think about it and are beginning to work on it.” Sert agreed that modern architecture and city planning were going through decisive years and that academic programs needed to change accordingly. A few months later, a Harvard professor, Siegfried Giedion, who had also taught seminars on civic design at MIT, renamed his course “History of Urban Design.” These were among the first steps toward the creation of what was, in name, the first graduate program in urban design, established at Harvard in 1960.9
The first urban design conference in which Jacobs participated was thus a historic moment for the fields of architecture, city planning, and landscape architecture. In it, Sert made a definitive break with “civic design” and made a case for the design professions’ participation in urban renewal. In his opening talk, he explained that the conference “avoided the term ‘Civic Design’ as having, in the minds of many, too specialized or too grandiose a connotation,” with its allusions to the City Beautiful movement and its limited emphasis on civic centers. Criticizing civic design and the City Beautiful movement as window-dressing the city—a critique Jacobs later repeated, and expanded, in Death and Life—Sert stated to the gathered crowd, “We cannot screen slums with marble fronts and colonnades, nor establish balance and harmony in a community [by] developing monumental civic centers, ignoring the living conditions of people in neighborhoods around those centers.”10
Sert proceeded to call on design professionals to become more involved in the urban design practices that had been largely taking place without their participation. Referring to the “large-scale redevelopment projects” since 1949, he observed, “Urban design has in the last years, been a no-man’s land that architects, city planners, engineers, and landscape architects did not invade.” After “many years of effort, research, and rediscovery on an individual basis,” he believed that “an era of synthesis” was at hand. But despite Sert’s sincere argument for improving the living conditions of city dwellers, and his memorable critique of civic centers and beautification efforts, Jacobs, sitting in the audience, must nevertheless have been shocked to hear his subsequent “apology” for the city, as he phrased it, and his unapologetic call to re-shape the city “as a whole” and give it “proper physical form.” She had recently witnessed the results of such ambitions in East Harlem—and would share her observations in her conference presentation.11
Suggesting the massive dimensions of the intellectual void that urban design needed to fill, Sert went to great lengths to explain the importance of being “urban-minded”—and Jacobs must have agreed with him in principle. “First of all, we must believe in cities, their importance and value to human progress and culture. We must be urban-minded to get such a position and attitude,” he stated, and he went on to contrast this sensibility with prevailing beliefs about the failures of the city and the superiority of the suburbs. “In late years we have heard much talk about the evils of the city, of its being a breeding place for crime, juvenile delinquency, prostitution, diseases of all kinds, traffic congestion, accidents, etc. To leave the city, to live outside it, has become a goal. … Everything good and healthy became suburbanite, and to solve the problems of our cities, our city planners turned their back to them.”12
Despite this argument, Sert was among many of his generation who did not accept the city wholeheartedly. He was the author of a 1944 book originally titled Should Our Cities Survive? and, in his Urban Design Conference address, he repeated early twentieth-century ideas about the need to change the city to accommodate the skyscraper. He thus argued that “the solution lies in re-shaping the city as a whole, including the central structures, [and] that “every American city, because of its growth, has to break up into constellations of communities,” each with its own center. This combination of Howard’s network of Garden Cities and Clarence Stein’s New Town proposals with a modernized, Corbusian central city would compose what Jacobs later described as the “Radiant Garden City.”13
If Jacobs was not already dismayed to hear Sert outline his urban vision, she must have been flabbergasted to hear him define urban design by comparing the walled, well-ordered, and well-landscaped Harvard campus to the surrounding town of Harvard Square. Remarking on their differences, he noted, “In one there is design that results in balance and harmony; in the other, there is no coordination of design elements or harmony whatever.” The campus was a well-ordered and parklike setting, while the town outside was a hellish, chaotic, denatured place: “A few steps away, there is a gateway that opens to Harvard Square and like Dante’s door to Hell, could carry over it the inscription “Abandon All Hope,” meaning all hope of finding these elements that make our environment human, because across the gate there is noise, disorder, lack of visual balance, and harmony. There is naturally no place for trees and you will search in vain for a squirrel.”
FIGURE 35. The cover of Progressive Architecture’s August 1956 special issue on urban design, which reported on the 1956 Harvard Urban Design Conference and included a transcript of Jacobs’s speech at the conference.
Sert opined that “on one side of the gate there is design at its best, and on the other it is totally absent.” This exemplar of urban design must have struck Jacobs, New Yorker that she was, as motivated by an inherent dislike for the city. Harvard Yard was a gated community, and while Harvard Square may have been noisy and had traffic problems on its winding streets, it was no great city, and it was hardly Hell or even “Hell’s Kitchen” (later Clinton) or “Hell’s Hundred Acres” (later SoHo), two Manhattan neighborhoods not far from where she lived.14
Jacobs’s conference presentation offered the inverse of Sert’s example. In fact, in the June 1956 issue of Architectural Forum, which reprinted her talk, she offered her own comparison. One photograph portrayed a “living neighborhood” in East Harlem, another a well-ordered but “dead” housing project. The caption of the first photograph, of an old Harlem street typical of those destroyed for superblocks, was “The living neighborhood is a complex of little organisms like this East Harlem store-front church and store.” The other, next to a photograph of the new Stephen Foster Houses at 112th and Lenox (later renamed the Martin Luther King Jr. Towers), stated “New housing developments like this one in East Harlem, New York City, take into account little beyond sanitary living space, formal playgrounds, and sacrosanct lawns.”15
While her talk was well received, Jacobs also must have come to realize how deeply entrenched and pervasive the Radiant Garden City model was as a system of thought. This is not to suggest that architects, even among the older generation, were not aware of its shortcomings or that Jacobs’s own paradigm shift was complete. During the course of the conference, Sert himself revealed misgivings about the intellectual and physical tools and goals of contemporary practice. “I also have the feeling that a lot of the work being done in architecture and city planning is scale-less. We design things that look very well as models, or blown down to magazine-page size, but very bad when blown up to full size,” he commented.16
In the meantime, the Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), the organization that had advocated functionalist city planning principles since the early 1930s, was splintering over this very issue. Undermining two decades of work by the pioneering generation of modern architects, those among the younger generation rejected CIAM’s Functionalist City concept, with its four key functions of dwelling, working, recreation, and circulation. At CIAM’s ninth congress in 1953, John Voelcker and Peter and Alison Smithson had presented a project on “urban reidentification” in which they made the iconoclastic argument that the city fabric of slums often succeeded where spacious redevelopment failed. Soon thereafter, they wrote the “Doorn Manifesto,” which proposed substituting the narrow functionalism of Le Corbusier and CIAM’s Athens Charter with a new understanding of the “ecological” complexity of the city. In 1955, the Smithsons summarized the change in thinking by sharply stating: “We wonder how anyone could possibly believe that in this [the four functions concept] lay the secret of town building.” In the face of such discontent, in 1956, Sert stepped down as the president of CIAM, handing over the reins to the “Generation of ‘56,” who would plan CIAM’s tenth and final congress, held in Dubrovnik in August of that year. At what Le Corbusier called a moment of “crisis or evolution” for modern architecture, the movement’s charismatic leader admitted that only the younger generation was “capable of feeling actual problems, personally, profoundly, the goals to follow, the means to reach them, and the pathetic urgency of the present.” A generational shift was under way.17
Nevertheless, soon after the Urban Design Conference, Jacobs observed in her May 1956 editorial “Pavement Pounders and Olympians” that ways of looking at the world were deeply ingrained. Although Sert, for example, lamented the scalelessness of contemporary architecture and the lack of contact with “the man in the street” in his introductory remarks, he celebrated the Olympian view of the city. “In late years we have developed a new view of the city, one that only birds could enjoy before,” he observed. In the same year that Brasilia, a city both planned from the air and given the form of an airplane or a bird, was being built, Sert described “Cinerama views” of American cities as “more convincing than hundreds of pages of statistics,” recalling Le Corbusier’s similar arguments for using the airplane to study and plan cities in Aircraft (1935), as well as Le Corbusier’s enthusiastic endorsement in The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning (1929) for using statistics. Le Corbusier claimed, in a particularly Olympian metaphor, that statistics were “the Pegasus of the town planner.” Jacobs would reject both tools—bird’s-eye views and statistical analysis—in “Pavement Pounders and Olympians” and later writing.18
Having assimilated East Harlem’s lessons into more widely applicable principles, Jacobs realized that this system of thought needed to be changed. While echoing the research on East Harlem done by Ellen Lurie and William Kirk, she expanded on the specific case of East Harlem to emphasize structural relationships between the built environment and human practices.
In contrast with decades of antagonism toward the historic city and the concept of separating city functions, she urged the Urban Design Conference audience—and soon thereafter her Architectural Forum readership in an article titled “The Missing Link in City Redevelopment”—to look at the relationships between city street, sidewalk, stoop, storefront, and dwelling. Ground-level relationships, she emphasized, were essential. “Look at some lively old parts of the city. Notice the tenement with the stoop and sidewalk and how that stoop and sidewalk belong to the people there,” she said. “A living room is not a substitute; this is a different facility.”19
These relationships, she emphasized, were functional. Whereas functionalist zoning and urban renewal projects destroyed the public spaces of the street, the subtle in-between space of the stoop, the flexible functionality of the storefront building, and complex social life all took place in multifunctioning public and semipublic spaces. As Jacobs explained, “A store is also often an empty store front. Into these fronts go all manner of churches, clubs, and mutual uplift societies. These store-front activities are enormously valuable. They are the institutions that people create, themselves.” And, extending Lurie’s social survey data into other principles, Jacobs recognized the city’s self-organized and overlooked institutions, invisible to statistics, as spaces of appearance for civil society. She observed, for example, that “most political clubs are in store-fronts” and that, “when an old area is leveled, it is often a great joke that Wardheeler so-and-so has lost his organization.” But, she continued, “This is not really hilarious. If you are a nobody, and you don’t know anybody who isn’t a nobody, the only way you can make yourself heard in a large city is through certain well defined channels. These channels all begin in holes in the wall.”20
While Jacobs recognized that “the charm, the creative social activity, and the vitality shift over to the old vestigial areas because there is literally no place for them in the new scheme of things,” she still had not completely rejected typical project planning or the idea of a “rebuilt city.” Thinking like a planner or architect, she saw the old city as offering lessons for new planning and architectural ideas. In an uncharacteristically removed turn of phrase, she said, “We do not suggest these units [parts of the city] be copied, but that you think about these examples of the plaza, the market place, and the forum, all very ugly and makeshift but very much belonging to the inhabitants, very intimate and informal.” She went on to suggest that planners and architects should be more careful about how they zoned, where they located stores, and how they designed gathering places and outdoor spaces. “The outdoor space should be at least as vital as the slum sidewalk,” she stated. “It is not enough that unallocated space serve as a sort of easel against which to display the fine art of buildings. In most urban plans, the unbuilt space is a giant bore.” She listed three projects that she was familiar with and had written about—Stonorov, Gruen, and Yamasaki’s Gratiot plan for Detroit; I. M. Pei’s plan for Southwest Washington; and Louis Kahn’s Mill Creek in Philadelphia—as “unusual exceptions” to the typical project.
Jacobs would later regret her praise for these projects. But, by mid-1956, the shift in her thinking had begun. She no longer saw the city from the viewpoint of the debate over the shopping mall versus central business districts. She recognized the difference between pavement pounders and Olympians. The latter, as she wrote in the 1958 essay “Downtown Is for People,” had “become fascinated with scale models and bird’s-eye views. This is a vicarious way to deal with reality, and it is, unhappily, symptomatic of a design philosophy now dominant.” She recognized the threat of suburbanizing the city. And, most important, although she did not yet fully understand the city’s “chaos,” she had begun to recognize “weird wisdom.” “Unless and until some solution for them can be found,” she wrote in “The Missing Link,” “the least we can do is to respect—in the deepest sense—strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order.”21
After her participation in the 1956 conference, Jacobs turned her attention back to the initial reason for her visit to East Harlem, which was Architectural Forum’s “big planning issue,” as Haskell called it.22 While East Harlem was critical to her understanding of cities, larger issues concerning the built environment were also on her mind. The monumental choice of centralization and the preservation of cities, or decentralization through suburbanization, remained a pressing social question.
As Jacobs knew from her early essays on New York City, the desire to escape the city was an old one. But by the 1930s, not long after the model automobile suburb of Radburn was built, the term “sprawl” came into use to describe unplanned and unattractive urban growth. In the postwar period, a whirlwind of factors—car ownership, urban housing conditions and shortages, public policy and financial instruments, highway construction and the automobile industry, and home builders marketing single-family homes with yards for the kids—all conspired to make the suburbs look much more attractive than old and crowded cities to the Baby Boomers’ parents. This willful middle class, an important character in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was voting with its wheels.23
Postwar suburbanization and exurban growth was not without its critics, however, and, for Haskell and Jacobs, among the most influential were their counterparts at The Architectural Review in London. Founded in 1896, the Review described itself as the first British architectural publication to depart from a primary concern with the business side of architectural production to focus on architecture’s aesthetic and conceptual qualities. In 1927, Hubert de Cronin Hastings—known to his colleagues as “H. de C.” and to readers by the penname “Ivor de Wolfe”—assumed the position of editor. Ten years later, Hastings pulled the historian Nikolaus Pevsner and the architectural critic J. M. Richards from the Review’s sister publication The Architect’s Journal. With Pevsner and Richards, the magazine quickly developed a distinctive approach to architectural criticism, which combined a deep respect for architectural history with an understanding of modern architecture’s roots in functional vernacular architecture, a sophisticated approach to tradition and modernization much needed in rebuilding cities after the war.
In December 1950, while Haskell was in the midst of reorganizing Forum, the Review published a remarkably biting special edition. “Man Made America” was devoted exclusively to studying “the mess that is man-made America.” Pulling no punches, the Review’s editors observed that the United States had “rejected a visual ideal, in favour of a laissez-faire environment—a universe of uncontrollable chaos sparsely inhabited by happy accidents.” The result was “a combination of automobile graveyard, industrial no-man’s land, and Usonian Idiot’s Delight… a visually scrofulous waste-land [characterized by] vast areas that fill the interstices between the suburbs and the city centers, not to mention the highways between cities, where not anarchy but visual chaos reigns.” For the British, “Man Made America” was a critical cautionary tale and also an opportunity to develop a new approach to the built environment that the Review described as “Townscape.”24
Originally articulated by H. de C. Hastings in December 1949, Townscape was at first a reaction to poor British town planning practices. Although Parliament had enacted the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, dramatically consolidating the government’s control over development and town planning (or city planning, in American usage) in the interest of rebuilding and modernizing London and other parts of the country damaged in the Blitz, postwar rebuilding still frequently resulted in sprawling, low-density housing and industrial areas insensitive to the landscape and of low aesthetic quality. In a country that cherished its landscapes, these developments were particularly troubling: They reminded British observers of the ugly and sprawling landscapes of roadside America. They worried that America was squandering its own utopian potential and that Britain was importing this disregard for the landscape along with its laissezfaire industrialism through the Marshall Plan, which demanded the adoption of American values in exchange for reconstruction dollars. With its “symptoms of infantilism and arrested development,” the state of the U.S. urban landscape, the Review’s editors wrote, was evidence of the questionable nature of these values.25
Despite the powerful Town and Country Planning Act, Hastings and Richards were concerned that the British were just as likely to make a mess of things. “Somewhere inside every Englishman is the original American,” they wrote in the introduction to “Man Made America,” and these “original Americans” could just as easily create an equally terrible British landscape. Partly to temper their criticism of the United States, they explained that they identified with the American adventure and felt bound up and even personally implicated in its outcome. They believed that Britain’s American descendants had learned nothing from the visual fate of England—as though Americans had “no other earthly ambition than to provide a bigger, more general suburbia, to add more wire, to model lovingly still huger areas of industrial and even agricultural scabbery; in the persuasion that the earth’s surface … is there for no other purpose than to do dirt on.”26
Reading this anti-American screed in early 1951, Haskell was outraged, and he soon replied with an indignant editorial. “For some years the more recondite among U.S. architects had been quietly enjoying their subscriptions to the Architectural Review,” he wrote in the April 1951 issue of Forum. “But late January these doting Americans received a heavy jolt. The Review had set forth on the warpath directly against them…. Rarely had a cultural publication, published in a friendly country, issued so wholesale a condemnation of American civilization.”27
Despite his wounded patriotic pride, Haskell found it difficult to make an effective counterargument. Instead he gave various explanations for the nature of the American landscape. America’s scale and tempo lay outside European experience, he offered. Its history was unique: “No European country had its birth at the precise moment of greatest force in the scientific-industrial revolution, in a territory of such boundless resources.” Haskell defended the American spirit and underscored his familiar conviction that “there are great reservoirs of vitality even in honky-tonk. Democracy has her victories.” And he concluded by expressing hope that the “lightness” of modern American architecture could hold promise: “Our art must favor every invention that permits us to rest lightly on the earth, and still not be ramshackle.”28
But Haskell had to concur that “Man Made America”—which featured essays by Christopher Tunnard, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and Gerhard Kallmann, and photographs and illustrations by Walker Evans, Saul Steinberg, and the Review’s Gordon Cullen—had made a compelling case. He ultimately admitted in his reply that the United States was building a “supremely ugly … tin-can civilization” and acknowledged that “thoughtful Americans were unreservedly thankful for the sharp reminder, from an outside source that some of the ‘mess’ is really there.”29 A year later, around the time Jacobs joined his staff, Haskell launched his new editorial agenda, with its renewed focus on architectural criticism and special attention to urban redevelopment. The Review had made a deep impression.
Although Haskell recognized that the Review had a different readership than Forum, by 1955, he could wholeheartedly embrace the Review’s lead on Townscape issues. Not only was U.S. sprawl proving the “Man Made America” critique accurate, but the Review writers Ian Nairn and Gordon Cullen also directed their critical gaze on England in a special issue titled “Outrage,” bravely criticizing everything from signage to the anti-urbanism of British housing estates. This outrage, Nairn wrote, “is that the whole land surface is being covered by the creeping mildew that already circumscribes all of our towns. This death by slow decay we have called Subtopia, a compound word formed from suburb and utopia, i.e., making an ideal of suburbia.” This new anti-urban form of urbanization was destroying the fabric of cities and smothering the distinction between town and country. Nairn observed, “Urban sprawl has come to its second stage; with everyone gone to the suburbs the centre has been left to decay. Towns have become half alive: one is where you work, but can’t live, the other half is where you live but don’t work.” Commenting presciently on the consequences of sprawl, he continued, “Half alive towns will produce half alive people, and the most immediate result is that in between working and living there can be up to two hours of limbo, nearly fifteen percent of one’s waking hours: forced and frustrating comradeship in public transport or forced and frustrating isolation in private cars.”30
His own initial outrage further mollified, Haskell prepared for Forum’s own “big planning issue,” with the inspiration of the Review’s example and help from Jacobs, who would serve as its editor. In a preparatory December 1955 editorial titled “Can Roadtown Be Damned?” he extended a warm handshake from the Forum editors to their counterparts at the Review: ‘‘Two paths are open to us. One is to accept Roadtown as a formidable fact and civilize Roadtown, now that it is commanding heavier highway engineering and bigger building capital. The other is to re-examine the very roots of our endlessly shuttling civilization. On both these subjects Forum will gladly work with the Review.” When the “big planning issue” was finally published in September 1956 as “What City Pattern?” Haskell accompanied it with an editorial in which he referred again to “Man Made America.” In “Architecture for the Next Twenty Years,” he wrote, “Back in 1950, friends of ours across the Atlantic, editing England’s Architectural Review, cut deeply into our native pride with a complete issue devoted to ‘Man Made America.’ What they said still rankles—because there was some justice in it.”31
Jacobs was similarly inspired by Nairn and Cullen’s efforts, and she alluded to “Outrage” in her introduction to the feature. She also took Haskell’s invitation for collaboration between Forum and the Review to heart. In the following years she would join forces with Nairn and Cullen on her “blockbuster on the superblock,” bring Nairn into the Rockefeller Foundation’s urban design research program, and cite their influence in Death and Life.32
Forum’s special issue “What City Pattern?,” one of Jacobs’s major writing and editing projects in 1956, included contributions by a number of collaborators. It featured the introductory editorial “By 1976, What City Pattern?” by Jacobs. “First Job: Control New City Sprawl,” by Catherine Bauer, an advocate for modern housing, was the lead essay and one that Jacobs ultimately believed required the editorial reply that followed. The next sections were analyses of different aspects of the built environment. First was “Central City: Concentration vs. Congestion,” by Jacobs; second, “Fringetown: Just Another Central City?”; and third, “Roadtown: The Great American Excursion” by Walter McQuade and Ogden Tanner. An essay by Victor Gruen, “How to Handle This Chaos of Congestion, This Anarchy of Scatteration,” followed, with the whole feature capped off by Haskell’s editorial “Architecture for the Next Twenty Years.”33
FIGURE 36. Among the magazine’s other influences, The Architectural Review’s June 1955 issue, titled “Outrage,” made a big impact on Jacobs and her colleagues at Architectural Forum. Jacobs cited it in her writing before Death and Life, then within the book, and alluded to it again in the introduction to Death and Life’s Modern Library edition. Authored by Ian Nairn and illustrated by Gordon Cullen, “Outrage” and the sequel “Counter-Attack Against Subtopia” (Dec. 1956) were reprinted in hardcover in 1956 and 1957. The Architectural Review and The Architectural Press.
As compared to the great city focus of Death and Life, “What City Pattern?” and Jacobs’s other writing during these years demonstrated her concern for the built environment as a whole—suburban and urban. In her introduction to the collection, for example, Jacobs explained that urban renewal was “only part of an over-all pattern of urbanization taking in spaces far beyond, and between, the old cities.” Echoing ideas and rhetoric that she saw in the Review, she wrote, “Cities used to be an incident in countryside; now countryside is become an incident in City. The last ten years have given us an unholy mess of land use, land coverage, congestion, and ugliness.” The next twenty years would see a crisis, she predicted, as cars, road building, and suburbanization drove the United States into a growth crisis the likes of which had never been seen before. “It is an unprecedented crisis simply because we are an unprecedented nation of centaurs,” she wrote. “Our automobile population is rising about as fast as our human population and promises to continue for another generation. … And because asphalt will not grow potatoes, the pavement that will be demanded by two cars for every one that we have today will have to come out of [our] other-purpose acreage. There’s the rub. For the car is not only a monstrous land-eater itself: it abets that other insatiable land-eater— endless, strung-out suburbanization.” She stated that Forum’s editors did not have answers: “It is as an eye-opener that this issue is intended.”34
The next feature was an unexpected eye-opener for Jacobs. Initially, Bauer’s lead essay was a great source of hope for Jacobs. When she read the draft in May 1956, she was ebullient, enthusiastically reporting to Haskell that Bauer’s essay was “a turning point” and “the start of a new direction” for both architectural criticism and urban theory. “If the next generation’s equivalent of the Steins and Mayers and Mumfords can begin to follow the line of thought started here, and show what can be done with the different type of planning it implies, Americans may well end up liking cities,” she wrote him in a long memo. Summarizing Bauer’s apparent intent, since “the great planning ideas, both inside and outside the city, have been stimulated and intellectually fertilized by city-rejectors,” she continued, “how could less imaginative planners and the unimaginative body of citizenry help but take their cue? What and who was there to lead them in any other direction? In this article of Catherine Bauer’s is the start of a new direction and I think it is very exciting.”35
In her piece Bauer had written a devastating critique—a wholesale rejection of generations of city planning theory as anti-urban, utopian, and unworkable—and one Jacobs later repeated in abridged form in Death and Life. While Jacobs famously criticized the Radiant Garden City model, Bauer criticized not only Howard’s Garden City and Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, but also Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City and Buckminster Fuller’s “nomadic noncity.” Illustrated with photographs of the original concepts and the versions created by less imaginative minds, Bauer’s essay critiqued these planning concepts as utopias, a motif that Jacobs also repeated in Death and Life. Of the illustrations, “Utopia No. 1” was the Garden City, the model for Clarence Stein and Henry Wright’s Radburn and thereafter vulgarized across suburban America. “Utopia No. 2” was Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, whose “principle has been perverted everywhere, as the typical suburb shows.” In the vulgarized version, Wright’s sense of organization was gone: “What is left is neither city nor country, only aimless scatteration, congestion, and needless waste.” Lastly, “Utopia No. 3” was Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, illustrated by what became a familiar juxtaposition of the Voisin plan with housing projects from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “Almost every big city today has vulgarized this concept,” the caption read. In the Corlears Hook housing project, for example, “the towers are dropped helter-skelter, the green space around them is shapeless, and there is no sign of relief that Corbu built into his plans with lower buildings that formed semicourts.” As in Jacobs’s memo to Haskell, the illustrations and captions, written by Jacobs, emphasized the difference between the model and its inevitable interpretation.36
Despite Jacobs’s initial praise for Bauer’s critique, her hopes were soon dashed. Encouraged by Bauer’s promising start, Jacobs was sorely disappointed by the conclusion of the final draft. As Jacobs saw it, Bauer’s proposal to “control new-city sprawl” was ultimately not so different from the utopias she condemned. Jacobs went to Haskell in a near panic. As Haskell later related to Bauer in July 1956, “Jane Jacobs was in here worried almost sick with fear lest I jump completely into new city planning problems. Her greatest concern: we don’t have the political apparatus nor the economic leverage to create the greenbelts. ‘In the United States nothing gets done until the situation is desperate; only because the central city situation is desperate does anything get done about it now and we have the instruments. Don’t you go escaping out into the country on paper!’” Jacobs scolded him.37
FIGURE 37. In September 1956, Architectural Forum published a special on city planning and design titled “What City Pattern?,” which Jacobs contributed to and edited. “First Job: Control New City Sprawl,” by Catherine Bauer, included a critique of prevailing “utopias,” and their vulgarizations, as initially proposed by Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, and Le Corbusier, as seen here, in a comparison of the Radiant City concept and the Corlears Hook housing project built on the site once proposed for the River Gardens project in the Lower East Side. AF (Sept. 1956), 111.
Bauer’s interpretation of population growth and demographic trends over a twenty-year horizon suggested to her that central cities could not absorb the anticipated growth of fifty million people and their fifty million automobiles, and this led Bauer to propose an updated New Towns program that would control sprawl while accommodating the new population. The result would be compact, transit-oriented satellite cities. Although transit-oriented design is an idea still valid decades later—if no easier to achieve than in 1956—Jacobs interpreted Bauer’s proposal as stemming from a preference for new towns outside of the old cities. Thus before it was printed, an editorial caption, written by Jacobs, was appended to the article. It said, “This novel argument says ‘forget the old city’ because 1976 will see new cities of up to a million people in today’s countryside. This provocative concept sets off Forum’s discussion of the city pattern to come.” However, “forget the old city” was not a message she wanted Architectural Forum to support or broadcast. She saw the message as at odds with both the larger pro-cities editorial position that Forum had been pursuing and her own interest in working for the magazine.38
To Jacobs’s apparent dismay, Haskell was responsive to the facts of Bauer’s essay, if not sympathetic with her argument. Typical of his approach, he was inclined to seek common ground even between apparently mutually exclusive propositions, whether it was Jacobs’s focus on the city center or Bauer’s on the region. He agreed with Bauer that “we couldn’t duck the fact that so large a part of the problem will in fact be out in the country, whether we yet know of anything we can do about it or not.” However, for Haskell, this did not mean giving up on “the old city.” As he explained to Bauer, “I don’t need to tell you that we don’t ourselves agree that urban renewal should be forgotten and our whole energy put on new cities.” He reassured Jacobs that Forum would keep its focus on the city, but not to the neglect of other issues. As he wrote Gruen on the same day, “We shall argue with [Bauer’s] conclusion that you decide between redoing downtown and taking care of the new outlying growth. We shall demand that both things be done.” According to Haskell, attention needed to be paid to “the continuity of America’s entire ‘human habitat’ problem, embracing both ‘new-towns’ and renewal,” country and city. The editorial that followed Bauer’s essay articulated this argument.39
Jacobs was not so compromising. When the preservation of cities was at risk, she rejected the “decentrist” position. Rather than stand with Bauer in what she believed was the quixotic cause of regional planning, she would side with urban renewal. In an editorial reply shaped and partly written by Jacobs and appended to Bauer’s essay, Forum’s editors wrote that they “promptly acknowledge the problem of giving decent shape to America’s scatteration, but will not for that reason surrender their deep concern with urban renewal for today’s central city.”40
Jacobs’s other contribution to “What City Pattern?” briefly examined a number of important aspects of the city: the central city itself, central city freeways, central city traffic, and central city housing. Unsurprisingly, “The Central City: Concentration vs. Congestion” discussed the difference between concentration and congestion and made a case for the city. In a few sentences, Jacobs summarized much of what she would elaborate in Death and Life—that the very essence of the city was the “intense concentration of people and activities.” Concentration meant “exchange, competition, convenience, multiplicity of choice, swift cross-fertilization of ideas, and variety of demand and whim to stimulate variety of skill and will.” And from this she concluded, “The suburbs may be incubators of people, but the city stands supreme as the incubator of enterprises,” economic, social, and cultural.41
Concentration often led to congestion, but, using her favored geographic metaphors, she explained that they were not the same thing. Reminiscent of her essay on the city’s infrastructure from fifteen years earlier, and Kahn’s more recent plan for Philadelphia, she drew an analogy between cities and ecological systems. “Geologists have a saying that rivers are the mortal enemies of lakes, because the feeder streams tirelessly seek to clog, and the outlet streams to drain,” she explained. “Just so, once the rivers of congestion are out of hand, as they are in our towns and cities today, they become the mortal enemies of pooled urban concentration. The elements of the city are clogged and eventually sundered from one another by the rivers of traffic, moving and still. … Even more serious, the rivers of congestion insidiously drain away those less visible urban strengths of convenience and swift, easy human interchange—and with them drains the historic, fruitful meaning of the city.”42
In the next sections of her essay, Jacobs thus questioned whether urban freeways were the answer to congestion and argued for the need to understand various transportation needs. The question Jacobs thus posed was how to “manage the streams of traffic so they feed and nourish instead of choke and kill?” Her answer was to have faith that the city would offer up solutions to its own problems. “The city itself is an invention—a quite marvelous invention,” she wrote. “Fundamentally it is an invention in specialization. And the time has come to apply that urban talent for specialization to traffic.” Alluding to Kahn’s ideas for Philadelphia and Gruen’s proposal for Fort Worth, which she described as the most promising of present models, Jacobs offered that we “have begun the first (often fumbling) experimental inventions in sorting out the different local traffics of the central city.” Anticipating problems with Kansas City’s new beltway and Boston’s new elevated highway and proposed Central Artery, she admired Gruen’s plan for eliminating congestion at the destination as well as en route and for its openness to invention and adoption by cities of greater size and complexity.43
Although Jacobs’s admiration for the Fort Worth plan continued in Death and Life, her ideas were still evolving at this time. Observing that half of the national $33 billion highway program was earmarked for expressways in and around cities, she wrote that the related “possibilities for good (traffic relief, blight-clearance, and blight protection) are magnificent; the possibilities for ill (new Chinese walls comparable to the old bisecting, blighting railways, more downtown floods of cars with nowhere to park them) are appalling.” Later, in Death and Life, she did not express any such hope for the good possibilities of highway construction. And while she believed at this time that passenger cars, pedestrians, delivery vehicles, and mass transit all needed different accommodations “suitable to their different natures,” in Death and Life her argument was more complex for synthesizing Bauer’s critique of planning utopias with the automobile problem. “We blame the automobile for too much,” she wrote in Death and Life. “Automobiles are hardly inherently destroyers of cities.” Moreover, since “the point of cities is the multiplicity of choice,” she could not reasonably argue for the complete elimination of automobiles, which, realistically, would not go away. The problem, she concluded, was not the car but the planning. While the Radiant City may have been designed for the car, it would have been equally void of city life if dependent on mass transit (and, as an urban interpretation of Howard’s rail-enabled Garden City, it originally was). Many years before city center congestion charges were implemented, she reasoned that the problem of cars was not their conflict with other uses but their number: When choked by their own redundancy, cars don’t move faster than the horses they replaced. Ultimately, for their own good and for the good of the cities that they would ultimately overwhelm through a positive feedback loop, she recognized the choice as the attrition of automobiles or the erosion of cities.44
Even as Jacobs proposed her city traffic solution in “What City Pattern?” the larger problem of sprawl and suburban settlement would nevertheless have remained unanswered. And she knew this. As she wrote in her introduction, “As a people, we are not too well prepared for physical planning to these dimensions: we are short on a philosophy for it, on laws, effective agencies, techniques…. It would be presumptuous of Forum’s editors to pretend they had answers.” Nevertheless, Gruen’s concluding essay, “How to Handle This Chaos of Congestion, This Anarchy of Scatteration,” was meant to offer some ideas. “What is needed,” Jacobs wrote in introducing it, “is a working method for contending with a situation that stops at none of the old boundaries. Could anybody come up with an approach that embraces concentration, dispersion, and scatteration—and brings order into all three? Because of Architect Victor Gruen’s planning against congestion in Fort Worth and against scatteration in suburbia, Forum asked him for a working approach, to start off the thorough discussion that must follow.”45
Gruen’s tactics may have intrigued Jacobs. Building on his mall designs and plan for Fort Worth, he elaborated a concept of “cluster planning” that used walking distance as its basic unit of measurement and design. His proposal was also realistic for recognizing the need for some walking distance from a parking space to a final destination, and it was praiseworthy for not recommending residential slum clearance in urban areas. Referring to the Fort Worth plan, Gruen reported that, “without demolishing a single structure of value, and hardly touching anything of more than two stories, we could get enough space for the encircling belt highway, enough space for green areas on both sides of it, enough space for garages, enough space for expansion for fifteen years—and when we were through we had enough left over for new cultural and civic areas.”46
It is unlikely, however, that even the best ideas for handling sprawl would have satisfied Jacobs’s expectations for the collective will, laws, agencies, and techniques necessary to make a difference. Gruen admitted as much: “A solution is only possible if we attack the problem of the entire fabric of urban organization.” Although his proposal avoided the anti-urbanism and heavy-handed design ideas of Howard, Wright, and Le Corbusier, it was an admission that revealed his strategy as perhaps no less utopian. As Jacobs had warned Haskell, she did not believe anything would get done until the situation was desperate. Although she would remain concerned about sprawl, Jacobs’s strategy would ultimately be to focus her energies on the city and to attack the forces of anti-urbanism, even including friends, like Bauer, whom she branded in Death and Life as a “decentrist” for escaping to the country rather than standing with the city.
Forum’s issue on “city patterns” was not two weeks old when, in early September 1956, Haskell wrote Bauer to ask if she would help them with another big feature issue, a “major re-evaluation” of public housing. Apart from the “gosh-awful repulsiveness and institutionalism” of New York City’s public housing, he offered a list of questions that might be asked of public housing at large, among them the roles of land reuse and racism, whether housing projects should be smaller and more integrated with their communities, and the place of subsidies toward homeownership. He mentioned a list of people with whom he had discussed the subject, including Vernon DeMars, Charley Abrams, Ernie Bohm, Dorothy Montgomery, Juan O’Gorman, and, of course, Jane Jacobs. After many trips to Harlem, Jacobs reported that public housing in the project model made “altogether a life less pleasant than the less comfortable life in adjacent slums.”47
A two-part series, “The Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing,” published in May and June 1957, thus became one of Jacobs’s major writing projects in that year, and it was an important one for her preparation for Death and Life, where she referred to it. Although Jacobs’s contribution, apart from editing, was a one-page introduction, others’ contributions resonated with her. In addition to Bauer, who wrote the essay for part 1, many of the authors of the shorter pieces of part 2’s “symposium”—James Rouse, Ellen Lurie, William L. C. Wheaton, Charles Abrams, Henry Churchill, Stanley Tankel, Dorothy Montgomery, Elizabeth Wood, Vernon DeMars, Lee Johnson, and Carl Feiss—later made appearances in Death and Life. Beyond her work for Forum, however, “The Dreary Deadlock” was a segue to Jacobs’s increasing activism in her own neighborhood as a member of the Greenwich Village Study group, chaired by Tankel, a New York city planner.48
Like her criticism of planning utopias in “What City Pattern?,” Bauer’s essay was hard-hitting when it came to public housing and more evenhanded when it came to discussing urban and suburban housing issues. She presciently anticipated both the migration of lower-income and minority families to the suburbs and the need for “better balanced communities with a wider variety of homes.” But turning to the city, she attacked public housing’s creation of an “extreme form of paternalistic class-segregation [manifested] architecturally in the name of ‘modern community planning’ ‘’—ideas originating, she explained, “from British garden city planners and … rationalized by the Bauhaus school of modern architects.” As Jacobs would also do, Bauer accepted the early experiments but rejected settling for the results. Among other failures, while Federal Housing Administration policy was creating a “lily-white suburbia,” the early success of “nondiscrimination and mixed racial occupancy in northern public housing projects” was giving way to more and more projects “virtually all-Negro.”49
Others made similarly “Jacobsian” remarks, many of which appeared indirectly or in quotation in Death and Life’s seventeenth chapter, where Jacobs referenced the article. Jacobs quoted the developer James Rouse’s point that public housing was not an end in itself. “Clearing pockets of slums and replacing them with new housing, public or private, does little to correct the basic conditions which cause slums,” he wrote. The ultimate goal, Rouse offered, must be “self-contained neighborhoods which have a soul, a spirit and a healthy pride—neighborhoods which people will vigorously defend against the forces of decay.” Public housing often created just the opposite.50
Tankel made similar remarks, also quoted in Death and Life. “Why is it just occurring to us to see if the slums themselves have some of the ingredients of a good housing policy?” he asked. “We are discovering suddenly that slums are human in scale; that slum families don’t necessarily move when their incomes go up; that independence in slums is not stifled by paternalistic management policy; and finally (incredible!) that slum people, like other people, don’t like being booted out of their neighborhoods. We are coming to realize that it is not people and social institutions which are properly the subject of attack, but their housing conditions.”51
The architect Henry Churchill agreed, adding, “We need an amendment to the [1954 Housing] Act, declaring the use of the word ‘project’ not only unconstitutional but wicked.” Expressing a shared sentiment about public housing design, particularly tower blocks, he stated that there was no reason subsidized housing should be in any way distinguishable from private housing “in looks, location, color, method of construction, or anything else except for the subsidy necessary to make it available to those who need it.”52
Finally, Ellen Lurie, a social worker at East Harlem’s Union Settlement House, whom Jacobs invited to contribute, offered a list of ideas that Jacobs would later reiterate in Death and Life. Her essay also received Jacobs’s decisive hand as an editor. Lurie’s original essay began in this way: “New York City’s East Harlem is probably the world’s most extensively experimented public-housing guinea pig. In this proportionately small section of some 200 square blocks, fourteen public housing projects have already been or soon will be constructed. Actually, no self-respecting laboratory technician would dare subject one guinea pig to fourteen identical tests in order to discover the efficacy of a method. … Yet public housing did not bring neighborhood renewal to East Harlem.” In editing it, however, Jacobs cut all this to a simple statement: “Public housing has not brought neighborhood renewal.” She removed all references to East Harlem, leaving the edited essay an indictment of urban renewal and public housing at large, and she presented Lurie’s key observations as general principles. “Too much of the cultural richness inherent in the slum neighborhood was destroyed,” Lurie wrote, although with Jacobs’s edits this loss of richness referred to all affected groups. Now emphasizing the vitality and intelligence of poor city neighborhoods everywhere, Lurie indicated that their complexity must be better understood by many contributors to city building, including city dwellers themselves. “There must be a real understanding of the neighborhood and the people who live there. Planners are needed—and not only architects. Sociologists, psychologists, clergymen, educators, and the people of the neighborhood themselves must study the social as well as the physical needs of the community,” she said. “Those who do this must be humble, for even among the poorest, most unsavory-appearing community has elements of unique vitality which must be recognized, ferreted out, and saved.”53
Lurie’s conclusion for the failures of public housing, repeated by Jacobs in “Subsidizing Dwellings” (chapter 17 of Death and Life), was the subsidization of private housing. Lurie offered, “There is something basically impossible about public landlordship.” In her book, Jacobs explained the sentiment as a societal one: “Because we lack any ideology that puts government as the landlord and owner of public housing in context with the rest of our national life, we have no sense about how to contend with such a thing.” It was at odds with the “meaning of home as it has evolved otherwise in our tradition.” She concluded that “the best that can be said of the conception is that it did afford a chance to experiment with some physical and social planning theories which did not pan out.” As others had suggested in “The Dreary Deadlock,” it was time to experiment with financial incentives that would correct market failures such as blacklisted districts, provide guarantees for private landlords, and channel public-supported private development into unslumming. In Death and Life, Jacobs would also similarly emphasize the need to enact public policies that were truly public. “Separate but equal makes nothing but trouble in a society where people are not taught that caste is a part of the divine order,” she wrote.54
FIGURE 38. This photo of the Stephen Foster Houses in East Harlem accompanied Jacobs’s June 1956 article “The Missing Link in City Redevelopment,” a version of her Urban Design Conference talk. She wrote, “New housing developments like this one in East Harlem, New York City, take into account little beyond sanitary living space, formal playgrounds, and sacrosanct lawns.” AF (Jun. 1956), 132.
At this time, however, Jacobs was thinking about architectural alternatives to typical high-rise project housing in “Row Houses for Cities,” which accompanied the first part of “The Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing.” “Row Houses” was actually the second time Jacobs examined the virtues of this quintessential urban housing type in a Forum article. The first was the last piece of her “Central City” feature for “What City Pattern?” in September 1956, where, in a short, four-paragraph essay titled “Central City Housing: Return to the Outdoor Room,” she succinctly described a number of the advantages of row houses, particularly when they were mixed with high-rises.
Still characteristic of her writing at this time, Jacobs’s essay included some ideas that she would later reject, such as the separation of traffic. New row-housing developments, she wrote, for example, separated “the street and all that belongs to it from the dismounted inhabitant and all that belongs to him, carefully disposed to create outdoor rooms, carefully punctuated with what the British, in their excellent experiments with mingled low and high rise housing, call ‘point’ buildings.”55
In “Row Houses for Cities,” she elaborated on this point. “The big rediscovery is that a basic scheme dating from pedestrian days in Pompeii and carriage days in Philadelphia, turns out to be an excellent answer to the automobile,” she wrote. “If the row houses are placed close along the street (or along an enlargement of the street for parking), and all vehicles are kept to the street side, then all the land for yards, garden and play can be concentrated on the other side of the houses, and the old vehicular alley can be converted to a pedestrian walk or commons. This pattern,” she continued, “effectively segregates vehicles, protects other activities and creates a kind of walled space with delightful possibilities.”56
Apart from issues of the car, Jacobs extolled the virtues of their semiprivate spaces. “No other city land serves such a fantastic variety of digging, gardening, repairing, playing, chattering, and plain sitting, or can be so subtly responsive to the needs of children and neighborhood as the row-house yard,” she wrote. To this she added the architect Henry Whitney’s arguments that row houses naturally cut the costs not only of land but also of infrastructure, and they made walking distances that much shorter. Moreover, row houses seemed to answer the desires and needs of the willful middle class. “The middle-income flight to the suburbs,” he said, “results primarily from a simple human necessity—the need for closer relationship between the indoors where the mother is doing the housework and the outdoors where her children and the neighbors’ are playing. High rise apartments cannot do this; row housing can.”
In “Row Houses for Cities,” case studies included I. M. Pei and Harry Weese’s designs for Southwest Washington; Wright, Andrade & Amenta’s Eastwick development for the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority; and Henry Whitney’s design for the Baltimore Housing Authority. Eastwick was praised for the close relationship of interior planning to exterior land use, while the Baltimore project, which offered individual, fenced yards, gave the tenants the status and responsibilities of normal householders and did not “set them off in outlandishly different quarters from their nonproject neighbors.”57
Despite being better in some ways than high-rise housing, these suburban projects—which had densities of twenty-one and thirty-five units per acre—were not praised in Death and Life. But Jacobs would not forget Whitney’s research on housing. In “Row Houses for Cities,” Jacobs reproduced Whitney’s chart of dwelling density per acre in various combinations of low- and high-rise units. In Death and Life—where she observed that Greenwich Village had 125 to more than 200 dwellings per acre, and Boston’s North End up to 275—she referred to his research again, although to support her own arguments for density and diversity. “Mr. Whitney found that no matter how you slice it, it is physically impossible to get above low city densities (40 to an acre or thereabouts) without standardizing all but a minute token of the dwellings—unless ground coverages are increased, which is to say unless open space is decreased,” she reasoned.58
Jacobs—who lived in a number of city homes with small backyards— did not give up on the idea of row houses. Among her activist projects after Death and Life was a ten-year fight for the West Village Houses, a cooperative housing project of five-story row-house “walkups,” put forward as an alternative to a typical renewal housing project for her neighborhood. Though West Village Houses would not be built until many years later, she started thinking about housing in her own neighborhood during these years. At the time of the “Dreary Deadlock” series, Jacobs became a member of the Greenwich Village Study, which formed in early 1957 and included thirty-four professionals—thirteen in city planning (including Tankel), eight in architecture, eleven in social sciences, and one each from engineering and real estate—to consider the future of the neighborhood, particularly its housing, zoning, schools, traffic, and opportunities for youth. By this time, part of Robert Moses’s massive Washington Square South project—now known as Washington Square Southeast (and NYU’s University Village)—was moving forward, although in mid-1957 Jacobs did not address it directly, seemingly unaware of the details at the time.59
In May 1957, Jacobs remained primarily concerned about the Washington Square traffic problem, and, speaking at an early Greenwich Village Study forum at Cooper Union, she offered a parable about “Dr. Moses.” In the parable, a man with a cold went to the doctor, demanding a cure. When told there was no cure for the common cold, the doctor advised sleeping with the windows open, though it was winter, and letting the cold air rush through. The patient retorted, “I might get pneumonia!” “Exactly!” the doctor replied, and, glancing at his medicine cabinet, said, “We know how to cure that!” In the punch line, Greenwich Village is told to let traffic rush through the park, but retorts, “I might get blight!” Dr. Moses replies, “Exactly!” and, glancing at his bulldozer, says, “We know how to cure that!” Continuing the medical analogy, and riffing on another simile—that blight and slums were like cancer—Jacobs stated, “In the traffic for Washington Square, we see how neatly a cancer can be planted.” Then, picking up Lurie’s metaphor, she punched again: “Unfortunately, these doctors seem to be confusing their guinea pigs with their patients.”60
In her talk, Jacobs then expanded on previous statements she had made about city planning with regard to Washington Square. “The outrageous plan for Washington Square is a vital issue in itself,” she stated. “But it is important for another reason. It shows us so clearly something we must understand and face: This city either is not interested, or does not know how, to preserve and improve healthy neighborhoods.” Alluding again to her parable, she continued: “City fathers worry because formerly stable neighborhoods deteriorate, because middle-income families move out, because Manhattan is becoming a place of only the very rich, the very poor, and the transient.” Therefore, their only solution was redevelopment. “The best you can say for redevelopment is that, in certain cases, it is the lesser evil,” Jacobs offered, with some ambivalence. She qualified this by observing that, “as practiced in New York, it is very painful.” Side effects included “catastrophic dislocation and hardship to tens of thousands of citizens,” slum-shifting, destruction of business, great expenditure of public funds and diminished tax revenue, and great dullness.61
FIGURE 39. A 1957 proposal for Washington Square showing a roadway through the park and a pedestrian bridge connecting the bisected halves. NYT.
“The great virtue of the city, the thing that helps make up for all its disadvantages, is that it is interesting,” Jacobs explained, making her case for Greenwich Village. Here, she observed, was “an area of the city with power to attract and hold a real cross-section of the population, including a lot of middle-income families. An area with a demonstrated potential for extending and upgrading its fringes. An area that pays more in taxes than it gets back in services. … Wouldn’t you think the city fathers would want to understand what makes our area successful and learn from it?” Real estate developers too had observed the area’s appeal, but they threatened it. Alluding to the “self-destruction of diversity” concept that she would explore at length in Death and Life, she noted that developers had said the Village was “fated to become largely an area of high-rent apartments with a transient population.” This, Jacobs replied, “is one of the classic steps toward deterioration.”62
Jacobs concluded her talk with four points for preserving and improving the Village, along with a mantra for community activism. Repeating points made by some other committee members, she advocated, first, “zoning to retain our scale, our variety, and the wonderful flexibility which make the Village so successful as an incubator of the arts and business.” Second, there needed to be “traffic control to keep us from being destroyed by traffic plans gone completely antisocial.” Constructive, “creative use” of zoning and traffic control, she emphasized, were “more important to our future than everything else put together.” Third, there had to be “judicious rebuilding to mend the wear and tear of time and use,” and, fourth, “careful siting and design of public facilities to make most sense for the community.” All of these points would find their way into Death and Life, where, in her chapter “The Self-Destruction of Diversity,” she referred to the work of Greenwich Village civic groups and advocated “zoning for diversity”—a concept that required intimate local knowledge of a neighborhood. Her mantra for civic activism, borrowed from one of her opponents, also endured, and offered the means to the end: “Agree on what you want, and use every pressure, rational and emotional, to get it. There is no other recipe.”63
Although Jacobs is so closely associated with cities, before dedicating her energies to the work that led to Death and Life, she was preoccupied with questions of land use and suburban sprawl. After “What City Pattern?” Forum published a series of articles on land use, some of them authored by Jacobs, including an editorial titled “Our ‘Surplus’ Land” and an article titled “New York’s Office Boom,” both published in March 1957. Almost a year later, in January 1958, while she worked on her important April 1958 essay “Downtown Is for People,” Forum published her article “The City’s Threat to Open Land.”
As she would later reiterate in Death and Life, in which she noted the loss of three thousand acres per day to sprawl, in these early essays Jacobs argued that land was a finite and precious resource. “Everybody is using land and more land, as if the reservoir of open land were inexhaustible,” she warned in “Our ‘Surplus’ Land.” Among sprawl’s other problems—she later included pollution and the loss of countryside and wilderness—she was especially worried that there would not be enough farmland to feed an ever-growing population. Comparing the automobile to the locomotive, she offered the near extinction of buffalo in the wake of the intercontinental railroad as an analogy for the destruction of a food supply and a civilization, a concern reminiscent of those she later expressed in Dark Age Ahead.64
FIGURE 40. In “The City’s Threat to Open Land,” published while Jacobs was working on her canonical essay “Downtown Is for People,” Jacobs discussed the problems and consequences of urban sprawl. AF (Jan. 1958), 89–90.
For the good of cities and the countryside, Jacobs offered that underused urban land was the better reservoir to tap. “The first step is to realize that unlimited land is not where we think it is,” she stated, “but that a wealth of it lies almost unnoticed where we think it isn’t.” City halls and renewal agencies have been overly focused on slum clearance and residential development, she argued. They needed to make an inventory of their land reservoirs, much of it abandoned, underused, or undeveloped industrial, commercial, and interstitial land standing derelict and empty. Referring to the example of Gruen’s Fort Worth plan (and to her May 1956 article), which utilized such land and thereby also avoided demolition, she argued, “Even in inner city cores, supposedly the most intensively used areas on the map, pools of surplus and underused land abound.” And Fort Worth was not unique, she said. A map of Cincinnati’s half-vacant downtown offered another example.65
Examining Manhattan’s new forty million square feet of office space and forty-one new office buildings, “New York’s Office Boom” offered an extreme illustration of the utilization of urban land, among other important points. Architecturally, she was not impressed, with a few exceptions; Lever House and the Seagram, Pepsi-Cola, and Union Carbide buildings were described again as masterpieces in Death and Life. “Esthetically, this boom is pretty much a bust,” she wrote, critiquing the form-dictating zoning envelopes, the simple-minded use and scalelessness of repetitive industrial materials, and contextual conflicts. From there, she went on to discuss urban design and, in a rare use of the term, wrote, “The few proud buildings of this boom make it clear that a new and urgent problem in urban design accompanies beneficial opening up of ground space.” Considering the case of the Seagram Building (1957) and its neighbor, the Astor Plaza Building (1959)—which she also alluded to in Death and Life’s chapter 19, “Visual Order: Its Limitations and Possibilities”—the problem was the addition of the Astor Plaza Building’s plaza, which “cancelled out” the welcomed first interruption in the street wall created by the Seagram’s setback. Buildings did not exist in isolation and therefore architects and clients needed to consider their work also as “town planning” or such coincidental plazas would “total up as happenstance, blobbed-together meanders.”66
Ultimately Jacobs was less interested in these “proud buildings,” as she called them, than in the “many-sided, enduring value of prideful building.” Puns aside, as she had done with many a writing assignment, she took the opportunity to write about important and enduring issues. In “New York’s Office Boom,” it was why all of these corporations would choose to concentrate in the “most chokingly congested” parts of Manhattan. “What has happened to those sensible-sounding postwar catchwords, ‘dispersal’ and ‘decentralization’? What has happened to the vision of the happy file clerks eating sandwiches on the grass far from the maddening crowd?” she quipped. “What has happened to the theory that modern magical communication makes constant shoulder-rubbing unnecessary?”67
Anticipating her arguments for the necessity of mixed primary uses and concentration in Death and Life, Jacobs presciently argued that technology would not replace physical presence. Apparently referring to the then-futuristic Tonotron videophone, Jacobs wrote that “person-to-person (even with video added) is no substitute for face-to-face, for the peek at figures not to be broadcast, the shared Martini, the subtle sizing up, the chance to bring the full weight of personality to bear.” Invoking the Garment District, the subject of one of her earliest essays, she wrote, “Face-to-face business and gossip, famous phenomenon of garment district sidewalks, is just as important although more cloistered on Park Avenue.” Sidewalks, she continued, were essential because concentration demanded short walking distances. In an early version of today’s “creative class” argument, she explained that the young seventeen-to-twenty-five-year-old demographic, then in short supply, was attracted to Manhattan for “air conditioning, ‘glamor,’ adjacent shops and lots of them, and location in the throbbing center of things”—all of these forces contributed to the office boom. Adding to and anticipating her ideas about self-organization and the self-destruction of diversity, she described a self-reinforcing process. Also anticipating Rem Koolhaas’s argument for the “culture of congestion” in Delirious New York (1978), Jacobs made what was, in the late 1950s, a truly radical argument. “Office district congestion is not visibly sowing the seeds of its own destruction, as reason says it should be. It is visibly sowing seeds of proliferation.” She continued, “The most striking result, and perhaps the most significant, is that without planning or policy—based on nothing but pragmatic, separate decisions by thousands of tenants—office-Manhattan is sorting out, consolidating, and densely populating” its pedestrian-scaled working districts. Taken together, “Our ‘Surplus’ Land” and “New York’s Office Boom” were arguments for density. The question left unanswered was how to make this happen.68
Jacobs’s subsequent August 1957 article “Metropolitan Government” was a topical departure for her at the time, although she would return to the problem of great city governance years later. At the moment, however, she began to think about some structural possibilities for addressing the overarching land-use questions she had raised. Contrary to later stereotypes that arose in reaction to Death and Life, Jacobs did not believe that market reactions or the collection of individual decisions were enough. Although she was not optimistic about its institution, she called metropolitan government “the complicated instrument the cities must design before they can redesign themselves.”69
On account of the automobile, Jacobs continued, metropolitan areas faced an unprecedented crisis of massive and complex problems— “monstrous traffic, missing or bankrupt transit, incompatible land uses, unbalanced tax structures, transformation of old core cities into racial and economic ghettos, pollution of air and water, and a host of others”— requiring coordinated thinking and planning. The obstacles, she realized, were tremendous. The nation’s 174 metropolitan areas were a “weird melange of 16,210 separate units of government.” And despite having become “a nation of metropoli,” the federal government had yet to come to grips with the fact of cities. Reminiscent of Henri Pirenne’s histories of cities, and anticipating ideas she would explore in Systems of Survival and other books, she wrote, “Our states, divided into their revealingly named counties, are an organizational heritage from feudal territorial warlords who fitted the city into their scheme of things as a special, chartered ‘exception.”’ She further observed that, although some states had authorized regional planning activity and drafted master plans, there was no plan or power to affect those plans. Quoting Charles M. Haar—a Harvard law professor whom she had met at the Urban Design Conference and whom she would cite again in Death and Life—she wrote, “Without such clarification [of enforcement], there is small hope for a reconciliation of divergent interests, without which planning becomes simply a pleasant intellectual hobby.”70
As for federal intervention, Jacobs also harbored little hope. Assuming that the federal government could miraculously coordinate its own agencies involved with cities and the suburban development, it was impossible to imagine Washington filling a planning role satisfactorily for the metropolitan area. Jacobs bluntly observed that the policies of the Federal Housing Administration and the Public Housing Administration, whether deliberately or not, “probably had more to do with the progressive ghettoizing of core cities, the class segregation of the suburbs, and the form of metropolitan scatteration than any other factors.” The new federal highway program, she predicted, would have an even more profound impact.71
Thus, in the short term, regional planning was politically inconceivable and potentially destructive as a distraction from more immediate matters. By the time the metropolitan governmental structures were in place, it was possible that both the countryside and city would have been destroyed. The number, size, and complexity of metropolitan problems already created a metropolitan crisis.72 As she had explained to Haskell during their work on “What City Pattern?,” it was only because the central city situation was desperate that it received some attention.
FIGURE 41. In “Metropolitan Government,” Jacobs wrote about the chaotic layers of city and county government and also the need for a coordinated approach to city planning problems. AF (Aug. 1957), 124.
On a more positive note, Jacobs offered that the very idea of metropolitan government was young, not much older than the eponymously titled book Metropolitan Government (1942) by the political scientist Victor Jones. Drawing on the work of Jones, Haar, the Regional Plan Association director Henry Fagin, and others, she outlined possibilities for creating state-level agencies and the federation of metropolitan governmental units, as had been established in Toronto (the city, probably not coincidentally, that would later become her home). Such new layers of government would be controversial, far from perfect, and would take many years to establish. However, they would be “one of the greatest adventures in inventive self-government that any people has ever had a chance at.” Calling up her deeply held belief in U.S. democracy, she quoted the architect Henry Churchill as stating that those who despair that self-government can ever be worked out with neatness and certitude should remember that, “within the broadest possible framework of the general good, disorder must be allowed for, lest the people perish. Any form of initiative is disordering of the status quo and so needs encouragement, not suppression, if democracy is to retain vitality.”73 Taking Churchill’s idea a step further, Jacobs related it to another of her deeply held beliefs: the importance of trial, error, and experimentation. “The first thing to understand about metropolitan government is that it is going to be dealt with not by abstract logic or elegance of structure, but in a combination of approaches by trial, error, and immense experimentation in a context of expediency and conflicting interests,” she wrote. “Whatever we arrive at, we shall feel our way there.”74
In “The City’s Threat to Open Land,” published in January 1958, Jacobs offered some similar ideas, negative and positive. The essay was Jacobs’s summary of an “Open Land” roundtable co-moderated by Haskell and Holly Whyte, who was then organizing a series of articles about the built environment for Fortune (later reprinted as The Exploding Metropolis in 1958). Whyte’s essay for the series—“Urban Sprawl”—spun out of the “Open Land” roundtable, which he mentioned in the essay. Other participants included Catherine Bauer (who read and commented on Jacobs’s draft summary), Charles Abrams, Ed Bacon, Charles Haar, Henry Fagin, and Carl Feiss.
In her article, Jacobs described the sprawl debate as already well developed and well understood (even by contemporary standards). Panelists “did not waste time discussing whether there is a problem.” It was clear that “whole counties of rolling land are being swallowed in repetitive suburbia” and “vast city sprawls” were growing between the “megalopolises” and “supercities.” Scenic landscape was being destroyed and precious Class I farmland was being consumed. Impervious surfaces abounded with rain “unable to percolate through uniform new carpetings of roofs and roads.” Streams were being polluted and watersheds fouled. Although the terms were different, this was the early age of environmentalism. For the built environment, the waste of “scatteration” left in its wake and at its flanks an astonishing amount of open space that counted for nothing and bore “no relationship to soils, water, topography.” What was left over was “too random, too formless, too inefficient” to amount to anything. “It is too blighted even to retain its attraction as a place to fill in,” she wrote.75 The only question was “how to steer the bulldozers before it is too late.”
Jacobs’s answer offered some insight into her approach to planning (or lack of it). She emphasized the necessity of the immediate acquisition of open land. Her prescription was “action first” to avoid “paralysis by analysis.” As Jacobs put it, “Set aside open land before it is too late; rationalize its use later.” “There is no such thing as ‘unused’ open land,” she remarked. Conversely, “To remain open may be by far the highest use of a piece of land in both the public and private interest,” she continued. “Scatteration … had outdated the old concept of ‘developed’ versus ‘undeveloped’ land—the concept that a favor is done for any land when it is built on.”76
Ad hoc preservation was thus a necessity and “no betrayal of the cause of regional planning.” On the contrary, each ad hoc “incident of improvement” could “accelerate de facto regional planning as nothing else could.” This tactical urbanism, she anticipated, could be the focus of action and the realistic, informed, and intelligent pressure of activists. “Open land amid sprawl is tangible, it is understandable, its benefits to a huge crosssection of population and interests can be made obvious,” Jacobs wrote hopefully. “And the dismaying truth about its desperate urgency is already registered in the brain of anyone with eyes to see what has happened to the metropolitan countryside of five years ago.”77
Jacobs’s conception of “action first” for open-land preservation also had its counterpart in her approach to preserving the city. The situation was desperate; there was no more time for “escaping into the country on paper” with comprehensive plans that would take years to be drawn up and debated than there was for New Towns. While sprawl and the loss of farm and open land were problems for civilization, if metropolitan government was impractical and “de facto regional planning” ultimately inadequate, perhaps cities could be saved.
Although Jacobs later denied being associated with the Greenwich Village Study, in late 1957 she remained engaged in neighborhood activism through the group as she worked on the “Open Land” symposium and pitched a story that Haskell would describe as “the first comprehensive piece” on the subject of urban redevelopment. The article that became “Downtown Is for People” was Jacobs’s prelude to Death and Life.78
In November 1957, Cooper Union hosted another forum for the Greenwich Village Study to present its preliminary findings, and, in December, the NYU Law School hosted a third presentation with an audience of three hundred persons and speakers, including Tankel, Jacobs, Gruen (evidently invited by Jacobs), and local politicians, including Carmine DeSapio and Bill Passannante (a state assemblyman). Passannante and DeSapio, the leading figure of Tammany Hall (the New York Democratic party) and the Greenwich Village District (and a Washington Square resident), had the power to challenge Moses’s plan but made ambiguous remarks about their support for closing the square to all traffic. Behind the scenes, as Jacobs later described, he and Passannante were the targets for local pressure in a game of Machiavellian politics. The Joint Emergency Committee to Close Washington Square to All but Emergency Traffic, led by Shirley Hayes and the local economist and consultant Ray Rubinow, had collected ten thousand signatures, which they delivered to DeSapio.79
At both presentations, Tankel spoke about Village demographics and the Washington Square roadway, arguing—possibly after Jacobs’s coaching —that it did not make a difference if the road was fifty feet wide, as Moses wanted, or thirty-six feet wide, as compromisers proposed. But he did not make clear demands for the closure of the square to all but emergency traffic.
Jacobs, now recognized as the chair of the Study’s housing committee, at last addressed the Washington Square Southeast housing project, but she recognized in it the much larger problems of urban renewal that she would address in her forthcoming article and in Death and Life. “We do not consider community destruction as progress, no matter how shiny or clean it looks,” Jacobs stated, likely thinking of East Harlem. New housing, though it might be needed, should not be built at the expense of the neighborhood, and it should not be in the now-familiar form. Segueing from Tankel’s remarks that Village demographics revealed a replacement of families for a “transient population with little interest in community welfare,” Jacobs argued for housing that catered to a diverse community and respected its physical nature. “There should be some low-income public housing. But— and this is a big but—any new building, whether for middle or low income groups, should not be in the form of ‘projects’ such as we are accustomed to see elsewhere in New York and as we shall soon see rising in the Washington Square Southeast high-income project,” she said. “Aesthetically, the approach is out of keeping with the Village. Furthermore, its implicit economic class segregation is socially undesirable and retrogressive from the situation now being found in the Village.” She argued that the needed alternative was a program of “spot redevelopment” (later called infill housing) for low- and middle-income families on a scale compatible with the Village.
Apart from the social and class segregation of project development, Jacobs also objected to the underlying premise, or excuses, of slum-clearance urban renewal. “She defended the Villager’s right to his cold-water flat if he wants it,” The Village Voice reported. “Many Villagers, especially a great many artists and writers, as well as simply old, established communities of families make out pretty well in what, objectively considered, is substandard housing,” she stated. Likely thinking again of East Harlem, she added that low rents and neighborhood social networks are more important than new apartments. She concluded, “It would be authoritarian, and a disservice to the community to take the attitude that this sense of values is wrong and that all tenement dwellings are, by definition, bad.”80
The day after Jacobs’s talk was reported in the Voice, Haskell told his colleagues and superiors—Ralph “Del” Paine (the publisher of Forum and Fortune), Joe Hazen (the managing editor of Forum and House & Home), Paul Grotz (the art director for Forum), and Lawrence P. Lessing (the assistant managing editor of Fortune and a science writer)—about a big story idea. Jacobs was prepared to attack the project concept. Jacobs, he told them, “has been talking about an approach to city pattern which I think we should discuss very seriously with her because it just might make an impression in Forum as strong as our September 1956 [“City Patterns”] issue.”81 Although he had been taken aback by her ideas at first, she had convinced him.
Haskell explained that Jacobs was prepared to take on generations of city planning theory. First, she would attack the idea of the large-scale, top-down planning approach: “Jane is moving right with the times because the ideas she is talking about do not require large-scale land acquisition, large-scale project planning, large-scale bureaucracy, etc., etc. Nevertheless, Jane is quite dauntlessly going in the face of some seventy-five years of tradition in city planning derived out of the original Garden City concept.”
Next, she would attack the superblock, and superblock thinking, and argue for small blocks and more streets. Haskell explained: “The superblock has been one of the main pillars of this concept, along with the greenbelt idea and the satellite town. What Jane is saying is that we do too much super-block thinking and, if anything, we need to cut our present blocks still smaller because the nervous system of the city is the street system.”
Lastly, she would argue for more ground coverage and a more finegrained and intimately scaled city fabric. “As I understand it, we would have a great deal of individual action on tightly packed small parcels by individual owners and no great dedications of land immediately contiguous to the houses, to space, light and air,” Haskell concluded. “This space, light, and air would be brought in to the fabric by municipalities through condemnation of a great many more little squares for outright park use. So the kids of the vicinity could jump from their tightly-packed houses right into an open space the way my nephew used to be able to run down into Gramercy Park.”82
Like few others, Haskell knew the extent of Jacobs’s expertise. Even as she worked on the “Open Land” piece, she was preparing a summary of urban renewal projects that would be published in the April 1958 issue as “Redevelopment Today.” In this unbylined feature, Jacobs wrote, “After nearly a decade of federal aid to urban redevelopment, only 17 Title I projects are now in use.” However, among the completed projects—in New York City (Corlears Hook, Kingsview Homes, Delano Village, Columbus Circle Coliseum, Morningside Gardens); two projects in Manchester, New Hampshire; Baltimore, Maryland (Waverly, Johns Hopkins-Broadway); Philadelphia (Spring Garden Homes, Cambridge Plaza Homes, Penn Towne, Harrison Plaza); Syracuse, New York; Norfolk, Virginia; Providence, Rhode Island (Willard Street); and Chicago (Lake Meadows)—she saw “much material for a serious reevaluation of redevelopment.” The elimination of urban “decay and squalor which these first 17 projects have achieved is heartening,” she admitted, “but it is sobering to scrutinize the architectural results of the rebuilding. Is this indeed the city of the future, the hope of redevelopment? Architecturally or socially the results do not match the political ingenuity that made them possible.”83
With this work in mind, Haskell recommended Jacobs’s feature for further discussion at the next executive editors’ meeting and that she should be allowed to elaborate her argument, despite the hostile reaction that they might receive at first from architects and city planners. He told his colleagues, “I think there is enough content in this to rate a serious go-around in our next editorial discussion to weigh giving Jane a big hunk of space for exposition and debate. I can imagine it would make many an existing planner furious at first, just as my own temptation was to be furious, but it is likely to rouse a very unexpected enthusiasm and give a new point for leverage in thinking and action about the city.”84
Two months later, in January 1958, the last editorial board member finally gave his affirmative vote, and Jane was given the go-ahead for her “blockbuster on the superblock.” It would lead her, by the end of the year, into writing The Death and Life of Great American Cities85
