Jane Jacobs

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Jane Jacobs (née Butzner) was an American-Canadian journalist, novelist, and feminist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics from May 4, 1916 to April 25, 2006.

In particular, Robert Moses' proposal to renovate her own Greenwich Village neighborhood sparked controversy.

She was instrumental in the eventual demise of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have passed directly through SoHo and Little Italy.

At a public hearing on the scheme in 1968, she was arrested for inciting a crowd.

Jacobs was both a mother and a writer who sluggishly critiqued experts in the male-dominated field of urban planning in Toronto, and under construction.

She was first described as a housewife.

She did not have a college degree or formal education in urban planning, and her lack of credentials was the object of suspicion.

Early years

Jane Isabel Butzner, a mother and nurse, and John Decker Butzner, a doctor, was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. They were a Christian family in a predominantly Roman Catholic parish. John Decker Butzner, Jr., her brother, served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. She spent a year as the unpaid assistant to Scranton's women's page editor for Scranton High School after graduating from Scranton High School.

Betty and her sister Betty moved to New York City in 1935, during the Great Depression. Jane Butzner took an immediate liking to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, which deviated some from the city's grid system. The sisters were able to relocate from Brooklyn shortly.

Jacobs served in a variety of capacities as a stenographer and freelance writer, writing about working districts in the city from the beginning. "These experiences gave me more of a sense of what was going on in the city and what company looked like, as well as what jobs looked like, what work was like," she later explained. As a secretary and then an editor, she worked for a trade journal. She sold articles to the Sunday Herald Tribune, Cue magazine, and Vogue.

She attended Columbia University's School of General Studies for two years, taking courses in geology, zoology, law, political science, and economics. She spoke about the freedom to pursue research that suited her numerous interests:

Life in Toronto

Jacobs migrated to Toronto shortly after her capture in 1968, settling at 69 Albany Avenue in The Annex from 1971 to her death in 2006. She left the United States in part because she opposed the Vietnam War, she was worried about the fate of her two draft-age sons, and she did not want to continue fighting the New York City government. She and her husband stayed in Toronto because it was convenient and provided work opportunities, and they moved to a part of Toronto that had so many Americans avoiding the draft that it was dubbed the "American ghetto."

She soared to fame in her new neighborhood and helped with the construction of the Spadina Expressway. A common thread of her work was to ask whether towns were built for people or for cars. At protests, she was arrested twice. She also had a huge influence on the revitalization of the St. Lawrence neighborhood, which was also a huge success. She became a Canadian citizen in 1974 and later told writer James Howard Kunstler that dual citizenship was not possible at the time, implying that her US citizenship had been lost.

In her book, The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle for Separation, she gave a more urban perspective on Quebec's sovereignty. Jacobs was a fan of the partition of Toronto from Ontario. "Cities, to flourish in the twentieth century, must distinguish themselves politically from their immediate areas," Jacobs said.

In 1996, she was selected to be an Officer of the Order of Canada because of her seminal writings and thought-provoking urban development. In 2002, the American Sociological Association's community and urban sociology branch honoured her with the Outstanding Lifetime Contribution award. "Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter" was sponsored by the city council of Toronto in 1997, which culminated in the publication of a book of the same name. The Jane Jacobs Prize was established at the end of the conference. It requires a stipend of $5,000 for three years to be given to "celebrate Toronto's original, unsung heroes" by seeking out people who are involved in activities that contribute to the city's vitality.

Jacobs never shied away from expressing her political support for specific candidates. She condemned the merger of the cities of Metro Toronto in 1997, fearing that individual communities would have less power with the new architecture. She backed Tooker Gomberg, a candidate who lost Toronto's 2000 mayoralty race, and she was an advisor to David Miller's resurgent mayoral bid in 2003, at a time when he was seen as a long shot. Jacobs also campaigned against the construction of a bridge that would connect the city waterfront to Toronto City Centre Airport during the mayoral election (TCCA). Following the election, the Toronto city council's earlier decision to approve the bridge was reversed, and the bridge building process was suspended. The ferry service was upgraded by TCCA, but the airport was still in service as of 2019. In lieu of the bridge, a pedestrian tunnel was built in March 2012. On July 30, 2015, the tunnel opened.

Jacobs was also involved in a protest against Royal St. George's College's (an established school very close to the Jacobs residence in Toronto's Annex district)'s proposal to reconfigure its facilities. Jacobs recommended that the redesign be suspended, but that the school be barred from the neighborhood completely. Despite the fact that Toronto council initially opposed the school's proposals, the decision was later reversed – and the Ontario Municipal Board approved the scheme later when opponents failed to provide credible witnesses and threatened to withdraw from the case after the hearing.

She also had a hand in Vancouver's urban planning. Jacobs has been dubbed "the mother of Vancouverism," referring to the city's use of her "density done well" philosophy.

Jacobs died in Toronto Western Hospital, aged 89, on April 25, 2006, apparently from a stroke. She was aided by her brother, James Butzner (d. 2009), a niece, Burgin Jacobs, her sons, James and Ned of Vancouver, and two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. "What's important is not that she died, but that she lived," her family's statement said, and that her life's work has influenced the way we think. Please support her by reading her books and implementing her suggestions."

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Career

Butzner, who worked at Columbia University's School of General Studies for two years, accepted a job at Iron Age magazine. Her 1943 essay on Scranton's economic decline was widely circulated, and the Murray Corporation of America recommended that a warplane factory be established there. Butzner, encouraged by this achievement, petitioned the War Production Board to fund additional Scranton operations. She has also advocated for equal pay for women and the right of employees to unionize in an era of workplace discrimination.

She was first a staff writer for the Office of War Information and then a reporter for Amerika, a Russian-language newsletter published by the US State Department. Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr., a Columbia-educated architect who was designing warplanes for Grumman, came to visit her while working there. They married in 1944. They had a daughter, Burgin, and two sons, James and Ned, as a family unit. At 555 Hudson Street, they purchased a three-story building. After the war, Jane continued to write for Amerika, while Robert left Grumman and resumed work as an architect.

The Jacobs branded the rapidly rising suburbs as "parasitic," opting to remain in Greenwich Village. They renovated their house in the middle of a mixed residential and commercial neighborhood, as well as a planting in the backyard.

In her foreword to her answer, she said:

Jacobs left Amerika in 1952 when it announced its relocation to Washington, D.C., where it was later hired as an associate editor. After early success in the position, Jacobs began to work on urban planning and "urban blight" as a result. She was sent in 1954 to cover a building in Philadelphia by Edmund Bacon. Although her editors aspired to a good news, Jacobs sluggishly dismissed Bacon's proposal, pointing to the lack of concern for the poor African Americans who were directly affected. When Bacon showed Jacobs examples of undeveloped and mature blocks, she found that "development" seemed to have brought an end to street life. As Jacobs returned to the Architectural Forum's headquarters, she began to question the 1950s' urban planning consensus.

Jacobs met William Kirk, an Episcopal minister who worked in East Harlem, in 1955. Kirk arrived at the Architectural Forum to discuss the effects that "revitalization" had on East Harlem, as well as Jacobs' visit to the neighborhood.

Jacobs gave a lecture at Harvard University in 1956, while standing in for Douglas Haskell of the Architectural Forum. When speaking on the issue of East Harlem, she spoke to leading architects, urban planners, and intellectuals (including Lewis Mumford). "Respect, in the truest sense, strips of chaos that have a strange sense of their own that has not yet embedded in our urban order model," she urged this audience. The talk, contrary to her hopes, was welcomed with enthusiasm, but it also placed her as a threat to established urban planners, real estate owners, and developers. The Architectural Forum published the address that year, as well as photographs of East Harlem.

William H. Whyte invited Jacobs to write an article for Fortune magazine after reading her Harvard address. "Downtown Is for People" was the resulting piece that appeared in a 1958 issue of Fortune, marking her first public critique of Robert Moses. At the Architectural Forum and Fortune, her critique of the Lincoln Center was not well-received by urban renewal campaigners. C.D. "Who is this crazy dame?" Fortune's publisher, Peter Jackson, was outraged and over the phone.

Chadbourne Gilpatric, then assistant director of the Humanities Division at the Rockefeller Foundation, was dragged to Jacobs by Fortune's cover story. The foundation had pushed into urban areas with a recent award to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for urban aesthetics research that would result in Kevin A. Lynch's City of the City's publication. Gilpatric invited Jacobs to begin reviewing grant proposals in May 1958. The Rockefeller Foundation gave Jacobs a grant to conduct an independent study of urban planning and urban life in the United States later this year. (Jacobe to the late 1960s: Jacobs was the first known grantee.) Jacobs was encouraged by Gilpatric to "explor[e] the field of urban design in the hopes of finding answers and actions that may help with city planning to enhance urban life, as well as cultural and human value." She spent three years researching and writing drafts for The New School, which is now known as The New School for Social Research. The result: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a Random House publication, was released in 1961.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities is one of the most influential books in the history of American city planning. "Social capital," "mixed primary uses," and "eyes on the street" were popular in urban planning, sociology, and several other fields. She coined the phrase "social capital." Jacobs painted a grim image of urban planning as a pseudoscience, referring to the profession as a pseudoscience. This angered the male-dominated urban planning profession. Jacobs was chastised for ad hominem attacks, as a "militant dame" and a "housewife": an amateur who had no right to interfere with an established rule. Jacobs' book was described by one planner as "bitter coffee-house rambling." "Intemperate and also libelous," Robert Moses wrote of it. "Sell this garbage to someone else." Later, Jacobs was chastised from the left for leaving out race and openly endorsing gentrification, which Jacobs referred to as "unslumming."

In 1962, she resigned from Architectural Forum to become a full-time writer and concentrate on raising her children. In other political roles, she marched on the Pentagon in October 1967 and sluggishly condemned the World Trade Center's construction as a tragedy for Manhattan's waterfront.

Her home neighborhood of Greenwich Village was being reimagined by city and state efforts to build housing (see, for example, Jacobs' 1961 attempt to build the West Village Houses in place of large apartment buildings), private developers, the expansion of New York University, and Robert Moses' urban renewal efforts. Several blocks were demolished and replaced with modern high-rises under Moses' initiative, which was funded as "slum clearance" under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949. The initiative forced 132 families out of their homes and displaced 1,000 small businesses, and the result was Washington Square Village.

Moses had suggested that Fifth Avenue be extended through Washington Square Park in 1935 as part of his efforts to revitalize the area. Moses had shelved the scheme in the face of community resistance but it was revived in the 1950s. Moses argued that the Fifth Avenue extension would improve the traffic flow through the neighborhood and provide access to the planned Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), which will connect the Manhattan Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge to the Holland Tunnel.

Shirley Hayes, a local activist, founded the "Committee to Save Washington Square Park," a coalition of hundreds of local community organizations that oppose the highway expansion. Raymond S. Rubinow took over the company, renaming it the "Joint Emergency Committee" to "Close Washington Square to Traffic." Jacobs had served on the committee under Hayes, but she had a more prominent role under Rubinow, reaching out to media outlets like The Village Voice, which had more sympathetic coverage than The New York Times. Margaret Mead, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lewis Mumford, Charles Abrams, and William H. Whyte, as well as Carmine De Sapio, a Greenwich Village resident and influential Democratic leader, received the committee's support. De Sapio's presence was decisive. The city closed Washington Square Park to traffic on June 25, 1958, and the joint committee held a ribbon tying (not cutting) ceremony.

Despite increasing community resistance in places such as Little Italy, plans for LOMEX Expressway remained unchanged. Jacobs chaired the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway in the 1960s. The New York Times was sympathetic to Moses, while The Village Voice covered community protests and protested against the expressway. When the expressway resurfaced in 1962, 1965, and 1968, Jacobs became a local hero for opposing the scheme. On April 10, 1968, she was arrested by a plainclothes police officer at a public hearing in which the audience had charged the stage and smashed the stenographer's notes. She was accused of inciting a protest, felony mischief, and obstructing public administration. Her conviction was reduced to disorderly conduct after months of trial in New York City (to which Jacobs commuted from Toronto).

A Documentary Film in New York devoted an hour of the eight-part, seventeen-and-a-half film to Moses and Jacobs' war. Despite Robert Caro's biography of Moses, The Power Broker, gives only passing mention to this event, despite Jacobs's hefty hold on Caro. "The section that I wrote about Jane Jacobs disappeared," Caro told an interviewer about the difficulty of removing more than 300 words from his initial manuscript. 'There's hardly a mention of Jane Jacobs,' I suppose, but I wrote a lot about her.' Every time I'm asked about it, I get this horrible feeling."

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