Separate Ways

Happy to have left the rancor of New York behind, Jane Jacobs settled into a cozy redbrick house in a quiet neighborhood on the west side of Toronto in the late summer of 1968. She continued to collect newspaper clippings on the denouement of the Lower Manhattan Expressway battle. She had made a deal with the prosecutor to disentangle herself from charges from the Seward Park High School meeting, pleading guilty to a single charge of disorderly conduct and agreeing to pay $150 in damages to the stenotype owner—though Jacobs maintained she never touched the machine and never saw it damaged. But she had moved on. It would be many years before she would set foot back in New York.

While Jacobs started her new life in Toronto, her fight against the Lower Manhattan Expressway inspired a series of citizen rebellions against highway construction in city neighborhoods across the United States. These “freeway revolts” were led by residents, and sometimes environmental organizations, that pressured politicians to quit building interstates in thickly settled areas, using many of the same tactics that Jacobs had in her campaigns, including filing lawsuits and harnessing the power of the media. In Boston, Governor Francis Sargent abandoned plans for a highway known as the Inner Belt, a bypass for the north-south interstate through downtown that would have run through the heart of several densely populated neighborhoods, and an additional spur known as the Southwest Expressway; the funds for the roadways were diverted to expanding the public transit system. In San Francisco, the freeway revolt not only killed the freeway proposals through the city center but galvanized community groups determined to have a say in all public works and development projects from then on. By 1971, highway construction was being stopped in its tracks in Baltimore, Milwaukee, New Orleans, and Philadelphia. In the years that followed, I-291 and Route 7 in Connecticut, three routes designed by Moses himself in Portland, Oregon, the Somerset Highway in Princeton, New Jersey, and other roadway proposals in Seattle, Detroit, Memphis, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore were all abandoned. A new breed of politicians staked their careers on siding with the anti-freeway movement.

Jacobs herself helped lead a similar rebellion not long after arriving in Toronto. City planners there were promoting a downtown bypass called the Spadina Expressway, which would have run straight through her neighborhood. Like Moses, the officials in Toronto were committed to the project—the first stage had already been rushed into construction—but they seemed to listen, somehow more genuinely than Moses and his colleagues had, to Jacobs and the other neighbors who objected. Jacobs’s reputation may have had something to do with this; city officials knew that this was a woman capable of stopping a highway. Spadina was dropped in 1971, and shortly thereafter Jacobs helped plant grass and shrubs on the flattened earth that had been cleared for the roadway.

In New York, the neighborhoods in the path of the Lower Manhattan Expressway flourished. At the corner of Chrystie and Broome streets at Sara Delano Roosevelt Park, deep underground, the eighty-foot foundation for the project was all that remained. Through the 1980s, all along Broome Street, one of the most remarkable urban success stories of the twentieth century began to take shape: SoHo, with its bistros, art galleries, designer shops, and unfinished loft space that over the years would sell for $1,800 a square foot. No new highway would be built in Manhattan after 1968, not even Westway a proposal to submerge the West Side Highway along the Hudson River from midtown to lower Manhattan, with open space and residential and commercial development on its surface.

Beginning in the 1980s, the movement that Jacobs had set in motion with her victory over Lomex went a step further. Not satisfied with stopping construction of new freeways, planners and community activists sought to tear down the most intrusive roadways that had been pushed through in the Moses era. Boston replaced the Central Artery a hulking elevated structure through the heart of downtown based on the Lomex model, with the $16 billion Big Dig—a mile-long tunnel with thirty acres of green space and civic buildings on top. While the project itself went over budget and had structural problems, real estate values have soared since its completion in 2007, as downtown neighborhoods split apart by the highway were reunited. Other cities have dismantled inner-city expressways without replacing them at all. The Embarcadero viaduct along the waterfront in San Francisco, damaged in the 1989 earthquake, was hauled away to make way for a surface boulevard with a trolley line. Portland, Oregon, erased a freeway through its downtown. Milwaukee, Denver, Baltimore, and Buffalo all dismantled major city roadways. In Seattle, the People’s Waterfront Coalition, led by a young activist named Cary Moon who said she modeled herself after Jacobs, has for years campaigned to tear down the Alaskan Way Viaduct along that city’s waterfront—a double-decked structure at the base of a steep hill that is also in danger of collapsing in an earthquake—and replace it with a surface boulevard with transit. And in New York, neighborhood groups have clamored for the demolition of two Moses roadways—the Bruckner and Sheridan expressways—to be replaced by parks, a simple surface road with bike paths and sidewalks, affordable housing, and eco-friendly businesses.

Jacobs’s then-radical argument against the Lower Manhattan Expressway—that building new highways just invites more traffic that quickly fills the lanes to capacity—is now widely accepted, and known as the phenomenon of “induced demand.” Transportation planning in the United States is slowly but surely coming around to this view—that the country has built enough new highways, not only in cities but in the countryside. More politicians are seeking to shift federal funding to transit, streetcars, and high-speed rail, for a more balanced transportation system. Light-rail systems are now being expanded in some unlikely places: Dallas, Phoenix, Minneapolis, and Denver.

Even in Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has given up on bumper-to-bumper freeways and started exploring whether well-designed surface boulevards could handle both local traffic and commuters. In other places, a more dramatic step has signaled the end of the automobile era in cities. London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, imposed a $16 charge for private cars entering the city center, enforced by a system of transponders and cameras; city officials say chronic gridlock is a thing of the past. New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, proposed a similar plan, to charge drivers $9 to enter Manhattan below Eighty-sixth Street.

In Toronto, Jacobs was finally able to complete the book delayed by her citizen activism in New York, The Economy of Cities. “I resent,” Jane said, “the time I’ve had to spend on these civic battles. The new book was begun two years later than it should have been because of [the Lower Manhattan Expressway] and the urban renewal fight in [the] West Village. It’s a terrible imposition when the city threatens its citizens in such a way that they can’t finish their work.”

The Economy of Cities was published in 1969 as the Lomex plan was being shelved. The books that followed—Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), Systems of Survival (1992), The Nature of Economies (2000), the last a conversation over coffee by five fictional characters—all focused on how cities function as economies. Jacobs had begun to see links between the order of the natural world and man-made systems, and how dynamic order emerged spontaneously from many individual decisions. Her belief that planning required flexibility and a light touch was bolstered by a growing fascination with chaos theory and fractals, and a theory of systems that put a premium on diversity over uniformity. She pursued these sophisticated ideas while remaining outside any kind of traditional academic setting.

Jacobs returned to the United States to plug the new books, right up to her last—the foreboding Dark Age Ahead (2004), a prediction that North American culture would deteriorate and implode, in part brought on by a burst housing bubble. She also wrote a book on the Quebec secession movement and, finally, chronicled the life of her great-aunt Hannah Breece, who taught on the islands off the Alaskan coast, in A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska. None of the books were blockbusters like The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and Jacobs began to chafe when the questions inexorably led back to her days among the bohemians in Greenwich Village, fighting the New York battles—as if she were a rock singer constantly being asked to play an old hit.

Yet the book’s influence was undeniable for a new generation of citizen activists, students—who viewed her as a kind of folk hero—and city planners. Activists in cities across the United States modeled themselves after Jacobs, acting as watchdogs over local government and demanding to be heard on everything from street-corner wastebaskets to the shadows cast by proposed skyscrapers. The Death and Life of Great American Cities became a standard text at colleges and universities, architecture and planning schools, and a generation of planners, architects, and elected officials based their careers on the principles of urbanism Jacobs set forth in the book.

A roommate at Yale gave Alexander Garvin, a prominent planner and designer in New York City today, a copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities around Christmastime in 1961. “It changed my life,” he said. “There’s nobody that I know in the business of cities who hasn’t been inspired by her,” said Susan Zielinski, a transportation planner. “It was not only us kindred spirits. She held up at every level, including among a lot of people at Harvard who she challenged.”

The Harvard professor James Stockard recalled how he got a call from a young man who had gone through the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, saying the mayor of Salt Lake City wanted him to be chief planner. He was worried, as he had no formal training in urban planning. “Do you own a copy of Death and Life?” Stockard asked him, and the answer was yes. “That’s all you need to know.”

Though the planning profession balked initially, the Jacobs principles are now the foundation of its professional guidelines. The American Planning Association, or APA, the earlier version of which recoiled at Jacobs, now has as its goals “safe, attractive, and healthy neighborhoods, affordable housing, and accessible, efficient, and environmentally friendly transportation.” Urban renewal and top-down redevelopment schemes are viewed as the shameful past; the APA’s motto is “making great communities happen.” The Congress for the New Urbanism, a group of architects and planners who argue for traditional town planning and compact, mixed-use neighborhoods, often cites Jacobs as an inspiration for the group’s efforts to reform zoning and combat sprawl. The principles of the related “smart growth” movement echo Jacobs’s call to redevelop buildings and establish lively, transit-accessible, and pedestrian-friendly places. Developers, as well, have embraced the Jacobs principles with a vengeance, as any glance at an issue of Urban Land magazine, a publication of the Urban Land Institute, will attest. Even corporate home builders are beginning to shift from single-family-home subdivisions to more urban environments; Toll Brothers has turned to projects in Manhattan and Hoboken, New Jersey, and other builders, such as Pulte Homes, have thrown investments into denser developments.

The business of development in the United States has changed completely as a result of Jacobs’s work. Builders and local government officials alike defer to the concerns of the neighborhood, involving the community in every step of the process. They offer “community benefit agreements,” including parks, affordable housing, day-care centers, and other amenities. They live in fear of being viewed as riding roughshod over citizens.

In the 1990s, planners at municipal housing authorities and at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development came around to Jacobs’s view that big public housing projects weren’t working. Some, like the Robert Taylor complex in Chicago and Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, have been torn down and replaced by Greenwich Village–style streetscapes of smaller individual homes with front porches. Cities are revisiting the landscapes of 1950s-and 1960s-style urban renewal and working on plans to fill in windswept plazas with more activity. The Jacobs theory promoting “eyes on the street”—the creation of safe, active neighborhoods with plenty of opportunities for people to monitor goings-on—has become not only a standard in urban design but accepted practice in crime fighting and community policing. Historic preservation and “adaptive reuse”—turning old buildings such as factories into condominiums or office space—became a bedrock policy in American cities. Everything from the design of workplaces to social media—the online networks of Facebook, YouTube, and open-source software—owes a debt to Jacobs and her original analysis of how decentralized, diverse, and ground-up systems function best.

Robert Moses, meanwhile, has been inexorably cast in the role of villain. After losing the Lomex battle, he was relegated to the sidelines in New York City politics and planning, retaining only the title of consultant for the new Metropolitan Transportation Authority. His urban renewal, highway, and housing programs had failed to stem the decline of the city, which veered into bankruptcy. In 1975, Mayor Abraham Beame, stared down by banks who refused to lend the city any more money had to ask the federal government for a bailout; President Gerald Ford rebuffed the request, prompting the infamous New York Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The arson fires raged in the South Bronx. While the suburbs boomed, New York City’s poor, immigrants, and people of color faced crumbling services and rising crime as the last vestiges of a once-thriving manufacturing economy disappeared. This was the fate of the city that Moses so desperately sought to avoid.

At a ceremony at Lincoln Center for the opening of Fordham University’s Manhattan campus in 1970, Moses, then eighty-one, was honored with a bust plaque engraved with the words “Robert Moses: Friend of Fordham, Master Builder.” His eyes welled up in tears. But the glory days were over. The biography that would destroy his reputation was in the works. Robert A. Caro, a young reporter on the Long Island newspaper Newsday, had become curious about Moses after covering the 1964 World’s Fair and began researching a book on him. The resulting project took Caro seven years to complete.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York was a devastating prosecutorial brief, detailing an obsession with power, ruthless evictions of the poor and people of color, manipulations of the legal and legislative process, misuse of eminent domain, cronyism, patronage, corruption, and insider contractor and developer deals. Coming out in 1974, right at the time of Watergate, The Power Broker inspired legions of journalists and politicians to root out backroom deals and secret financial negotiations. Robert Moses became the classic case study for the abuse of power.

Jane Jacobs was an important source for the book, but she is not mentioned once in its pages. Though there was an entire chapter on Jacobs in the original manuscript, it had to be cut, along with others on the New York Port Authority and the City Planning Commission and detail on the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers, because the doorstop-size book had grown too large by hundreds of pages.

Not until the publisher sent Jacobs the bound page proofs of The Power Broker did she realize the full weight of the nemesis she had battled.

“Bob is reading one of them while I am reading the other. We lie in bed at night, propped up under the reading light with our twin volumes and Jimmy says the sight is hilarious,” she wrote to her mother.

Well, we always knew Moses was an awful man, doing awful things, but even so this book is a shocking revelation. He was much worse than we had even imagined. I am beginning to think he was not quite sane. The things he did—the corruption, the brutality, the sheer seizure and misuse of power—make Watergate seem rather tame. I think the big difference is, the press did not expose Moses, in fact (particularly the New York Times) aided and abetted him in every way, so that he got away with his outrages and kept building upon them further for thirty years before there was any public exposure of what his victims, of course, knew only too well …

Exposure is the only defense of the people against such tyranny and lawlessness. I wonder whether it teaches any lessons for the future. Doubtful, but I hope so.

Moses, of course, was unable to stop the publication of The Power Broker, and instead issued rebuttals of selected charges. It was obvious, he said, that his opponents were coming out of the woodwork to vilify him. In a response to Caro, Moses seems to have Jacobs in mind: “The current fiction is that any overnight ersatz bagel and lox and boardwalk merchant, any down-to-earth commentator or barfly, any busy housewife who gets her expertise from newspaper, television, radio, and telephone is ipso facto endowed to plan in detail a huge metropolitan arterial complex good for a century,” he said. “Anyone in public works is bound to be a target for charges of arbitrary administration and power broking leveled by critics who never had responsibility for building anything … I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without moving people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs.”

After the failure of the Lomex project, his demotion, and the publication of The Power Broker, Moses spent his final years in virtual exile. He and his second wife maintained the residence at Gracie Terrace in Manhattan, but spent much more time in Babylon. Their Long Island home was close to Robert Moses State Park and to the harbor on Great South Bay, where there is a clear view of the Robert Moses Causeway leading to Fire Island. To be closer to the ocean, Moses rented cottages at Oak Beach and Gilgo Beach nearby.

“He loved it down here,” a neighbor said. “He could see his bridge and his park from here. He was still alive and had something to remember.”

On the afternoon of July 28, 1981, at the cottage at Gilgo Beach, Moses felt chest pains and was taken to the Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip, Long Island. He died of heart failure the next day, at the age of ninety-two. Remarkably, the man who had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on public construction projects in New York State had less than $50,000 in assets when he died. His pursuit of power and eagerness to get things clearly did not include the goal of building his own personal wealth.

For a man so determined to see things go his way, Moses would be appalled that his approach to urban planning is now seen as the model of how not to build a city. His entire career, built on energy, ambition, and single-minded pursuit of power, has been repudiated. Since his death, American cities have spent most of their time trying to correct the mistakes of the Moses era; even his great triumph, Lincoln Center, is today undergoing a much-needed rehabilitation in order to better accommodate pedestrians.

In recent years, however, the Moses legacy has been reconsidered. It was Herbert Kaufman, a political science scholar, who in 1975 first suggested that the Caro critique was overblown, though his claim garnered little attention. Alex Krieger, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, lectured in 2000 that while history has taken a dim view of Moses’s tactics, cities everywhere are in need of reliable infrastructure—and with citizens continually blocking cities’ efforts, it was difficult to get even the most necessary projects passed. In 2006, the New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff suggested that the planning profession had become obsessed with fine-grained, tree-lined blocks, at the expense of the things that actually make cities function. “Today, the pendulum of opinion has swung so far in favor of Ms. Jacobs that it has distorted the public’s understanding of urban planning. As we mourn her death, we may want to mourn a bit for Mr. Moses as well,” he wrote. Moses’s vision, he said, however flawed, represented “an America that still believed a healthy government would provide the infrastructure—roads, parks, bridges—that binds us into a nation. Ms. Jacobs, at her best, was fighting to preserve the more delicate bonds that tie us to a community. A city, to survive and flourish, needs both perspectives.”

Among government, business, and civic leaders in New York who have been frustrated by what they see as paralysis, there has even been talk of the need for a new Robert Moses, to supply basic infrastructure and the big projects needed to propel the city as a competitive economic center for the twenty-first century. Projects on the scale of those of Moses could not take place today as the kind of thoughtful citizen involvement Jacobs envisioned has evolved into mere NIMBYism—the protest of “not in my backyard.” Citizen opposition now brings even modest projects to a grinding halt. The proposed rehabilitation of an abandoned factory building, a housing complex on a vacant parcel, the development of a parking lot near a transit station, the slightest modification of a structure deemed historically significant—all evaporate before the all-powerful neighborhood residents, who seek conditions to stay exactly as they are and reward politicians who agree with them. To some, New York risks becoming a city preserved and unchanged, as if under glass. In Boston, Mayor Thomas Menino complained that citizen veto power had made some neighborhoods go “BANANAs—build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything.”

In the winter of 2007, Columbia University, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Queens Museum of Art put on Robert Moses and the Modern City, a series of exhibits reevaluating the Moses legacy. The basis for the exhibits was to remind visitors of Moses’s less sinister motivations—his determination to save the city, and his dedication to its health. Contributing scholars went so far as to say that the Cross Bronx Expressway wasn’t so devastating, and couldn’t be blamed for being the direct cause of the decline of the South Bronx.

The retrospective on Moses’s efforts in public housing also underscored something that Jacobs never fully addressed: gentrification. Her prescription for “unslumming” run-down areas and the improvements in the West Village were not easily duplicated on a broad scale, and in many cases what she called “oversuccess”—or gentrification—took over. Her goal was to incorporate affordable housing into existing neighborhoods, without warehousing the poor in giant towers, but urban neighborhoods have become so wildly popular that only the wealthy—and predominantly white—can afford to live there. Parts of New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco have become every bit as exclusive as wealthy suburban enclaves, if not more so. Cafés and art galleries have replaced hardware stores and Laundromats.

The gentrification saga repeats itself over and over: first come artists seeking undiscovered and affordable digs, then architects and designers, then the young professionals, and then the celebrities and retiring baby boomers. When the Jacobses paid $7,000 for 555 Hudson Street in 1947, they were pioneers helping to save a neighborhood from being designated a slum. Today, the process has been honed by young urbanites and savvy developers, who transform forlorn blocks into ritzy enclaves seemingly in a matter of weeks. In contrast to the bagpiper or the friendly shopkeeper in Jacobs’s time, today fashion designers, actors, supermodels, and NFL quarterbacks prowl the streets of Greenwich Village.

Jacobs anticipated gentrification in her efforts to build the West Village Houses, a project that presaged today’s neighborhood-based community development approach. The “windbreaks” against rapidly rising real estate values she envisioned are today embodied in policies such as “inclusionary zoning,” where local governments require that new residential development be 10 or 15 percent affordable. Another innovation is the community land trust, where a nonprofit organization buys land and sells homes based only on the cost of the structure, exclusive of the plots they sit on; buyers are restricted from making a big profit if they sell, which has the effect of keeping the affordability perpetual. If Jacobs were building the West Village Houses today, chances are she would have tried to make the project a community land trust.

Jacobs was convinced the city was the best possible place for people to live, and in many ways gentrification proved her right. She argued that the problem was a matter of supply and demand—that there weren’t enough urban neighborhoods, and if they were as ubiquitous as suburban sprawl, they wouldn’t be such a precious commodity, and prices would come down.

On this point, Moses and Jacobs actually agreed: cities needed to be flooded with as much new housing as possible, made available to the broadest range of incomes as possible. They disagreed on the form that housing should take, but Moses was, in the end, trying to rebuild the city so more people could live and work there. He appreciated the mix of uses that Jacobs advocated, and spoke harshly of the “dormitories” of the suburbs. Some of his housing projects—Kips Bay, Chatham Towers, Lenox Terrace, even, some would say, Washington Square Village—have endured today as successful urban places. His beaches, parks, and public pools remain important elements of what makes New York City livable. His methods, and the failures of the worst towers-in-the-park redevelopments, have overshadowed the legacy of effective city building.

Moses was, as well, a product of his time. Many other cities were engaged just as enthusiastically—and in some cases more destructively—in urban renewal and highway building. After World War II, accommodating the car seemed like the sensible course for urban planners everywhere. The environmental and energy challenges of the twenty-first century are very different. Had Moses been in charge of building the world’s greatest transit system, he would be cheered today no matter how many people he had uprooted.

Toward the end of her life, Jacobs was constantly asked to accept honorary degrees, but always refused—even after forty-five minutes of urging and cajoling by the president of Harvard. She did accept the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture, awarded at the University of Virginia, in 1996. “I accepted it because it wasn’t an honorary degree, so it’s not a credential,” she said. Her father, the first in the family to attend college, was a UVA alumnus. At the reception, Jane and Bob were photographed sitting on a bench, with a cane at their side.

Bob died of lung cancer a year later at the age of seventy-nine. Without her lifelong partner, Jacobs lived alone in Toronto, agreeing to the occasional interview but never authorizing a biography.

In her last years in Toronto, Jacobs tended to her garden and found more time to enjoy cooking and baking, delighting in such concoctions as a loaf of bread in the shape of a turkey, adventurous entrées such as wild boar, and crab-apple, pecan, and pumpkin pies. She cultivated sweet peas and tomato plants in the backyard and watched as the crocuses poked up in the spring, alongside her mail-house orders of bulbs and herbs, with black squirrels racing all around. She began to compost the needles of Christmas trees—hers and her neighbors’—after learning of the practice from her daughter, Mary, who had moved to British Columbia. Jacobs’s son Jim, an inventor and physicist, married and settled in Toronto. Her second son, Ned, married and moved to Vancouver, where he is an activist in urban redevelopment like his mother, and a musician.

Jacobs had removed some interior walls on the first floor of the Toronto house so the living room, dining room, and kitchen formed one big space, just as at 555 Hudson Street. The walls, lined with books, were painted in the bright colors of the early 1970s; she kept a Native American breastplate by the bay window, and the dining room tablecloth was an aboriginal print, with a big globe-shaped paper chandelier overhead. Family photographs and drawings by her daughter were all around. A stranger watching her emerge from the front porch of the ivy-covered brick row house would see just another retiree on her way to the farmers’ market.

She was selective in her public appearances, but always drew big crowds. At a forum held by Boston College Law School in 2000, Jacobs took questions from the audience, some of whom spoke with such care and awe to suggest they were addressing the pope. “I know a lot of planners and people who I challenged did take it personally as if I were just having fun kicking them,” she said when asked about her battles. Cities on the whole, she added, were “doing much, much better. Cities are beginning to heal themselves … [to] get back their old pizzazz.” The audience hung on every word.

Those gathered at Boston College, where Jacobs’s papers are archived, had good reason to pay attention to what she said about how cities work. Through the 1980s and 1990s, America had rediscovered the charm and utility of its cities. Young professionals and retiring baby boomers had flocked to urban neighborhoods, enjoying the density and activity and mix of amenities that Jacobs espoused. As the twentieth century came to a close, cities across the country sought to replicate Greenwich Village and SoHo in old districts of warehouses and brownstones, from LoDo in Denver to Belltown in Seattle to the Mission in San Francisco and the South End in Boston.

City living is increasingly recognized for its health benefits, another idea that Jacobs introduced. When city officials balked at the lack of elevators in the West Village Houses, Jacobs responded by suggesting that it was great exercise to use the stairs. One resident said walking up five flights every day kept her seventy-seven-year-old husband fit and trim and “great in bed.” Studies have shown that urban dwellers who walk or bike and take transit, instead of sitting behind the wheel of a car for every errand and commute to work, aren’t as heavy as their suburban counterparts.

The value of local businesses and a local economy, a bedrock theme in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is also at a premium. The local food movement emphasizes the availability of locally produced food that does not travel thousands of miles to big supermarkets and restaurants. “Locavore” was the word of the year for the New Oxford American Dictionary in 2007, and many cities have “buy local” programs supporting small, family-run businesses in their downtowns to help them compete against suburban shopping malls and chain stores. As gasoline prices increase, the notion of a self-contained neighborhood, with the needs of life within a few blocks, has grown in appeal.

Cities are also increasingly seen as an answer to the challenge of climate change. They are dense and have transit; if their buildings can become more energy efficient, they represent the potential for the greenest form of human settlement, and compared with suburban sprawl can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Manhattanites, on a per capita basis, consume less energy than anywhere else in the country. In the context of the planetary emergency cited by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, cities play a major role—and Jacobs provided the owner’s manual for how they function best.

On April 25, 2006, Jacobs was taken to a Toronto hospital after suffering what appeared to be a stroke. She died two weeks shy of turning ninety, having struggled with health problems all the previous year.

After that sad spring day in Toronto, with Jacobs no longer able to veto them, the honors came bursting forth. Some of them would surely have made her chuckle. At the Silverleaf Tavern on Thirty-eighth Street in Manhattan, bartenders christened a drink called the Jane Jacobs—a blend of Hendricks gin, elder-flower syrup, a dash of orange bitters, and sparkling wine. On May 24, 2006, a dozen women gathered under the arch at Washington Square Park in a knitting circle in her honor, and every year on the anniversary of her death others gather at the White Horse Tavern to celebrate her work on behalf of the West Village. At the Congress for the New Urbanism’s annual convention in 2006, two thousand people gathered for a moment of silence in her memory.

New York City’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, proclaimed June 28, 2006, as Jane Jacobs Day. In Toronto, organizers started the annual Jane Jacobs Walk through the most cozy, tight-knit neighborhoods of the city. The American Planning Association issued the National Planning Excellence Award for Innovation in Neighborhood Planning in honor of Jane Jacobs. The Jane Jacobs Medal, awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Municipal Art Society, recognizes “visionary work in building a more diverse, dynamic and equitable city through creative uses of the urban environment… whose accomplishments represent Jacobsean principles and practices in action in New York City.” The first recipients were the organizers of a farmers’ market and an effort to recycle waste from waste transfer stations in the Bronx.

The local community board in Greenwich Village accepted petitions to call the stretch of Hudson Street from Eleventh Street to Perry Street Jane Jacobs Way and to rename Bleecker Playground Jane Jacobs Park. While the street sign was uncontroversial, the latter proposal has met resistance from some modern-day mothers—in perhaps an even better preservation of her legacy—who worry that children will be confused if the name is changed.

The girl from Scranton stood up to Moses and challenged the status quo. Now virtually all those engaged in city building follow her rules. Her triumphs are engraved in the protocols followed by developers, city officials, and advocacy and grassroots organizations, and copies of The Death and Life of Great American Cities sit on the shelves of the planning offices at city halls across the country.

The morning after Jane Jacobs died, the owner of the Art of Cooking, the housewares store occupying 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, went to unlock the door and open for business. She found bouquets of lilies and daisies at the doorstep, and an unsigned note: “From this house, in 1961, a housewife changed the world.”