FIGURE 42. An image of the modernist city, reminiscent of Brasilia, by Gordon Cullen and Helmut Jacoby to illustrate “Downtown Is for People,” Jacobs’s “blockbuster on the super-block.” Fortune and Getty Images.
This book is neither a retelling in new form of things already said, nor an expansion and enlargement of previously worked out basic ground, but it is an attempt to make what amounts to a different system of thought about the great city.
—Jane Jacobs, 1959
When Jacobs first outlined a book on American cities in the summer of 1958, the time was ripe for a new way of thinking about cities, and people knew it. As Douglas Haskell said of her “blockbuster on the superblock” in 1957, Jacobs’s criticism of large-scale land acquisition, large-scale project planning, and large-scale bureaucracy was “right with the times.” After “Downtown Is for People” was published, Catherine Bauer expressed a similar sentiment. “Your piece was absolutely knockout, also splendidly timed, I think, to make a major dent. A couple years ago would have been too much on the up-tide … and you would only have sounded sentimental,” Bauer wrote. But “now that the South Side of Chicago really looks like the City of the Future of 1930, however, and many other cities are visibly on the way, there are some tremors of doubt… though less in architectural offices for the most part than elsewhere.”1
Jacobs admitted as much to Bauer. She dated her change in thinking to around 1956 and suggested that “Downtown Is for People” and a follow-up writing project that she had in mind—which would become Death and Life—were both “a symptom of the times”:
I wish I could take credit for wisely judging the time was ripe for the viewpoint in the downtown article; but the fact is I am just a symptom of the times. These ideas have just been stewing around in me for the past two years or so, not before. Wish I could claim more foresightedness and forbearance, but it wouldn’t be true.
Right now I am just dying to do a series for Forum on what we can learn from the existing city about what is right, and the implications of this both for city rebuilding and new, fresh building. I believe they think I am kind of nuts, but sooner or later I will get permission to do it, and I know it will be interesting.2
The late 1950s were a time of great change. The years when Jacobs wrote Death and Life saw breakthroughs and momentous events in space exploration, geopolitics, desegregation, medicine, technology, literature, and the arts. The revolutions of the 1960s were just over the horizon, and criticism of all sorts, from angry young men and women, had blossomed by the time she started writing her book. As Jacobs admitted, she was not alone in recognizing the need for new thinking about the city and the built environment. Civic design and urban design programs were revived and created at American universities throughout the 1950s. Kevin Lynch was at work on “Form of the City” studies at MIT and, in 1954, he published an eponymous article in Scientific American in which he considered such basic city characteristics as size, density, grain, shape, and pattern. In 1956, Bauer wrote her broad critique of twentieth-century city planning in “What City Pattern?,” and Ian Nairn and Gordon Cullen published the “Outrage” special edition and “Counter-Attack Against Subtopia” in 1956 and 1957. At the University of Pennsylvania, the chair of the new department of landscape architecture, Ian McHarg, was, like Lynch, working on fundamental research in his field, and, in 1957, he wrote “The Humane City: Must the Man of Distinction Always Move to the Suburbs?,” an argument that landscape architects needed to shift their focus from horticulture to the design of cities. In New York, and elsewhere, opposition to Robert Moses’s “blockbusting” approach to urban renewal grew each year. By 1958, Shirley Hayes’s Committee to Save Washington Square, then six years old, had evolved into the Joint Emergency Committee to Close Washington Square Park to Traffic. Although Lewis Mumford had previously advocated the redevelopment of the area, his understanding had also changed; he described Moses’s plan to run Fifth Avenue through the park as a “piece of unqualified vandalism.” And by 1959 Grady Clay—the real estate editor for the Louisville Courier-Journal and associate editor of Landscape Architecture —published “Metropolis Regained,” a Townscape-inspired essay admired by Jacobs for its thorough criticisms of city planning and advocacy of city life. Indeed, by the time she started writing Death and Life, there was ferment, even competition, in Jacobs’s circle. McHarg wrote Clay to say, “I enjoyed the Fortune article by J. Jacobs, but I hope that this has not usurped your projected article.”3
Architecture culture, meanwhile, remained in crisis but was also starting to move in new directions. Le Corbusier’s chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (1954), in Ronchamp, France, heralded change. With Ronchamp, the master abandoned the very tenets and dogmas of modern architecture that he had defined, an act some younger architects considered so heretical that they accused Le Corbusier of causing a “crisis of rationalism.” However, Le Corbusier’s abandonment of the machine aesthetic of the 1920s was just one example of postwar disillusionment with the ideology of modernism that was broadly shared by architects young and old. By the mid-1950s, new ideas, and points of view previously suppressed, came to the fore. As Reyner Banham, a British critic, wrote in his 1955 essay “The New Brutalism,” new movements—such as New Empiricism, New Traditionalism, New Regionalism, and New Palladianism—were appearing right and left. “The use of phrases of the form ‘The New X-ism’—where X equals any adjectival root became commonplace in the early nineteen-fifties in fourth-year studios and other places where architecture is discussed, rather than practiced,” he quipped. With this explosion of new ideas, the tenth meeting of the Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), held in 1956, would be the last official gathering of the organization that had championed modern architecture. In 1959, while Jacobs worked on Death and Life, “Team 10” (named for their role in organizing that last conference), which included the British architects John Voelcker and Alison and Peter Smithson and the Dutch architect Jacob Bakema, decided to disband the organization and no longer use its name. Bakema declared that young architects, like CIAM’s founders, must renew their relationship with the present. To this end, and to “intensify the attempts for finding a new architectural language, individuals and groups must work in their own way.” Indeed, Bakema went so far as to make a case against the use of the term “modern architecture.” He explained that “in our Dutch circumstances we no longer like the word l’Architecture Moderne,” and he went on to give a rather Jacobsian reason: “Why don’t we like it? Because we think that after the war, towns have been built, streets have been built, in a way that makes them look like what people associate with l’Architecture Moderne: we have mass repetition of blocks, [and] houses are placed in these blocks in military fashion.”4
FIGURE 42. An image of the modernist city, reminiscent of Brasilia, by Gordon Cullen and Helmut Jacoby to illustrate “Downtown Is for People,” Jacobs’s “blockbuster on the super-block.” Fortune and Getty Images.
Thus, orthodox modern architecture—as previously conceived—was all but dead by the time Jacobs started Death and Life. However, the paradigm shift was not immediate. The rhetoric and images of the 1930s were extraordinarily powerful, and many among the Generation of ‘56 were not ready to part with them. As Banham wrote in 1966, the “vision of the Radiant City survived everything, and continued to dominate the minds of the Team 10-Brutalist connection even after the Athens Charter had been declared obsolete.” Thus, while some modern architects were critical of CIAM modernism and sought ways to engage the particulars of place and time in their work, others remained committed to a more utopian project of “total architecture.” Characteristic of paradigm shifts, new and old ideas coexisted in a confused state. Despite their criticisms of CIAM urbanism, Team 10 members and others advanced the metabolist and megastructural movements of the 1960s and 1970s with a persisting ambition for “total architecture.” As Bakema put it, “If we don’t work for an architecture expressing three-dimensional human behavior in total life, architects will lose their natural function in society, and they will end as decorators of mechanization-administration schemes. If we don’t realize total architecture, we will end in no-architecture.” Peter and Alison Smithson may have argued for replacing the functional hierarchy of modernist city planning with a hierarchy of human associations, but their London Roads Study of 1959 sought to give a wholly “new pattern” to the city—one that privileged the efficient movement of automobiles. When asked about their plan for the Soho district, Peter Smithson answered, “In the end we would probably destroy everything.”5
Jacobs’s proposal for Death and Life was published in Fortune in April 1958 as “Downtown Is for People.” To Haskell’s disappointment, the editors of Time, Incorporated, decided to divert her feature to Fortune, where it would have more space, gain greater exposure, and become the capstone of William Whyte’s series of articles on cities and urban sprawl. They hoped to repeat the success that Whyte recently achieved with another series—a sequence of interviews with corporate executives that led to his best-selling book The Organization Man (1956).6
It was a good decision for Fortune and, ultimately, for Jacobs. Illustrated with a “photo essay” by Nairn and Cullen (who made drawings from Nairn’s photographs) titled “Scale of the City” and accompanied by a heavily edited sidebar “What Makes a Good Square Good?” by Clay, Jacobs’s feature garnered one of the strongest responses of any article published by the magazine. Whyte sent Haskell a transcription of thirty glowing letters from mayors, city planning directors, academics, real estate developers, and urban renewal consultants, including Raymond Vernon, a New York planning director; James Rouse; Frank Zeidler, the mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Richard Dilworth, the mayor of Philadelphia; Raymond Tucker, the mayor of St. Louis, Missouri; James Gardner, the mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana; James McCarthy, a city planning director in San Francisco; Francis Violich, a city planning professor in Berkeley, California; J. B. Jackson, the editor of Landscape; Gyorgy Kepes, an MIT professor; and Ellen Lurie and William Kirk, Jacobs’s acquaintances. “Look what your girl did for us!” Whyte penciled on the top of the memo. “This is one of the best responses we’ve ever had!”7
FIGURE 43. A sketch of San Francisco’s Union Square drawn by Gordon Cullen from a photograph by Ian Nairn. Based on Cullen and Nairn’s “Townscape” design philosophy, a series of pedestrian-eye views of real cities illustrated Jacobs’s “Downtown Is for People.” Fortune and Getty Images.
Haskell was delighted with Jacobs’s success but disappointed that it was Fortune rather than Forum that was receiving the recognition. The relationship between Forum and Fortune was somewhat strained, at least from Haskell’s perspective. As he wrote Bauer in October 1957, “We are working with Whyte and Fortune in a highly cooperative spirit, but on the other hand, it is quite natural for Fortune people to need material they have in hand.” After Jacobs’s article was published, Haskell was similarly keen to point out that Whyte was their “student,” not the other way around, and that Jacobs, one of his best writers, had been “lent” to Fortune. In a letter to Nairn in May 1958, he acknowledged that Fortune deserved praise for being ahead of most writing about architecture and urbanism in the United States, but “they got their cram course from Forum, and, alas, they got the first comprehensive piece on this subject by Forum’s own best writer [Jane Jacobs]. Since it will travel farther in Fortune, we can only be happy that Holly Whyte was so brilliant a student. Moreover, the work he is doing under his own steam, and with no help from us, on open space, is quite wonderful.”8
For Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People” was an opportunity to rearticulate, synthesize, and expand on points she had made in previous essays: the significance of the city’s concentration and centrality, and the need to protect it from the automobile; the need to study it on foot and to design it at the eye level and for the human horizon, not for viewpoints from cars or airplanes; the collaborative process of city making; and the flaws of statistical design techniques and urban renewal projects like the “ersatz suburb” of Gateway Center. Anticipating points that she would elaborate in whole chapters of Death and Life, Jacobs argued that the street, not the block, was the city’s essential formal and functional element, and that the multiple functions of the public space of the street needed to be respected and augmented, as in the example of Rockefeller Center. She argued the need for old buildings and short blocks, compact public spaces, focal points in city design, and the variety and function of a mixture of old and new. New buildings, she observed, invited chain stores and restaurants, not the marginal and exceptional enterprises that only a city could support. She argued in favor of mixed uses, multiple functions, a twenty-four-hour city, and the public spaces and planning that would facilitate these interactions and relationships. She argued for thinking beyond the limits of a redevelopment site: “Look at the bird’s eye views published of forthcoming projects,” she remarked, “if they bother to indicate the surrounding streets, all too likely an airbrush has softened the streets into an innocuous blur.” And she argued for designing with the “peculiar combinations of past and present, climate and topography, or accidents of growth.” She explained, in a Townscape-like fashion, that “a sense of place is built up, in the end, from many little things too, some so small people take them for granted, and yet the lack of them takes the flavor out of the city: irregularities in level, so often bulldozed away; different kinds of paving, signs and fireplugs and street lights, white marble stoops.” Cities, Jacobs argued, were physical and perceptual topographies, and city building needed to be a collaborative affair, an activity of common senses, not of single plans and perceptions. “The remarkable intricacy and liveliness of downtown can never be created by the abstract logic of a few men,” she affirmed.9
Among those captivated by Jacobs’s article was Chadbourne Gilpatric, the associate director of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation and a champion of the foundation’s urban design research initiative. In fact, Jacobs was already on his radar before “Downtown Is for People.” In February 1958, Gilpatric had contacted Haskell, who suggested he speak with Jacobs about issues of cities and critical thinking about their renewal. In his notes on this conversation with Haskell, Gilpatric noted, “Haskell deplores the paucity of critical thinking about new demands for architecture and design in city planning. One of the few able and imaginative people concerned with this domain is Jane Jacobs, on his staff. She has just completed a long piece for the next issue of Fortune on the problem of the overloaded central city, i.e., congested downtown areas in American cities. (Jay Gold of Fortune will send an advance copy of this issue.) She might be a person worth talking to soon.”10
By this time, the Rockefeller Foundation’s ten-year urban design research initiative was halfway through its run. Launched in 1952, the initiative was the inspiration of Wallace K. Harrison, a new Rockefeller Foundation executive and trustee and also the lead architect of Rockefeller Center, the 1939 World’s Fair, and the United Nations headquarters. Harrison, who was then working on plans for Lincoln Center with the architect Pietro Belluschi, also the dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, had recommended MIT for the foundation’s support. As part of the emergent interest in urban design, in 1952, Belluschi was considering the establishment of a new civic design program, and two of his faculty members, Kevin Lynch, assistant professor of city planning, and György Kepes, professor of visual design, had recently begun collaborative research on the form and experiential qualities of the city in a graduate seminar named “The Form of the City.” Following up on Harrison’s recommendation, Charles Fahs, the director of the foundation’s Humanities Division, began a series of conversations with Lynch, Kepes, and John Ely Burchard, the MIT dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, to discuss possible research initiatives for funding.11
Burchard pushed the idea further. With a background in liberal arts and architectural engineering, Burchard was a passionate proponent of developing programs for the study of art in conjunction with general education, with a special interest in architecture and its education for both majors and nonmajors. He was also an amateur urbanist who would later write “The Urban Aesthetic” (1957) for the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, where he made observations about the phenomena, experience, and life of the city in terms later associated with Jacobs. At the time that the Rockefeller Foundation was considering supporting research on urbanism, Burchard felt that city planning had neglected “aesthetic elements to concentrate largely on technical ones of communication, hygiene, and economics.” He therefore supported faculty and research projects that sought to develop more holistic approaches to the study of the city. He wanted to “get a more humanistic element into planning,” with greater concern for the aesthetic and intellectual problems of dwellers in the communities being planned.12
Burchard’s comments pointed to the often-overlooked fact that, in 1953, city planning was still a relatively young field. The first city planning degree program had been established at Harvard, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, in 1929, but approximately half of the degree programs that existed by the early 1950s had been established during the postwar years. For MIT, a new Center for Urban and Regional Studies, directed by the planner Louis Wetmore, was a step toward Burchard’s goals; it would become the institutional home for urban design research, “a means of bringing together architecture and planning.” Belluschi believed that “architecture could not flourish without connections with its application in planning, and also that city and regional planning needed architecture, with particular emphasis on the visual element.”13
By September 1953, MIT faculty had outlined three possible research initiatives: (1) the study of the relationship between economic activity and city structure; (2) the value of decentralization in response to the threat of enemy attack; and (3) visual aspects of the physical environment. The first topic was of particular interest to Wetmore, whose work concerned urban economics and industrial location; the second was of interest to the city planning chair-elect Gordon Stephenson and the architecture department head Lawrence Anderson. Ultimately, it was the third topic, a study of the phenomenological characteristics of the urban environment, that was of interest to the foundation, and it led to the first urban design research grant to Lynch and Kepes in 1954 and to Lynch’s Image of the City in 1960—work that would influence Jacobs’s in various ways.14
As a collaborative project between an architect/city planner and an artist who was oriented toward environment, science, and visual design, Lynch and Kepes’s proposal to study the visual aspects of the urban environment was fundamentally concerned with the human experience of the city, and it helped to lay the groundwork for the foundation’s support of Jacobs’s work. Building on their “Form of the City” research, in which they sought to analyze effects on the city landscape from new buildings, like Boston’s John Hancock Building (the first tower, built in 1947, now known as the Berkeley Building), which some had regarded as destroying the “aesthetic skyline.” Through urban analysis they hoped to develop techniques to anticipate such effects. More broadly, they were interested in light, color, and other phenomenological qualities of the urban landscape, as well as in developing a “grammar of visual features” that was similar to the Townscape research being done by Cullen during the same years and to which it was later compared.15
FIGURE 44. As shown in Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City, the Central Artery in Boston was a problematic edge urban condition. It was characteristic of new urban features that affected the “imageability” of modern cities. Photo by Nishan Bichajian, 1956. MIT Libraries.
In the fall of 1953, as Lynch and Kepes drafted their first grant proposal, they made explicit the association between urban design and urban redevelopment, and they also discussed the urban growth and sprawl that would be “dominant for many decades to come.” They recognized, however, that “little systematic research has been done which has the threedimensional city as its core.” Anticipating Jacobs’s criticism and research of a few years later, they wrote, “We possess several fragmentary concepts of desirable urban form: density relations, neighborhood organization, superblock design, specialization of traffic ways, standards for public facilities and housing, greenbelts, and so on. Currently useful in city planning practice, they are partly based on intuition and are the centers of controversy. Architects and planners, although centrally concerned with this subject, are only now beginning to turn to research to provide the desperately needed information, criteria, and techniques.” They wanted to know answers to the following questions: “What are the effects of urban design from the point of view of the citizen? What is the meaning which such design has for people? What is the relationship of form to individuals? [How could urban design provide] a sense of location so that the resident both knows his way around and feels at home?” Burchard summed up the problem this way: “It is only once in a while that a Corbusier has a chance to build an [entire] city, and the cost of empirical experiment of this sort is large. Surely something can be achieved by rational analysis and laboratory experiment.”16
While their framing objectives had the character of academic research, of particular interest to Lynch and Kepes were the “psychological and sensuous effects of city form on the individual.” Their final grant proposal was accordingly titled “The Perceptual Form of Cities.” From their study, they intended to learn how to build “a rich sensuous world out of the urban environment, one capable of generating new forms, new values, new imagery.” They wanted to know what effects “the total visual environment of the city have on the inhabitants, and what would be the effects of various changes in the visual environment?” And they wondered if “the loss of unity in the architectural designs in modern cities produces unhappiness in the population, and how can happiness be restored by improving the unity of urban design?”17
To find answers, their starting point was the study of “the nature of the sensuous effects themselves,” with an analysis of the urban environment with the goal of developing descriptions of significant visual elements such as spaces, surfaces, silhouettes, masses, scale relations, color, detail, time, and patterns. Phenomenological research would thus “concentrate on the sensuous impact of the physical city by sight, smell, sound, and touch; on the interactions of these sense data as they combine with each other in place and time and with the preconceptions of the observer; and on the decisions or outside influences that have created such particular sensations in the physical setting.” Influenced by Gestalt theory, and the Gestalt-influenced Townscape theory, they believed that “a high level of meaning in the physical forms of parts and whole, expressive of their particular natures and functions, allow[s] the user to ‘read’ the city easily and to feel that it is ‘warm,’ stimulating, that it has character, or is well adapted to human ends.” When awarded in 1954, the Rockefeller Foundation’s grant to Lynch, Kepes, and MIT helped to establish the field of urban design, which the foundation’s directors described as an effort to correct “the relative neglect of aesthetic aspects in connection with city planning during the last few decades.”18
In the following years, the foundation’s attention turned to the University of Pennsylvania. Under G. Holmes Perkins’s leadership, in 1954, the school had reestablished its landscape architecture program, which had ceased instruction during the war, with Ian McHarg as director, and it launched a new civic design program in 1956 under William L. C. Wheaton. Perkins, McHarg, and Wheaton were initially unsuccessful in convincing the foundation to support their work, largely because it was so nascent. As Perkins observed in 1956, “There is little which can be described as research in the school, or, in fact, in other architectural schools.” But Edward D’Arms, the foundation director, understood the matter quite clearly. In response to an unsuccessful proposal by McHarg, he remarked, “McHarg, by implication at least, seems to regard landscape architecture as something different and distinct from architecture or city planning. Actually, it seems to me that the examples he has given of landscape architecture (parkways, expressways, municipal parks, play fields, playgrounds) should be regarded as part of the total urban or rural scene and, hence, can hardly be considered separately from either architecture proper or urban design and suburban planning.” It was a telling observation about the poor articulation of landscape architecture theory in the mid-1950s.19
Likely influenced by this feedback, McHarg would go on to revolutionize landscape architecture and write the seminal book Design with Nature (1969). However, the foundation’s second grant went to Erwin Anton Gutkind, a University of Pennsylvania faculty member and architect and historian, for his ambitious history of Western planning and urbanization, with a small line item to McHarg as project administrator. Gutkind’s eight-volume International History of City Development, published between 1964 and 1972, fulfilled the humanities department’s basic mission, while Gutkind was seen as a successor to his friend Lewis Mumford, who was then also teaching at Penn.20
While valuable undertakings, the primary research project at MIT and the major historical project at Penn left the foundation looking for someone to answer the “almost complete absence of critical writing about the design of cities in the American popular and professional press.” This is what led Gilpatric—a Rhodes scholar, former professor of philosophy, and polymath with an interest in literary criticism—to Haskell in February 1958.21
Indeed, there was so little writing of its kind that when Gilpatric read the draft of “Downtown Is for People” a few days later, he remarked to a colleague that Jacobs had drawn heavily on Lynch and Kepes’s research. Although Jacobs had indeed referenced their work in her article, it was an overstatement that was ultimately to her credit, for the article appeared to Gilpatric to be on par with work from academics at a major research institution. Moreover, at a time when Mumford’s “Sky Line” column in The New Yorker and Clay’s articles in the Courier Journal were regarded as “the only regularly published criticisms of urban design appearing in any American [magazine or] newspaper,” the success of her Fortune piece put her in the national spotlight. As Gilpatric put it a few months before Jacobs was awarded her first grant, “One form of the question was where there were to be found other Lewis Mumfords, who could bring his critical, philosophical and historical background to bear on problems of urban planning.” She would be another Lewis Mumford, and perhaps more.22
Following the success of “Downtown Is for People,” Jacobs gave a talk at a symposium on the future of New York at the New School for Social Research in April 1958. Moderated by Raymond Vernon (later cited in Death and Life), other speakers included Victor Gruen, Charles Abrams, and the developer Robert Dowling. In her talk, Jacobs’s research, writing, and activism wove together ever tighter. She explained, “New York’s basic material is its enormous variety of activities and people, and the intricate relationships among them.” Anticipating similar arguments in Death and Life, she went on to observe that the new Lincoln Center project and Moses’s revived project to run a road through Washington Square Park were two examples of how, “at great expense, we are systematically building rigor mortis into our city.” For its own sake, Lincoln Center needed urbanity—restaurants, bars, flower shops, studios, music shops, and all sorts of interesting places—as well as for its neighbors’ sake. “The project is so placed, and so bounded, that there will be no possible place where urbanity can work itself in,” she predicted.23
FIGURE 45. Chadbourne Gilpatric at his home in White Plains, New York, ca. 1955. Marguerite Gilpatric.
Just five blocks from the New School, the Washington Square project, she continued, represented another way to destroy a community, but one that would be stopped. “Because we are an effective, functioning community,” she stated, “we are going to defeat that piece of vandalism and get Washington Square Park closed to all but emergency traffic. We have to.” Echoing her 1955 letter to Mayor Wagner, she declared, “This is a chips-down test of the whole question of whether human values can survive in the city.” Such projects must be stopped, and the thinking behind them must be changed.24
Among those who attended the event were Mumford and Jason Epstein, the senior editor of Doubleday, who was turning “The Exploding Metropolis” series into a book. Her talk made a big impression on them. Soon thereafter, Mumford wrote her and said she needed to reach a larger audience: “You stated, with such refreshing clarity, a point of view that only a few people in city planning circles, like Ed Bacon, even dimly apprehend. Your analysis of the functions of the city is sociology of the first order. … You ought to reach a wider audience for your ideas. Have you thought of the Saturday Evening Post? They seem in a mood for serious contributions these days. At all events, keep hammering: your worst opponents are the old fogies who imagine that Le Corbusier circa 1922-25 is the last word in urbanism.” Undoubtedly encouraged by this, Jacobs presented the first outline for her project to Gilpatric a few days later.25
In a long conversation on May 9, Jacobs and Gilpatric talked about her recent trip to Baltimore to visit the new Charles Center redevelopment project. In “New Heart for Baltimore,” published in Forum’s June 1958 issue, Jacobs reiterated that the project, although large in scale, was currently the best of its kind because many city departments and civic groups had been involved; because the streets and public spaces would be city property, not private property; and because numerous developers would be involved. With such an organization, “There would be no overall developer who could impose design and the kind of objectionable features typical of many big development projects.” She admitted that Charles Center, “like all urban redevelopment, will cause hardship and perplexing injustices to some people now on the site.” Despite the hardship to businessmen like Isaac Hamburger, a third-generation men’s wear store owner, however, Jacobs praised Charles Center for drawing on more than a decade of “trial-and-error experience” with city redevelopment; for site planning that made the redevelopment less “a ‘project’ than an integral, continuous part of downtown”; and for creating “undiluted urbanity” through “architecturally designed and architecturally organized [open] spaces,” which she associated with a scale and tradition closer to public spaces from medieval and renaissance times. “The open spaces,” she observed, “are not simply places left without buildings.”26
When next asked how the Rockefeller Foundation could best support the design and planning of cities, Jacobs told Gilpatric that she would like to see the foundation “give opportunities for observation and writing to some first-rate architectural critics who could develop helpful new ideas for the planning of cities.” She recommended Ian Nairn (possibly “the best man there is on cityscapes”), Grady Clay (“the best man she knows at the present time” in the United States), and Catherine Bauer (who “is far ahead of her time and full of ideas”). She also recommended Nathan Glazer, an associate professor of sociology and social institutions at Berkeley, who had recently submitted the essay “The Great City and the City Planners” to Architectural Forum (published as “Why City Planning Is Obsolete” in July 1958)—which Jacobs would later cite in Death and Life.27
Finally, Jacobs indicated to Gilpatric that she also had an idea for a project of her own. She was interested in making an intensive three-month study of New York, focused on the city’s public sphere. She had four studies, and articles, in mind: first, the city’s streets and their sociological function; second, the scale of neighborhoods and the relationship of the size of social groups to their function as neighborhoods or communities; third, the city’s social mixture and interaction, which she believed was “the essence of urban life”; and fourth, the implications of these scales and mixtures on the city’s public streets and places. As she first imagined them, these articles would probably be published in Architectural Forum, but she needed a few months’ leave from her other editorial responsibilities to write them.28
Jacobs and Gilpatric would not talk again until early June. By that time, her thoughts about writing a series of articles had changed to writing a book, the subject of which would be “what is the city” or “what should the city be for people.” Referring to Henri Pirenne’s Medieval Cities, the primary theme of the book would be showing the flaws of the contemporary planning concept of the city “as a castle where the overall plan is subject to a single or collective mastermind.” In contrast to this top-down approach, Jacobs would explain her understanding of a “highly pluralistic concept of the city which allows for many forces and chance factors.” A book, she added, would give her the opportunity to expand her research beyond New York, to other cities, including Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia.29
In mid-June, Jacobs followed up on their conversation with a revised proposal, the first outline of her book. Such a book, she reiterated, was needed because “we are now planning for our cities with very little idea of what the city is, what works well in it, and what does not.” Anticipating the introduction to Death and Life, she stated that most city planning and rebuilding ideas, since the time of Ebenezer Howard, had been based on rejection of the city, in favor of small towns and suburban values. In the meantime, she continued, enough experiments based on such ideas had been built to show their failures. As she similarly remarked in Death and Life, “Our cities have gone through an enormous amount of unplanned trial-and-error experimentation. If we will only look for this and try to understand what it means, we can learn much from it to guide our treatment of the city and stimulate our imagination about ways to improve the city.”30
The outline of Jacobs’s book now included five sections—street, park, scale, mixture, and focal centers—and she went on to discuss each. “The street is the most important organ of the city; we need to know what jobs it does, how people try to use it, when and how it works as a unifier and a social control, what distinguishes the streets of socially or economically successful parts of the city, what has been past experience with superblocks and other street variations in the city,” she explained. Parks, she went on, were a specialized extension of the street, with similar principles of social safety and informal use, and a better understanding of what distinguishes parts that “do a good job” was also needed. Scale included the “characteristic sizes of things in the big city, and ranges of sizes, and also the frequency with which similar things occur. We need to know the characteristic scale of different kinds of commercial and cultural enterprises, the scale of big-city neighborhoods and communities, the scale of the kinds of institutions that have grown most spontaneously or have been most responsive to needs.”31
Mixtures, she continued, were related to scale, but there was much that is interesting about them. Anticipating her critical discussions of diversity in Death and Life, mixtures indicated “the sort of mixtures occurring in business areas that have shown the best survival value, the kinds of mixtures of people and activities that occur in areas which fight political battles for community survival or improvement most successfully, what happens to areas of extreme sorting-out of people or activities, and why, what opposing forces are at work for mixing and sorting.” Lastly, focal centers were the places within a city community, large or small, that are “important out of all proportion to their size.” Anticipating a number of chapters in Death and Life about city form and public space, she wrote, “We need to know what kinds of things are in the places where big-city communities come to a focus, what kind of effect they exert, and what relation they have to a sense of community. Related to this is the question of ‘borders’ and edges of areas within the city. The borders are much less significant than the centers, but present planning has pretty well overlooked the importance of centers and concentrated on defining borders, often with ridiculous results because what looks like a border in orthodox planning theory may, in reality, be a vital center.” Jacobs wrote that she would conclude her book by analyzing the implications of all this for planning in cities, and she would suggest suitable aims and means for big city planning and rebuilding. She would also discuss the limitations of planning: “the things in the city that must be left to happen, that no planner can do for people, but that will be done well or ill or not at all, partly depending on whether the general framework hampers the functioning of the city or fosters it.”32
In the remainder of her letter, Jacobs wrote about her focus, method, time frame, and other comments about what, other than her five elements of study, would be at the heart of the book. She would draw primarily on Manhattan, she explained, because she knew it well, and within Manhattan most on “East Harlem, Greenwich Village (a big range is presented among these two), and the series of downtowns which Manhattan has grown from south to north.” However, she would test her observations against other parts of the city, and against a number of other cities entirely, to avoid taking things for granted in places she knew well, to reveal superficial irrele-vancies, and to concentrate on the widest applicability for her findings.33
In writing her book, Jacobs remarked, “I would aim at the general interested citizen, rather than writing for the specialist. But I hope (and think) that the book would interest specialists.” On account of the subject matter, moreover, she would avoid abstraction. “I plan to make my points and describe the city mainly by means of specific instances and examples. I would include examples embracing, in each section, commercial life, residential life, cultural and institutional life, because one of the very important characteristics of the big city is the inextricable interdependence among all these aspects of life; we have already been led much astray by arbitrary attempts to deal with these as isolated and independent entities,” she wrote.
In conclusion, she wrote, “My bias, in general, is that of a person who is on the side of the big city. … I want to see it work well and fulfill its potentialities.” And then, underscoring her lifelong interest in the relationship of cities to civilizations, she affirmed, “The most valuable thing about it [the big city], in my view, is that it is a marvelously intricate, constantly adjusting network of people and their activities. This network makes all the unique and constructive contributions of the great city possible; it also makes possible the social controls that have to be effective on people, communities and enterprises within the big city if we are to maintain a high standard (or even a decent standard) of civilization.” The project, she now estimated, would take about nine months—three for research, five for writing, and one for editing. “I know it’s a tight schedule,” she admitted, but “I do my best work when I am under pressure that I have to do my utmost to meet. It is not very comfortable, but it works.”34
A few days later, Jacobs asked Mumford’s opinion about writing a book. In a letter, she thanked him for his kind words about her New School talk and praised his recent article in Architectural Record on the highwaybuilding boom following the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. With characteristic interest not just in criticism, but in the underlying principles of flawed ideas, she wrote, “Your article on highways in the Record was splendid. It was so good to read not just a criticism of the way highway planning is being done, or an exhortation to do it better, but an analysis of the destructive and lopsided premises on which the very existence of the program, as it stands, is based. You made a statement I’ve never seen before, and that I think is terribly important: about the relationship between the cost of feeding this automobile way of life, and the poverty of our public standard of living, schools, libraries, and the like.” Mumford responded with great enthusiasm and generous encouragement. “Though I can’t guess how the public would take to it, you have a duty to produce the book!” he exclaimed. “There’s no one else who’s had so many fresh and sensible things to say about the city—and it’s high time these things were said and discussed.”35
Early support for Jacobs’s book project was invigorating. Epstein, who would become her lifelong editor, offered her an advance on a book contract. However, Gilpatric and his colleagues still had questions about the scope and content of the work. In July 1958, Jacobs addressed these indirectly in an editorial in Forum and directly in a series of letters to Gilpatric. In “What Is a City?,” published in Forum in July 1958, Jacobs explained much of her project and many of her ambitions. A city, she explained, “consists of an intricate living network of relationships, and is made up of an enormously rich variety of people and activities. … [C]onsider the thousands upon thousands of pieces, most of them quite small, which make a big city. Consider the interdependence, the constant adjustment, and the mutual support of every kind which must work in the city, and work well. This network of human relationships is, in fact, all that the city has which is of unique value.” The idea of a city as a network of human relationships echoed similar ideas in “Downtown Is for People,” “Philadelphia’s Redevelopment” from a few years earlier, and her first essays on the city.36
Jacobs continued by admitting that cities needed help. “The average US city does need rebuilding, to be sure; in some portions it needs wholesale clearance.” But this did not excuse the need to criticize current thinking, programs, and practices. To support her case, she quoted from Harrison Salisbury’s recent series of articles on the “shook-up generation” in the New York Times. “When slum clearance enters an area,” Salisbury wrote, “it does not merely rip out slatternly houses. It uproots the people. It tears out the churches. It destroys the local businessman. It sends the neighborhood lawyer to new offices downtown and it mangles the tight skein of community friendships and group relationships beyond repair.” Resonant with her analysis of East Harlem in her 1956 Urban Design Conference talk, “The Missing Link in City Redevelopment,” Jacobs quoted the same passage from Salisbury again in Death and Life. She agreed with his criticism of the flawed premises of redevelopment as well—in fact, she originally titled one of Death and Life’s chapters “Redevelopment—The Shook Up City.”37
Shifting her focus to the related economic impacts, and anticipating Death and Life’s chapters “Gradual Money and Cataclysmic Money” and “Subsidizing Dwellings,” Jacobs argued that urban redevelopment rested on the flawed premise that subsidized improvement would catalyze further spontaneous improvement. “Unfortunately, things are not working that way in most cities,” she observed. “Living communities, portions of living commercial districts, are so ruthlessly and haphazardly amputated that the remnants, far from improving, often develop galloping gangrene.” Social and economic segregation, moreover, went hand-in-hand. “We do not need to be prophets to see that we are creating an urban monster—a pseudo-city composed of economically segregated islands, of large, repetitive, separated, monotonous buildings,” she contended.38
Jacobs concluded “What Is a City?” with a list of ideas that she would reiterate both in her follow-up proposals to Gilpatric, written soon after, and in Death and Life. “We must begin to examine and nurture what is good about the city to find the wisdom and practicality imbedded in them, such as how a great city, full of strangers, informally polices itself, and why various enterprises locate where they do.” In an early formulation of her “eyes on the street” idea, she added, “We may find the old city was not so stupid in orienting all its eyes and activities toward the street.” She went on to discuss why various enterprises locate, thrive, and fail in certain locations and of the consequent need to be astute about locating schools, health centers, welfare offices, shopping areas, and parks, so that facilities strengthen communities and reinforce “the living network of relationships.” Alluding to the counterexample of Lincoln Center, she observed that downtown theater owners had traditionally located where the city was lively and would become livelier for their presence. To build strong communities, she offered that we must avoid fostering communities composed only of the transient—“either the publically housed transient poor, or the childless, transient rich.” For the frequently dislocated poor, this meant searching for economic ways of rehabilitating structurally sound buildings without evicting “old, well-rooted communities.”39
In a letter to Gilpatric on July 1, Jacobs added to these foundational ideas her conceptions of complexity and emergent order. This order, she explained to Gilpatric, underlay the city’s network of relationships:
Within the seeming chaos and jumble of the city is a remarkable degree of order, in the form of relationships of all kinds that people have evolved and that are absolutely fundamental to city life— more fundamental and necessary to safety, to convenience, to social action, to economic opportunity, than anything conceived of in the image of the rebuilt city. Where it works at all well, this network of relationships is astonishingly intricate. It requires a staggering diversity of activities and people, very intimately interlocked (although often casually so), and able to make constant adjustments to needs and circumstances; the physical form of the city has also to be full of variety and flexibility for people to accommodate it to their needs.40
Appreciation of the existence of this ordered complexity, and Jacobs’s goals of understanding and communicating it, would distinguish her approach from others. She offered that there were presently two “dominant and very compelling mental images of the city” that had come to shape the thinking of both citizens and city planners. One was “the image of the city in trouble, an inhuman mass of masonry, a chaos of happenstance growth, a place starved of the simple decencies and amenities of life, beset with so many accumulated problems it makes your head swim.” The other image was of “the rebuilt city, the antithesis of all that the unplanned city represents, a carefully planned panorama of projects and green spaces, a place where functions are sorted-out instead of jumbled together, a place of light, air, sunshine, dignity, and order for all.” Echoing Bauer’s, Glazer’s, and others’ criticisms of the suburbanism of Howard’s low-density Garden City and of Le Corbusier’s high-density garden city, she argued that city planners and theorists had replaced city problems with a patterns of design better suited for suburbs and small towns. Jacobs proposed to offer a different image of the city, “not drawn from mine or anyone else’s imagination or wishes but, so far as this is possible, from real life; an image more compelling to the reader than the abstractions, because he is convinced it is truer.” Her goal, moreover, was not just presenting a new image of the city, but opening “the reader’s eyes to a different way of looking at the city for himself and understanding what he sees.”41
Later criticized for her empirical approach, Jacobs, in her letters to Gilpatric, was thoughtful and deliberate about her approach to writing Death and Life. To convince readers of her ideas about the city, she deliberately built up “a pointed accumulation of examples, illustrations, and explanations of cause and effect” and pursued an incremental organization of her argument. Her goal was “to present this accumulation of facts, and inferences from facts, so it really adds up for the reader and persuades him of its significance, instead of overwhelming or confusing him.” Referring to the structure of her book, this would be achieved by “taking up certain aspects of the city, one at a time, without evading the intricacy of each aspect, but by choosing the sequence of subjects so that an understanding of each illuminates the next one and leads into it.” She explained that in her book—as in the city—“complexity is thus of the essence, but it won’t do to throw these intricacies at the reader like a basket of leaves.”42
Once again, Jacobs reiterated her initial outline and sequence of topics: the street, park, scale, mixture, centers and edges (originally “focal centers”), and then “the implications of all of this for the physical city and its people.” But what was becoming increasingly clear to her was the notion of use. She admitted that there were quite a number of people today looking at the city in the same way: “hunting for evidence of how people use it.” She mentioned William Kirk, the head worker of Union Settlement, as she did again in the introduction to Death and Life. But she explained that many others did not understand the issue. In East Harlem, $250 million had been spent on redevelopment, but no one seemed to understand what was being destroyed or what was being created. She gave another example from her Harvard talk from 1956, also influenced by her experiences in East Harlem, about her observations of the use of storefronts. “A few years ago I gave a talk about the great importance of stores and storekeepers in city neighborhoods, and also the important non-commercial ways in which city people use storefronts,” she wrote. “Since then, I have been distressed at the way this observation has been simplified into a gimmick, ‘the corner grocery store,’ by many people who were apparently moved by what they heard, but who have fixed in their heads so formalized an image of the ‘residential’ city that they are unable to assimilate contrary data from real life, except by modifying it into a pretty meaningless gadget.”43
Jacobs’s report of the influence of her 1956 Harvard talk was not exaggerated. Mumford and others had been impressed by her thinking then, and they continued to be as she pursued her book project. A week later, Jacobs showed Gilpatric a recent letter from Mumford and also mentioned that the architect Henry Churchill had offered to help her with research in Philadelphia. In fact, everyone she had discussed her proposal with was enthusiastic. A few weeks later, Hans Simons, the president of the New School, enthusiastically agreed to sponsor and administer her project, and he wrote Gilpatric that Jacobs’s unusual qualifications for researching and writing her book would be assisted by the school’s faculty and staff resources. Mumford, Bauer, Whyte, and others, she told him, would likely endorse her as well.
At the end of July 1958, Gilpatric wrote Mumford, Bauer, Whyte, and Epstein, as well as the Yale professor Christopher Tunnard; Martin Meyerson, the director of the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies; and Holmes Perkins for their comments. In their letters, sent in August, Mumford and Bauer, whom Jacobs would later criticize in Death and Life, were very enthusiastic. Mumford wrote that “there is no one among the younger generation whose work, in housing and planning, seems to me more promising. Indeed, she has already opened various fresh lines of investigation on matters that have been singularly ignored or misinterpreted by both planners and urban sociologists.” Bauer concurred: “I’d back Jane Jacobs if I were you. She’s already proven her effectiveness in promoting what has been a highly unfashionable viewpoint on the brutalities and banalities of present-day large-scale civic design. She’s a good writer, sensitive and imaginative, with real personal concern for the qualitative visual and social aspect of modern American cities.” Whyte was equally admiring and stated, “I believe the result may prove to be one of the great contributions to the whole field of urban planning and design.” Epstein affirmed that he had offered her a contract. Meyerson questioned whether she could finish a book of real substance within eight months, but he described her as a very stimulating writer of great ability. Perkins, who was later alienated by the rhetorical attacks on city planners in her book, similarly wrote, “Her interest in the subject and her enthusiastic way of tackling the problem have truly brought new life into the discussion of the city. On these counts she is deserving of all the possible support that can be given her. She is a keen observer and to my mind a good writer.”44
The only respondent who was not enthusiastic was Tunnard, who implied that she was an amateur. He wrote, “Studies of the city and of urbanization and urban aesthetics are suffering because they are being done in an amateur fashion by people who think it’s an exciting new field. Her project sounds grandiose and vague, from the sub-headings you gave me. Perhaps I am underestimating her capabilities.”45
With otherwise overwhelming support, on September 8, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded $10,000, the first of a series of grants to cover Jacobs’s research and secretarial, travel, and living expenses while on leave from Architectural Forum, to the New School for Social Research and Jane Jacobs for a study of “relations of function to design in large cities.”46
In October 1958, Jacobs began her leave, intending to return to her job when her project was completed less than a year later. Her research phase began in early October with an appropriate and stimulating start at the University of Pennsylvania Conference on Urban Design Criticism, held at the Westchester Country Club, in Rye, New York. This event had emerged from her suggestion that the foundation support architectural critics who could develop helpful new ideas for the planning of cities, and she had praised the University of Pennsylvania as being “the most productive and influential center” in the United States for architectural and city planning research.47
As orchestrated by the city planning chair, William L. C. Wheaton (whom Jacobs knew as a consultant on the Baltimore Charles Center project); David Crane, who circulated an extensive working paper in September; and Gilpatric, the purpose of the conference was to discuss “the low state of present urban design” and, with a few exceptional writers in attendance, the “almost complete absence” of critical writing about the design of cities in America. Anticipated outcomes were articles on the philosophy of urban design, suggestions for foundation program development, and possibly specific proposals for foundation support. In a sense, The Death and Life of Great American Cities would be its most significant outcome.
The conference was organized into three presentation sessions on Friday, slideshows on Thursday and Friday evenings, and working sessions on Saturday. Overarching topics concerned “some philosophical views,” with Gilpatric on “The Meaning of Depth in Criticism,” Ian McHarg on “New and Old Attitudes in Urban Environment,” and Edward Weeks, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, on “The Intangibles.” A second session focused on “efforts, inhibitions, and failings in the urban design press,” with presentations by Gordon Stephenson, then the chair of the Department of Town and Regional Planning at the University of Toronto, on “Design and City Planning as Seen in the Press”; Frederick Gutheim, an architect, planner, author, and journalist (whom Jacobs knew from her January 1956 article on Washington, DC), on “Efforts of the Working Press”; and Jacobs on “Inhibiting Factors in Criticism.” The third group reflected on “idea and form in urban design criticism,” with talks by Kevin Lynch on “Idea-building and the Instruments of Communication,” Grady Clay on “Form and Method in Design Criticism,” and Catherine Bauer on “Professional Introspection and Extroversion.” Mumford spoke on cities during lunch. Presenting slideshows were J. B. Jackson on “Ecology and Values in Environment”; Leslie Cheek, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art director, on “The Virginia Town Exhibit”; Bauer on “Asian Vernaculars in Urban Design”; and Clay on “Ruminations on European Townscapes.” On Saturday evening, the architect Arthur Holden read “Sonnets for My City” and Louis Kahn discussed “Ideas of the City.”48
When Gilpatric first mentioned that her idea for supporting architectural or urban design criticism might take the form of a conference, Jacobs had warned him that it would be successful only if it was focused. Her talk was accordingly to the point. Jacobs discussed three factors inhibiting criticism.
FIGURE 46. The attendees of the 1958 University of Pennsylvania Conference on Urban Design Criticism included William L. C. Wheaton, Lewis Mumford, Ian McHarg, J. B. Jackson, David Crane, Louis Kahn, G. Holmes Perkins, Catherine Bauer Wurster, Edward Weeks, Kevin Lynch, Gordon Stephenson, and I. M. Pei. Jacobs is seen here speaking with Weeks. Grady Clay was the photographer. Grady Clay.
First was the journalist’s conflicted relationship with his sources. It is difficult, she pointed out, “for an architectural editor to be simultaneously both an all-purpose diplomat in the profession and a major critic. One or the other must suffer.” Second was the problem of the journalist being influenced by parties involved in a project and their description of the extenuating circumstances of the project’s deficiencies. “If these were generally nice people who had been doing their best, and for whom the critic could not help but feel sympathy once he understood their difficulties, you can see how it would affect his review and how far off it might be as information on the worth of the work itself,” she said. “It takes an extremely tough-minded person not to be unduly influenced.” Third, and most significant, was the lack of willingness on the part of publications and writers to criticize, for various reasons. One of these, as Haskell had observed around the time Jacobs joined Forum, was the fear of libel suits and the resulting habit to “print only the work you can praise and discuss only those aspects of the work that are laudable.” Anticipating Death and Life and her future activism, Jacobs offered that “getting either quality or quantity of urban design criticism, and hopefully both, is the problem of getting publications to understand that intelligent criticism—in some cases very destructive criticism—can be of more real help to a community in its aims at improvement than is automatic applause, and so much more help that it is actually worth the real and unmistakable trouble it causes.” Death and Life’s criticism and her activism would prove her right.49
After the conference, Jacobs told Gilpatric she thought it had been an exciting and promising event. She mentioned being “most interested in the advice of I. M. Pei and Arthur Holden, both leading architects who were trying to see architectural needs in light of existing laws and regulations, but also for the social consequences of architectural schemes and development projects.” They talked about continuing the conversation together during an evening later in October or November. In fact, Jacobs continued to participate in discussions about urban design hosted by Gilpatric during the next few years, while she wrote Death and Life, although she shared with Gilpatric her dislike for the terms “urban design” and “urban design criticism.” She told him that as a description for “the complex field of city development, in which architectural planning corresponds with an adequate philosophy of city life,” she preferred the phrase “city design criticism,” “partly because the terms ‘urban’ and ‘planning’ have objectionable connotations at this point.”50
Perhaps still believing that she could complete the research for her book in three months, Jacobs compiled a list of people involved in renewal and development she wanted to meet. First on her list was James Rouse, whom she knew from writing about shopping centers in 1953 and more recently from her work on “A New Heart for Baltimore.” Second was William Slayton, a colleague of Pei and the director of the Webb and Knapp/ William Zeckendorf development project in Southwest Washington. Slayton, not mentioned directly in Death and Life, worked for the Housing and Home Finance Agency before being selected by President Kennedy to be the commissioner of the Urban Renewal Administration in 1961, wherein he prohibited racial and cultural discrimination from developers involved in urban renewal housing.51
Amid these visits and making plans for others to Philadelphia and Boston, Jacobs remained involved in the fight to save Washington Square, which came to a head in 1958. As she had said in her New School talk, the neighborhood had to prevail, and it eventually won a trial period in which the square, which previously admitted buses, would be closed to all but emergency vehicles. In September 1958, Jacobs spoke at a public hearing at City Hall, as did Shirley Hayes, Eleanor Roosevelt (who had lived in Washington Square after FDR’s death), Margaret Mead (another Village resident), Haskell, Stanley Tankel, Charlie Abrams, and some of the other thirty thousand petitioners. In November, she gave a longer talk to the New York State Motorbus Association, explaining that “down in Greenwich Village we are as progressive as anybody. Sometimes we are accused of being too progressive. But we concluded that piling in more cars, to the detriment of every other city value—and as a mere stopgap measure at that—is no more progress than erosion is progress.” Her thoughts having changed significantly since her early writing about shopping centers, she added, “The greatest menace to downtown today comes not from suburban shopping centers; nor from decentralization of offices. … The greatest menace comes rather from well-meant attempts at traffic stopgap expediencies.” She went on to list the effects of widened streets, parking lots and garages, and the parking requirements of stadia and similar venues on city life—ideas repeated today. She remarked that citizens can make their stands here and there but that, for the sake of cities, advocacy was needed by many—including the Motorbus people in the audience—in order to support better policies about public transportation. She urged them to be better advocates for their own industry.52
On November 1, Tankel drove the last car through the Washington Square arch and Jacobs’s daughter, Mary, helped tie a ribbon to mark the “closing” ceremony. Although the closure was temporary, and buses continued to drive through the square until the permanent and complete closure in 1963, Jacobs reported on the “human victory” of Washington Square in a short editorial in the December 1958 issue of Forum. Anticipating her chapter on governing and planning districts, she wrote that effective political pressure had won the day. She concluded that the park, despite its deliberate neglect by the Parks Department, was full of people, with gangs and juvenile delinquents conspicuously absent. People came to play music or checkers, sing and dance, read and “have a genuine ‘village’ good time.” She wrote, “All this is heartening to see in a great modern city. It proves that city neighborhoods too can be human, and it deserves its victory.”53
In the meantime, Jacobs had been to Philadelphia, where she visited various redevelopment projects and spoke with the journalist Joseph “Mack” Guess, who encouraged her to take especially hard looks at the widely touted Morningside Gardens project in New York and Lake Meadows in Chicago. She had been to Cincinnati, where she participated in a conference on the relationship of cities and suburbs with Charlie Farnsley, the former mayor of Louisville, Kentucky; Gruen; Clay; and others. While there, she toured the city and observed its downtown, parks, and housing projects. And she had also been to Boston, where she had notable and extensive conversations with Edward Logue, the director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and his staff and where she visited the city’s North End.54
Just a few months into her research, the North End made a big impression on her—and she told Gilpatric of her experiences in much the same way as she related them in the introduction to Death and Life. “With no sights of big building projects,” she told him, “the residents have undertaken to improve their homes, stores, so that outside and inside there is new and attractive decoration, as with awnings, painting, benches put out. The streets and alleys are full of quite evidently happy and communicative people who, in response to odd questions now and then, expressed immense joy in their life and the situation.” Redevelopment Authority officials, she related, “partly from lack of firsthand acquaintance, view this area with something close to horror and feel that it should really be razed and some ambitious new housing project undertaken, with the usual high-rise buildings and big open plazas.” She noted the low rates of crime and high level of public health but admitted that its density of two hundred residential units per acre was high. Nevertheless, she admired the residents for “taking care of themselves, with a sense of social solidarity and social values, and resisting ‘big projectism’ as it might be launched by municipal government or real estate speculators.” Similar to her descriptions of Greenwich Village and Chicago’s Back-of-the-Yards in Death and Life, she said, “There is a zest, friendliness, social responsiveness and responsibility which one would like to expect in certain city areas.”55
In early January 1959, Jacobs planned a trip to tour San Francisco and Los Angeles, armed with maps and materials from the American Society of Planning Officials lent to her by Clay and Bauer, as well as their suggestions for things to see and people to meet. She looked forward to visiting Bauer in Berkeley and talking over some ideas. “Many, many thanks for the notes. You are wonderful,” Jacobs wrote her. “I am getting some very iconoclastic notions about density and open space (in cities) from what I see on my travels. Would love to have a chance to talk with you about them.”56
At the last minute, however, Jacobs delayed these travel plans in order to attend a meeting in East Harlem, where she remained involved in neighborhood issues as a board member of Union Settlement. She was disappointed that she would not see Bauer, who was leaving for India soon after their planned get-together in San Francisco. “The reason I have to postpone the trip,” she wrote, “is that the East Harlem Housing Council, to which I belong by virtue of being on the board of a settlement up there, has persuaded the NYC Housing Authority to put a 30-day stop on two horrid projects well along in the planning for East Harlem while we see if we can’t come up with something better that can still get approval in Washington.” She explained that the two housing projects would be home to about a thousand families. “If we can shake up some of the miserable old stereotypes here it will not only matter to those thousand, but also might make a difference in the authority’s approach to others, so we sure don’t want to miss the chance for lack of trying.” As her collaborator on the “Dreary Deadlock” series, Bauer must have appreciated both this and the challenge ahead. So, Jacobs concluded, “I need to be here during the earlier stages of it, or so the council thinks, more for moral support than anything else I guess, because I am no architect. But we have a good firm of architects putting their all into it, strictly as a public service! Since I helped instigate the whole thing, I can’t just leave at the crucial moment.”57
Perhaps self-conscious about talking about housing with an expert such as Bauer, Jacobs was modest about her role in trying to improve housing in East Harlem. In early December 1958, she addressed the United Neighborhood Houses of New York, a federation of settlement houses founded in 1919 (and still a lively organization), where she spoke about the planner’s need to hear from residents and the virtues of institutions like Union Settlement to serve as the voice of the residents. She also spoke on a familiar theme: the perpetuation of outdated housing principles and formulas established by an earlier generation of planners that thwarted creative exploration.58
Though Jacobs’s work in East Harlem would delay progress on her book, it provided direct and practical experience with the types of housing projects and planning concepts that she would criticize—and offer alternatives to—in Death and Life. The DeWitt Clinton housing project, the focus of her efforts at this time, was approved by the city’s Board of Estimate in 1956 and was one of the proposed redevelopment projects that first led Kirk to contact Haskell in 1955. She had since become a board member of Union Settlement, and by the end of 1958, she had become one of the leaders of the housing committee of the East Harlem Council for Community Planning.
In early January 1959, shortly before her trip to California, Jacobs, Kirk, and Lurie; Mildred Zucker, the director of the James Weldon Community Center; and four architects from Perkins & Will, including Phil Will, met to discuss alternatives to the proposed DeWitt Clinton housing project. The project would evict approximately nine hundred families and destroy sixty stores, a number of small factories and warehouses that employed more than one hundred people, and five small churches between 104th and 110th streets (east of Park Avenue) and then replace them with twenty-one-story apartment towers. The group had won an opportunity to present the Housing Authority with an alternative project that would provide not only bedrooms, but also ones in which the residents could “live completely.” As they discussed in their meeting, they wanted to see shops and resident amenities (not apartments) at the ground floor, for neighborhood streets to remain as active gathering places—to “bleed street life into our project!”—and to replace the towers-only scheme with a mix of walk-up and high-rise apartments that would serve children, parents, and the elderly. Details included niches and irregularities in the building lines to create “door step living” (as Jacobs later described in the use of sidewalks in Death and Life), active open spaces with small play areas and gathering places, and bike paths and storage. In the bigger picture, their goal was to critique prevailing ideas and replace them with a mixed-use, mixed-building housing model.59
In February 1959, after her trip to California, the group met with twenty-five tenants and representatives from East Harlem housing projects to get direct feedback that might improve their proposal. Lurie noted that the attendees “derived status by being asked to be critical of a plan drawn up by a group that proposes to represent them.” A few days later, Jacobs presented their alternative scheme to the Housing Authority.60
In her presentation, Jacobs spoke about the evidence of flaws in the East River, Johnson, and Washington housing projects, where there was high turnover and no evidence of improvement to the surrounding neighborhoods. “We are convinced,” she affirmed, “that a great part of the poor social showing of East Harlem’s projects is owing to the physical design of the buildings themselves and their grounds.” Dwelling density, she offered, was not the problem. While DeWitt Clinton might have more than 130 apartments per acre, she reported that otherwise similar projects in St. Louis and Philadelphia, with densities of only 60 dwellings or less per acre, had proved to be no better than New York’s high-density projects and in some cases had appeared to be worse. However, while likely thinking of Boston’s North End, she observed that socially successful neighborhoods with even higher densities could be found in low-rent, “non-project areas” of New York and other cities.61
In the initial draft of her presentation, Jacobs planned to discuss the conceptual reasons behind the failures of project housing. Although she edited much of this out of her final copy, the draft included a critique of eight planning and design theories, outlined in conversation with her housing committee collaborators, that she would make again in Death and Life: the theory of “neat beauty” (large neat buildings, inhuman in scale, surrounded by lots of grass and unused open space); the theory of improvement (that such projects would improve their surroundings); the theory of safety (that closing streets and isolating housing from the street would make them safer); the theory of elevators, aka “streamlined progress” (that using elevators was better than walking up stairs); the theory of rebuilding old community (replacing diverse family types with “homogenous childbearing, acceptably composed families,” eliminating stores, and destroying the “social heart along streets of heterogeneity” to create a “totally new kind of community”); the theory of streamlined recreation (the idea of open space as a quiet oasis and the elimination of the places of “informal non-structural life”—corner stores, sidewalks, stoops, landings, and lobbies); the theory of small sites (the scalar irrelevance of tower schemes to their sites, whether large or small); and the theory of regulations and codes (where “planning [was] almost the same as the final plan,” where rules came first and family, people, and community came last).62
In Jacobs’s presentation, much of this material was refined to a single statement:
The design trouble in East Harlem’s projects goes much deeper than the accommodation of high densities. The trouble is rooted, rather, in public housing’s disregard of the social structure of city neighborhoods, particularly poor neighborhoods. The projects are designed for a kind of sophisticated family individualism, which is beyond the inner resources and the financial resources of their tenants, and which is the opposite of the highly communal and cooperative society among families in the old slums. The projects are designed not to include, but to exclude the constant informal social controls which are needed by every society, including that of the poor.63
Soon after the meeting with the Housing Authority, Jacobs wrote up a press release that spoke of “what can be accomplished when interested citizens and public spirited private specialists take the initiative of cooperating with official agencies toward the solution of a common problem.” In the five-page document, Jacobs outlined the various problems with public housing and noted that the loss of some 2,500 stores and storekeepers in East Harlem due to the housing project clearance had destroyed the vital community role played by the shop owners and their enterprises. Speaking for her committee, she also criticized the federal public housing policy that limited walk-up apartments to three stories, while up to six floors were permitted in the city of New York. Advocating for local decision making and greater housing diversity, she wrote, “We think the walk-up restriction of the federal code is unrealistic; like many federal housing restrictions it has apparently been framed with the ‘average’ city in mind.” Taking a long view to reframe the argument in historical terms, she concluded, “We suspect that future generations of Americans will regard the deliberate deadness of low-income housing as unnecessary and will attempt to introduce into it again the vitality of city neighborhoods. … A project built today will probably stand for sixty or seventy years. Ideas and neighborhoods have changed since 1895 and presumably they will change as much by the year 2025.”64
In April 1959, Forum published an article called “Public Housing … for People,” written by Jacobs’s colleague Richard Miller, about the committee’s proposal for DeWitt Clinton. The article described “the need for overhauling US public housing policies and dropping the shackles and shibboleths that encumber project design.” Illustrated with sketches of Perkins & Will’s scheme and some of the same photographs of Harlem street life used to illustrate Jacobs’s 1956 article “The Missing Link in City Redevelopment,” the article quoted at some length from Jacobs’s press release, referred to Jacobs’s other ideas and writing on the subject (including a nod to Ernest Bohn of Cleveland), and would have had her approval, if not her hand in it. Described as a hypothetical design solution, the article explained that the purpose of the design was to demonstrate the major faults of public housing that could be corrected without a significant change in the number of dwellings provided or cost. Miller noted, however, that the designers could not satisfy the committee’s objectives while simultaneously satisfying “the myriad mandates of setback, interspace, and site-planning which have been heaped upon public housing design by bureaucrat after bureaucrat.” Their violations of the regulations—four-and-a-half-story walk-ups, courtyards, and the provision of retail and workshop space below the ground-level piloti, among others—were therefore described as “premeditated” and the design as something of an act of protest. Miller concluded the article by stating, “Perkins & Will, like many other architectural firms, will not accept actual public housing commissions until design requirements, fee schedules, and contract provisions established by the PHA [Public Housing Administration] in Washington are reformed.”65
Unsurprisingly, the committee’s proposal for DeWitt Clinton was rejected by the Housing Authority, which had little choice but to comply with federal regulations. In her chapter on “salvaging projects” in Death and Life, Jacobs briefly described the proposal, giving full credit to Perkins & Will. She made no reference to her extensive involvement, allowing a paragraph-long anecdote to stand in for, and indeed belie, her direct experience working in public housing regulations and design.66
In the midst of her work in East Harlem, in February 1959, Jacobs wrote her friend Grady Clay a funny letter:
I am now the proud possessor of a hide-out in which to work, just a few short blocks from home. My husband found and rented it for me under false pretenses—that it was for him—because it is in a men’s rooming house. However, the other denizens, who seem to run mostly to musicians and magicians, seem to have accepted my odd presence tolerantly and to have made the further tolerant assumption that I have some sort of relationship with Mr. Jacobs which I do not wish to advertise. I have not disillusioned them. Ah, the city is a wonderful place.67
She also offered some quips about her visit to California, which included San Francisco, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Disneyland. “Los Angeles didn’t surprise me as much as I’d expected,” she wrote, “because I’ve seen so much of it, we all have, in other cities.” But there, she went on, “there’s nothing else but Los Angeles. … A great big bag of sticky hard candy; the more different the pieces try to look, the more the whole bag looks the same. Just the same it interested me tremendously, and so did Disneyland which Catherine Bauer told me not to miss and she was right!”
FIGURE 47. In early January 1959, while at work on Death and Life, Jacobs worked with architects from Perkins & Will and Ellen Lurie and William Kirk from Union Settlement House (Jacobs served as one of its board members) on trying to improve the designs of an East Harlem housing project. Jacobs’s colleague Richard Miller wrote about their unsuccessful proposal in “Public Housing … for People.” AF (Apr. 1959), 134.
Jokes aside, Jacobs was worried about her book. “Despite the hide-out, I am almost two months behind schedule from when I thought I’d be writing, which makes me feel fairly desperate. Now I’m only in the process of sorting out my notes and glop, a vast and gruesome task, but one that I find I can’t evade. Do you think I will ever get this thing done? I’m really dying to start writing although I know that when I do I will frequently wonder why.” Jacobs and Clay’s correspondence continued over the next few months. He provided her with information about Louisville, which found its way into her book, and she praised his “Townscape” columns and encouraged him on his new essay. “It’s great that you’re writing the Horizon piece,” she wrote, “and you will do it much better than I ever possibly could.”68
They traded ideas about street life and safety, and, continuing the discussion, she shared anecdotes about neighborhood parks from her Baltimore friend Penny Kostritsky (later retold in Death and Life) and went on to remark that in rebuilt cities a “buffer principle” was being deployed that was in direct conflict with the fact that strangers are an essential part of daily city life. “The buffer principle—keep the strangers out—seems to be the motif of the rebuilt city generally from Stuyvesant Town on, and it is engendering enormous hostilities and insecurities, not only in New York but also in Chicago, Baltimore (where the Johns Hopkins Title I job has a 9-ft. cyclone fence around it!), and Los Angeles,” she wrote. “Boston will have a lulu with its West End redevelopment because it is built to be unsafe unless the strangers are kept out, although the designers don’t mean it that way. They never do. But that’s what they get.”
Then, in response to questions from Clay’s previous letter, Jacobs went on to explain the evolution of her thinking, saying that she had been shocked at seeing early redevelopment and housing projects when they were completed and that she felt guilty about, and implicated in, having written about them favorably. She related her early experiences in East Harlem with Kirk in much the same way as in the first chapter of Death and Life, but with even more feeling. She told Clay, “I began to see that the most important thing in life in East Harlem was relationships of all kinds among people—that these relationships, many of them very casual, were the means of keeping the peace, of assistance in time of trouble, of squeezing some fun and joy out of the slum, of avenues to opportunity and glimpses of different choices in life, and of any sort of political participation. I saw that many people in East Harlem were of true importance in their circles and had the dignity that comes of having some influence and mastery, however little, on their environment.” In urban renewal projects, she “saw that these relationships were wiped out in the projects, drastically built out of them, and so was the dignity and the responsibility.” From this, she explained, “I began to get a glimmer of the idea that the workings of the city were based on mutual support among a great variety of things, and that this principle was totally missing from the rebuilt city.”69
Jacobs went on at length, discussing the city-hating tradition in “orthodox town planning,” and repeated the half-joking remarks made by planners about the great fire or several hundred sticks of dynamite that would make the work of transforming their cities into suburban shopping centers that much easier. As far as knowledge was concerned—again rehearsing passages from Death and Life—she compared city planning, “and its creatures redevelopment and renewal,” to medical science in the age of bloodletting. “There is no bedrock of knowledge about how the city works, and this leaves even those with affection for the city in a relatively helpless position,” she concluded.
Creating a foundation of knowledge about how the city works was ultimately her mission, but she lacked confidence in her contribution. She explained that the functions of the city—how it was used and how it worked—were her focus and that the lack of knowledge about them in planning literature motivated her. When she wrote in the “Illustrations” page of Death and Life “please look closely at real cities … and think about what you see,” she was describing her own method and experience:
I began getting very curious about how the city worked as well as how it looked. And I’m sorry to say that I got mighty little help from the writings on planning. In fact, the more I looked at how the city worked, the more I saw that a great many of the planning rules were outright hokum, abstractions that had nothing to do with real life. I also became more and more struck with the sheer sentimentality of town planning. I decided the only way to find out what is good planning for the city is to start looking at the city itself, notice what is working well and what is not, and try to find out why, and to forget about the theory because it only stands in the way of seeing, in this case.70
Rebuilding twentieth-century planning theory from the ground up was an ambitious task, and, as the scope of her project grew, Jacobs fell further behind her expectations and into despair about completing the book. She had no hope of finishing it before October 1959, when her grant expired, and she could not afford, and did not want, to lose her job at Architectural Forum. After a lunch with her in June 1959, Gilpatric noted his disappointment. Jacobs had run into many unexpected problems and had completed less writing than he had expected.71
In a letter in July, Jacobs explained two of at least three reasons for her delays. First and foremost, she had overestimated her understanding of the city:
[A]s I proceeded with my research and traveling during the initial months, I found that I needed to go into a good many aspects of the behavior of cities which I had either not previously thought about, or had not understood as significant. For instance, I had given no thought, until I bumped into it hard in the course of my research, to what actually occurs and why when a city area spontaneously unslums itself; I had given very little thought to the intricate connections of city density with city safety and attractiveness, nor to the paradox that decay and over-crowding today are more apt to be associated with relatively low city densities than high ones; I had not realized a good many of the economic ramifications involved in city success and deterioration; on almost everything I had thought about, in fact, I found relationships I had not taken into account but that must be taken into account.72
Second, not only was she learning about her subject as she went, but she was learning how to write such a book. “I did not anticipate the difficulties I was going to get into in organizing and writing. It is far different from writing and organizing articles, and how different I had no conception until I waded in. In retrospect, how over-optimistic I was about the writing! Well, I have been going through considerable trial, error and bafflement, but… I have been learning by doing,” she told him. The transformation from a series of articles to a field-changing book had caught up with her.73
Third, although she didn’t mention this to Gilpatric, some of her time had been consumed with neighborhood projects in East Harlem and Greenwich Village. Robert Moses fought back against the closure of Washington Square to cars with proposals to make Fifth Avenue a one-way street and to widen the roads around the park to facilitate traffic flow toward the southern bridges and tunnels. Jacobs assumed the role of leader of the fight against making Fifth Avenue a one-way. It would not be the only battle she would have while writing the book. Later in the year, she would form the Save the Sidewalks Committee to stop the widening of Hudson Street.74
The good news that she could share with Gilpatric was that she now had a good sense of her project, and she sent him an outline for what she called simply a “book on American cities.” In structure, it had already begun to resemble the four parts and many of the chapters of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It took this form:
1. Introduction
Part I—The Nature of Cities
2. The peculiar jobs of the city street
3. The meaning and uses of city neighborhoods
4. The nature of city parks
5. The uses of variety
6. The uses of concentration
Part II—The Knack of Mutual Support
7. The importance of primary and secondary mixture
8. Incubation of enterprises and culture
9. Physical centers vs. physical edges
10. The pitfalls of too much success
Part III—Decay and Rejuvenation
11. Slumming and unslumming
12. The blight of dullness
13. Gradual money for gradual change
14. Redevelopment—The shook-up city
Part IV—How to Change Our Ways
15. Where and why thinking about cities got off the track
16. Planning by diagnosis
17. Attrition of the automobile
18. Municipal organization for proper planning
19. The basic practical problem—public money vs. flexibility
20. Visual order for the city—its possibilities and limitations
The bad news was that there was much, much more to be done. She had a draft of a number of chapters for part I, but these were going to require extensive rewriting. She still needed to write first drafts of at least fifteen chapters. She would need another year at least and additional foundation support. Her hair was turning white from the stress.
Gilpatric did not reply to Jacobs with much encouragement. “I am reluctant,” he told her, “to take up your request with others until I have something more to show on the content and ideas of your book.” This made her a bit desperate. “Without further help, the problem and decision I will have to face is whether I ought to go back to work at my job for a period of time, probably a year, save up as much as I can and finance as much as possible of the continuation of the book later by this means, or whether I ought to attempt to borrow the necessary money from some source and pay it back in the years after the book is completed,” she explained.75
The idea of postponing the book was almost as repugnant as the idea of abandoning the project, which she had decided she would not do. Her past years of covering urban redevelopment for Forum, her initial research and writing, and her recent fights with City Hall all contributed to her sense of her book’s importance.
“Without wishing to sound immodest about it,” she wrote Gilpatric, “I feel very deeply that it is important for this book to get finished and published, because I think it is needed. City rebuilding, and plans for rebuilding, for renewal, for civic facilities and for traffic and highways are going ahead very fast, to say nothing of the speed with which unplanned development is also occurring.” She explained, “We are copying failure, in new architectural and planning dress, and we are creating city which is, more and more, composed of mutually hostile or non-interacting islands, city which at worst lacks even such primitive necessities as built-in safety for humans from one another in its public spaces, and which at best is inhospitable to urban variety, vitality, and experimentation. We are doing this, not because we have to, but from lack of the understanding required to do better.” The results of current planning theories and practices— homogeneity, insularity, paucity of eyes and activities on the streets, lack of varied and well-designed open spaces, elimination of urban density, and resistance to change, adaptation, variety, vitality, and experimentation— were creating demonstrably unsuccessful cities. The theory needed to change.76
Jacobs explained how she had struggled with understanding the project and her subject matter. She was learning as she wrote. She told Gilpatric, “The necessities of what must be done to the prior work continually come clearer to me, and this is a process which has to be continued through the whole book. … Some of my earlier troubles came from not understanding this, and attempting to do it in article-sized chunks, alternating basic creative writing and organization with rewriting and reorganization. It was a waste and a frustration.” She now knew she needed to work through the whole book and argument because, she explained, “the logic of every part is a portion of the logic of the whole [book], done in the light of the whole.” Ultimately making a case for the foundation’s continued support, she sought to assure Gilpatric that the result would be worth the effort. She knew that she was creating new and important knowledge about city life and design. “If this sounds esoteric or something, and not the way all books are written, which I know, I can only lay it to the fact that this book is neither a retelling in new form of things already said, nor an expansion and enlargement of previously worked out basic ground,” she wrote.
Jacobs’s goal was nothing less than synthesizing a new system of thought about the great city to create a new foundation for the understanding of cities:
In my book, I am not rehashing old material on cities and city planning. I am working with new concepts about the city and its behavior. Many of these concepts are quite radically opposed to those accepted in orthodox and conventional planning theory. I think I am proving the validity of these new concepts and giving evidence, from experience in the city itself, which shows that the alternative to ignoring them is not the rebuilding of some improved type of city but, rather, the social, economic, and visual disintegration of the city. I am trying to get the theory and practice of city planning and design started on a new and different track. … The times, intellectually speaking, are ripe for understanding and accepting these ideas. … My contribution is the organizing of these observations and ideas into workable systems of thought about the city, and in indicating the new aims and tactics which planning must adopt to catalyze constructive and genuinely urban city behavior.
She summed up her argument simply: “This is the kind of thing I am up to, and it is hard work, but I cannot think of anything I could do which might be more useful to my times.”77
In the following weeks, Gilpatric sought renewed support for Jacobs’s project. Holly Whyte wrote Gilpatric a very supportive note on her behalf, stating, “I believe Jane Jacobs has a great contribution to make and quite frankly I was happy to hear that she wants to spend more time on the book. … I wholeheartedly recommend the additional assistance for the extra time she wants to give the book. I believe a great and influential book is in the making.”78
Other letters and comments of support for Jacobs’s continued work on her book came from Kirk, the writer Eric Larrabee, W. N. Seymour (a member of the Committee to Save Washington Square), Charlie Farnsley, and the planner Barclay Jones. Kirk wrote, “Other than Jane Jacobs, there have been few individuals who have been interested or aware of the successes and failures that have accompanied these vast changes [in East Harlem].” Larrabee stated, “She has somehow managed to free herself from the layers of preconception which surround [study of the city], and looks at cities as they are with a clear and sympathetic eye. What she sees is that the city functions in ways we have only dimly begun to understand; and she is making what seems to me a first rate effort to convert her perceptions into usable generalities.” In a related conversation, Farnsley (mentioned in Death and Life’s acknowledgments) congratulated the foundation on its support for “the one promising author on the subject of urban problems,” adding that “Lewis Mumford hates the city while Ms. Jacobs loves it.” Remarking on the impact of Jacobs’s work even before Death and Life was published, Jones, whose research—including attendance at the third Urban Design Conference at Harvard—was also supported by the foundation, observed that the impact of Jacobs’s presentation at the 1956 conference had not been forgotten. He told Gilpatric, “The first question with respect to criticism of current urban design was raised by Jane Jacobs at the first of these conferences. Since that time, an increasing amount of criticism of current urban design has been appearing in both the professional and the popular press. Articles by Jane Jacobs, Grady Clay, William H. Whyte, Jr., Nathan Glazer, and others have all appeared since Mrs. Jacobs’ original speech. The format of this, the third Conference, seems to reflect this growing criticism.”79
The last of these letters had not yet been received when Gilpatric wrote his colleagues a memo approving the extension of Jacobs’s grant to support her book on “ ‘a new system of thought’ for bringing improvement to large cities.” In October 1959, the Rockefeller Foundation renewed her grant until May 1960, allowing her to continue her leave from Architectural Forum, which Haskell also graciously renewed, although she had recently caused him some trouble with remarks in the New York Times. In July, as she was making her renewed case for the importance of her book, she was quoted in an article on slum clearance and housing as saying, “Title I in its very nature is a track for the gravy train. It hands great chunks of the city over to officially anointed barons, makes city rebuilding and city commerce into a monopolistic set-up for the favored few.” After reading this, Haskell told her, “I believe you really should not have sounded off in the New York Times without making a check because you are identified there as an editor of Forum and not as an individual.” He had refrained from commenting himself because Forum’s publisher had indicated that they should tell their own story in the magazine. He explained furthermore, “We don’t see the urban renewal situation as black and white as you do, and are having a meeting today to decide what attitude Forum should take.” But he promised, “I shall keep as quiet as possible around the shop hoping that this one will blow over. … Of course you know I appreciate your having strong concerns and convictions.”80
When Jacobs wrote to Gilpatric later in October 1959 to thank him for his continued support, she was happy to tell him that the writing was going well. “I’m averaging a chapter a week, instead of the slow and discouraging chapter a month of the spring and summer,” she said. However, to others, like her friend Saul Alinsky, who shared with her knowledge about Chicago, she admitted continuing struggles. In correspondence with Alinsky, who was also at work on a book, she wrote, “My problem with the book is not lack of immediacy. It is anything but remote, aloof, etc. from the current political, social and economic fix. You expressed my difficulties exactly when you wrote about your writing problem, ‘I’ve got so damned much to say and everything is so interrelated with everything else.’ Isn’t it the devil!” But she was by this time, in August 1959, cautiously optimistic. “I’ve had fundamental messes of organization that blocked me completely. Now I think I’ve got them combed out (maybe) and have relatively minor messes of organization, but many of them. I’m only half way in the first draft, but think I’m making progress. Still a long way to go, but I can’t imagine stopping. It is like some kind of limbo,” she told him.81
By the time Jacobs’s second grant was about to expire in May 1960—a third grant extension would carry her to May 1961—she had the book’s title and was ready to share a number of chapters with Glazer and Epstein. She told Gilpatric that she was gratified to report that Glazer thought the book would make a real contribution to the understanding of cities. Epstein estimated a publication date of August or September 1961. She tentatively offered a few chapters to Gilpatric as well, with a caveat that still applies to today’s readers: “There are (or I hope there will be) advantages to reading it all at once, for of necessity many avenues of thought get opened up in the early part that must be traveled one by one later on.” Nevertheless, she felt obliged to show him something and offered that “enough is completed to show the general pitch and direction, as the book will not turn into a different kind of book at any point.”82
Two weeks later, Gilpatric replied, “I think the title is excellent and the beginning superb. I was fascinated, exhilarated and informed by Chapter 1.” He also gave her some suggestions, such as using the term “togetherness” less frequently and quoting the first line of E. B. White’s Here Is New York (1949) during her discussion of privacy in cities. His most notable piece of advice, which he repeated when he read the full manuscript in March 1961, was to make the book shorter: “In what follows, there is a great deal of insight and constructive observation but I do have the strong feeling that rewriting in quite a few places, particularly compression, is called for.”83
Jacobs disagreed with some of his comments but noted that others were right as soon as she read them. She also agreed that “the whole thing needs considerable trimming and pruning, which I’ll do at the end, in a good cold-blooded mood. I’m now a little beyond what I think is the halfway mark in pages, a little under it in number of chapters. All the hardest part is done, I believe. A few more months’ work and it should be finished.”84
Jacobs finished the manuscript at the end of January 1961 and returned to Architectural Forum on February 1. In the end, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs’s study of the relation of function to design in large cities, took two years and four months, three times longer than she had expected.
Ultimately, it was a book of twenty-two chapters. Remaining focused on function, Jacobs retitled chapters in Part I to emphasize “use” and split the preliminary chapter on “The Peculiar Jobs of the City Street” into three chapters on “The Uses of Sidewalks.” Other chapters were reordered and a separate chapter on “The Need for Small Blocks” was added, emphasizing the four conditions for city diversity (previously “mutual support”) in Part II. Other chapters were retitled, including “Redevelopment—The Shook-Up City” and “Planning by Diagnosis,” sometimes making less obvious Jacobs’s inspirations and intentions. Perhaps most significant, in her initial conception, the book had concluded with the chapter “Visual Order for the City,” in which she emphasized that a city cannot be a work of art. As Jacobs explained to Gilpatric, “I draw my reasoning on esthetics from reasoning about the structure of cities—I think esthetics ought to express structure and explain order among other things—and structure depends in its turn upon function.” She ultimately summed it up this way: “A city’s very structure consists of mixture of uses, and we get closest to its structural secrets when we deal with the conditions that generate diversity.”85 The final draft, however, had a new concluding chapter, “The Kind of Problem a City Is,” which transcended considerations of the function of design and, with the help of a long extract from an essay by Warren Weaver, the Rockefeller Foundation’s former director of life sciences, proposed a new epistemology and methodology of design and planning. Perhaps including material from the previous chapter 15, “Where and Why Thinking About Cities Got Off the Track,” the new conclusion closed the book by framing the problems and possibilities of cities in an environmental context shaped by the suburban impulse, the sentimentalization of nature, and the destruction of irreplaceable human habitat including the city.
When Gilpatric read the final version, he argued that Jacobs should cut the 669-page manuscript by half. He described the book as “thoughtful and thought-provoking, vividly and constructively concrete (with many illuminating cues to problems of city life and building), powerful in its effect, and most timely.” However, he doubted that it would “hold the interest it should if it remains as long and as discursive as the draft.” Specific suggestions included eliminating much of the anecdotal material that served as data for Jacobs’s theses, in favor of more focus on tactics. He recommended cutting extended references to Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City. Some months earlier, after reading the book, Jacobs had written Gilpatric with enthusiasm about Lynch’s book, the first to emerge from the foundation’s urban design research program, with enthusiasm. She told him that Lynch’s book “is reassuring to me, and I have learned from it too.” She was “fascinated to discover that the five elements of city design he has signaled out— paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks—are the same ones I have figured out as basic for expression of the functional (social and economic) aspects of city order, although I have called them streets, borders, districts, centers of activity, and focus points. … In so many instances, we have gotten to the same place by following entirely different lines of reasoning.” In Death and Life, Jacobs took his suggestion and cut the discussion of Lynch back to three relatively minor references.86
Gilpatric also recommended cutting back on her quotation of Warren Weaver’s essay on complexity science, which served as the keystone for her conclusion, in favor of more criticism. He wrote her, “I was sorry to note that you didn’t include in this chapter a critique of some of the governing images of city organization and physical layout, which are out-dated. This is more than made up, perhaps, by the lambasting you give the Garden City planners and addicts of the Radiant City.”87
No doubt shocked by Gilpatric’s suggestion to cut her book in half, Jacobs did not reply to his letter for some six weeks, by which time the manuscript was being set in type. She told him that she had done some editing, but nowhere near the extent of his suggestions. To do so, she told him, would have “pulled supporting beams out of the structure of the book,” and other readers had confirmed her belief that “the detail, in its cumulative effect, is what makes the book convincing.” She added that “this country is full of digesters, reviewers, and summarizers, and those who do not care to read a book as long as this will get some of the drift of its ideas through those means anyhow.” She concluded by saying that she had edited her quotation of Weaver’s essay from the Rockefeller Foundation’s 1958 Annual Report somewhat but that it was still long enough to require permission to use it.88
Given the intensity of Jacobs’s caustic remarks, it was rather ironic that Gilpatric wanted an even more critical tone, and less emphasis on such theoretical content as Weaver’s essay, although he admitted that her application of complexity science to cities had merit. A serendipitous discovery, Weaver’s essay “Science and Complexity” was published as a modest festschrift, in honor of his retirement from the foundation, in the same volume that reported Jacobs’s first grant for Death and Life. However, the essay ultimately galvanized Jacobs’s ideas about the complexity of the city and provided the theoretical conclusion for the sequential and cumulative observations of the preceding twenty-one chapters. Applying Weaver’s concepts, Jacobs argued that the city was like other living things, a system of interrelated and interdependent variables, or “organized complexity.” In making this leap, she was among the first people to recognize the significance of complexity science outside of scientific circles, and she was perhaps the first person to recognize complexity’s significance to cities.89
The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published on October 1, 1961, but as early as June, Epstein, who was immensely pleased with the book, had arranged for excerpts to be published in various magazines. In September, Haskell published an excerpt in Architectural Forum and welcomed her return to the magazine—which would be brief. She had become an author, fulfilling a childhood ambition to make an important contribution, and already knew that she had other books to write.
Later in October, Jacobs sent Gilpatric a brief note with an attachment, a copy of three blurbs from William Whyte, Harrison Salisbury, and the writer Martin Mayer that praised the book. She thought he would like to see them. “I was naturally very pleased when I saw the comments,” she wrote, “even though I know I’m not as good as that.” She signed off by commenting that she had seen her first review of the book the day before and that she was already getting some less favorable feedback. She wrote, “As an antidote to the praise, I am getting a spate of furiously angry and denunciatory letters from planners and housers who seem to have me tabbed as an irresponsible, if not vicious, demagogue!”90
A different system of thought about great cities had emerged, but it was not the work of a demagogue or an amateur. The Death and Life of Great American Cities was not a book that Jacobs had planned at the outset; she learned about cities by writing it. But she had been writing it for almost thirty years, since her first essays on the city and through her work for Architectural Forum.
