Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs

by Robert Kanigel Narrated by Kimberly Farr

Overview

The first major biography of the irrepressible woman who changed the way we view and live in cities, and whose influence can still be felt in any discussion of urban planning to this day.

Eyes on the Street is a revelation of the phenomenal woman who raised three children, wrote seven groundbreaking books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, and engaged at home and on the streets in thousands of debates--all of which she won. Here is the child who challenged her third-grade teacher; the high school poet; the journalist who honed her writing skills at Iron Age, Architectural Forum, Fortune, and other outlets, while amassing the knowledge she would draw upon to write her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Here, too, is the activist who helped lead an ultimately successful protest against Robert Moses's proposed expressway through her beloved Greenwich Village; and who, in order to keep her sons out of the Vietnam War, moved to Canada, where she became as well known and admired as she was in the United States.

Editorial Reviews

DECEMBER 2016 - AudioFile

The life of Jane Jacobs, one of the great intellectual heroes of the American twentieth century, makes for a fascinating listen. As a writer, without so much as a college degree, Jacobs changed the way planners and politicians think about cities; as a community organizer, she rescued downtown New York from a disastrous highway scheme of the power broker Robert Moses. Robert Kanigel tells the story of this SUI GENERIS thinker artfully and with granular detail, and Kimberly Farr performs the text with nuance and care. From Jane’s successful third-grade rebellion against a hidebound teacher to her leaving her beloved Greenwich Village for Canada to keep her sons from the Vietnam war, this is a unique and important life, and a lovely production. B.G. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

The Barnes & Noble Review

Jane Jacobs was an author and activist whose fame and influence derived from one book. It's apt, then, that the most stirring part of the first major biography of Jacobs, Robert Kanigel's enthusiastic and admiring Eyes on the Street, concerns the creation of that book, 1961’s paradigm-smashing The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

When it was published, Jacobs, who was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, had been living in New York City for nearly three decades. The ideas that became Death and Life began brewing in the mid-1950s when Jacobs, then a writer for Architectural Forum, was shown around Philadelphia by celebrated urban planner Edmund Bacon. Bacon, something of a showman, started what he conceived as a "before and after" tour in a densely packed, impoverished black neighborhood where Jacobs observed people crowding the sidewalks and hanging out on stoops. Next, as Kanigel tells it, the planner proudly escorted her to a street that had been "the beneficiary of Bacon's vision — bulldozed, the unsavory mess of the old city swept away, a fine project replacing it, all pretty and new." Jacobs acknowledged that the street looked very nice, but what struck her with most force was the absence of human life: "She saw one little boy — she'd remember him all her life — kicking a tire. Just him, alone on the deserted street." Worse yet, when she asked her guide where all of the people were, he appeared uninterested in the question.

Around the same time, Jacobs went on tours of East Harlem with community leader William Kirk; their meandering walks convinced her that so-called slums had a strong and functional social fabric, that razing dilapidated blocks to build tall modernist projects resulted, in Kanigel's words, in "social glue weakened — a community, as Jane would put it, replaced by a dormitory." Indeed, when a community group wanted to meet with residents of an East Harlem project that had replaced a chunk of the old neighborhood, its members were told that there was nowhere to gather except the basement's laundry room.

Jacobs wasn't an urban planner or an architect; she didn't even have a college degree. But as Kanigel — whose previous books include On an Irish Island and The Man Who Knew Infinity — establishes in the first third of the book, she grew up challenging received wisdom and believing she could do anything, qualities that served her well as an uncredentialed woman taking on male-dominated professions, as she did in Death and Life. (The author is explicit in his desire to convey the hurdles Jacobs faced as a woman and a mother, so one wishes he'd focused less on her appearance — "never beautiful" and "not even memorably unbeautiful," he marvels — or at least consulted a thesaurus before describing her as "fat and dumpy.") Jacobs wrote in a unique style, neither academic nor literary, full of observations, insights, and provocation. Across several pages, she lovingly described the "intricate sidewalk ballet" of her own chaotic-seeming Greenwich Village block, which involved a web of community ties that urban planners were blind to. "There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder," she declared in one of the book's famous passages, "and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and be served."

The Death and Life of Great American Cities had immediate impact. While critics took issue with its blind spots (among them Jacobs's lack of analysis of race and ethnicity and her tendency to romanticize city life without fully acknowledging the costs of poverty and crime), readers found it thrilling. Jacobs's prescription for vital cities — mixed-use buildings, population density, short blocks — has triumphed so completely that it's difficult to appreciate how disruptive her thinking was to the status quo. Kanigel provides useful context of the postwar period, when destroying cities and rebuilding from scratch seemed the obvious course of action (although here, as throughout the book, he has an irritating tendency to make his point with rhetorical questions): "Was any old horse-and-wagon better suited to us today, more desirable, than a new automobile? Then in what impossible, upside-down universe would you not want to tear down an aging slum of nineteenth-century tenements and put up a new apartment complex designed to make life easier, airier, and brighter?" As far as Jacobs was concerned, easy, airy, and bright were better left in the suburbs. Whether landscaped "superblocks" were created as part of low-income housing projects, middle- income residences like Manhattan's Stuyvesant Town, or cultural complexes like Lincoln Center, she argued that overlarge structures set back from the street deadened, rather than revitalized, urban life.

Jacobs, who authored seven books, saw herself primarily as a writer, but when her own beloved neighborhood was threatened, she reluctantly abandoned her typewriter to enter the fray. She helped kill a proposal to narrow the sidewalks on her block in order to widen the street for cars and a plan to allow traffic into Washington Square Park, her children's local playground. She is credited with a major role in defeating New York master builder Robert Moses's planned Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have destroyed parts of the Soho and Little Italy neighborhoods to make room for an eight-lane highway. Jacobs and Moses are so often paired in a David-and-Goliath narrative — there's even an opera about them — that it’s surprising to learn they may have met only once.

Kanigel's account of how Jacobs came to write Death and Life is so compelling that the biography suffers a loss of momentum afterward. Jacobs and her family moved to Toronto in 1968 to protect her draft-age sons from serving in the Vietnam War. She became a Canadian citizen and remained in Toronto, a city she came to love, until her death, in 2006, at eighty-nine. Her later books were respectfully received, but none had the impact of her masterwork. All told, she had an interesting, contented life: a happy childhood, a solid marriage, well-adjusted children, work she loved along with ample recognition for it. "All these lucky things," she herself said. The biggest drama of her life involved the formation and expression of her visionary ideas. Eyes on the Street works because as cities evolve and face fresh crises – gentrification, soaring rents, and renewed segregation — those ideas continue to challenge as much as they fascinate.

Barbara Spindel has covered books for Time Out New York, Newsweek.com, Details, and Spin. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies.

Reviewer: Barbara Spindel

Publishers Weekly

★ 05/30/2016
Kanigel (The Man Who Knew Infinity) captures the life and character of Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), a stubborn, principled activist and the doyenne of urban planning. Jacobs—best known for her highly influential and heralded book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which attacked efficiency-focused midcentury urban planning policies and called for livable, diverse, and pedestrian-friendly cities—led an intellectually and socially rich life from start to finish. She enjoyed an idyllic childhood in Scranton, Pa., and got her first big break in 1935 at age 19, writing about Manhattan’s fur district for Vogue. She fell in love with the lively West Village upon exiting the Christopher Street subway station for the first time. Kanigel turns Jacobs’s life into a fascinating narrative with an endearing, obstinate, brilliant protagonist. Readers familiar with Jacobs’s work will enjoy reading the behind-the-scenes anecdotes from her career—at her first lecture at Harvard, which was a smashing success, she was only filling in at the last minute for her boss and was so nervous she memorized her speech beforehand—and those who are learning about her for the first time will want to immediately pick up one (or all seven) of the books she wrote. Agent: Michael V. Carlisle, InkWell Management. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

Best Books of the Year, NPR 
Top Ten Art Books of the Year, Booklist
Top Ten Architecture Books of the Year, World Architecture
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction

“A powerful and all too rare biography of the making of a female public intellectual. . . . Thrilling.”—Fresh Air (NPR)

“Kanigel has written the definitive Jacobs biography . . . in prose that is as lively as her own.” —The Washington Post
 
“Sparkling. . . . Magisterial. . . . An exhaustively researched, beautifully rendered tale, revealing the human contours of a vigorous, original mind.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“A portrait emerges of an independent heroine who stepped into an arena dominated by men. She was Betty Friedan, Rachel Carson, and Erin Brockovich all rolled into one.” —Boston Globe

“[Kanigel delivers] fast-paced and nuanced storytelling in a crisp prose style that engages the reader. . . . This most complete biography of Jane Jacobs to date is a treat to read.” —The New York Journal of Books
 
“Zestfully illuminating and entertaining . . . Kanigel’s delight in his subject . . . shimmers on every page.” —Booklist (starred review)
 
“[Jane Jacobs] was great, and Kanigel gives her the great biography she deserves.” —Edward Glaeser, The American Scholar
 

Library Journal

07/01/2016
This is the first major biography of a writer, activist, and public intellectual considered to be one of the "most influential urban thinkers of all time." Iconoclastic, independent, and fearless, Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) is remembered for her 1961 best seller The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which influenced urban planning and architectural design concepts for more than 40 years. A city dweller for nearly her entire life, Jacobs challenged people to reconsider the best way to live at a time when suburbia was growing and "urban renewal" was destroying what she believed to be the richness and community inherent in traditional city life. Kanigel (On An Irish Island) mines archives, personal papers, and interviews with family and friends to create a sympathetic overview of Jacobs' career, political activism, and travels. The analysis of Jacobs' many writings is accompanied by contemporary reviews of her works along with accounts of her professional dealings with other key figures in the history of urban America such as Lewis Mumford, Herbert J. Gans, and Robert Moses. VERDICT This meticulously researched yet very readable book will appeal to anyone interested in American history after World War II but will especially engage those interested in city life, urban planning, and design.—Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ

DECEMBER 2016 - AudioFile

The life of Jane Jacobs, one of the great intellectual heroes of the American twentieth century, makes for a fascinating listen. As a writer, without so much as a college degree, Jacobs changed the way planners and politicians think about cities; as a community organizer, she rescued downtown New York from a disastrous highway scheme of the power broker Robert Moses. Robert Kanigel tells the story of this SUI GENERIS thinker artfully and with granular detail, and Kimberly Farr performs the text with nuance and care. From Jane’s successful third-grade rebellion against a hidebound teacher to her leaving her beloved Greenwich Village for Canada to keep her sons from the Vietnam war, this is a unique and important life, and a lovely production. B.G. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2016-06-21
A significant, comprehensive biography of an irrepressible urbanist, author, and pioneering community activist.Drawing on a cache of archival source material, award-winning author Kanigel (On an Irish Island, 2012, etc.) engagingly assembles the extraordinary life of Jane Jacobs (1916-2006). She was an American-Canadian whom many considered radical and outspoken, and her feisty determination won her great respect and admiration alongside biting criticism. With affable prose and exacting detail, Kanigel diligently escorts readers through Jacobs' lifetime in a three-part narrative tracing her early years, when she cultivated a "defiantly independent" character, through her middle and later years, when intensive grass-roots organizing with civic groups bolstered her community-based perspectives on urban planning. As a schoolgirl in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Jacobs began challenging authority as she spoke up and "figured things out for herself, and said them," which led to run-ins with authority figures. Journalistic motivations led her to newspaper writing in Manhattan and an early career "coup" writing a piece on the fur district for Vogue at age 19. During that time, a fond appreciation for Greenwich Village bloomed. A whirlwind marriage to architect Robert Jacobs Jr. and a West Village property purchase proved blissful, and even the trouble of a redbaiting FBI investigation and a criminal mischief arrest hardly dimmed Jacobs' hardheaded, contrarian opinions on economic erosion, cultural collapse, and urban sprawl. The author shares a vast wealth of entertaining anecdotes highlighting Jacobs at her best (and worst) and features a particularly compelling address to urban designers at Harvard and the story of her vehement opposition to Robert Moses' Lower Manhattan Expressway project. Throughout her adulthood, Jacobs authored an impressive, intellectually innovative oeuvre, including the groundbreaking The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which she wrote after her relocation to Canada with her family in the late 1960s. Kanigel crafts a well-rounded, illuminating narrative of a "woman of the people who'd risen up out of the gritty city streets to fight city hall." An outstanding chronicle of a provocative, influential, iconoclastic theorist of the American cityscape.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170029600
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/20/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The Great Bewildering World


It couldn’t have been long into her life there that Jane learned what every New Yorker knew, that “the city” was Manhattan, period. The fur district she’d stumbled upon so fortuitously was in Manhattan. So was the diamond district. Vogue itself, New York fashion personified, was in Manhattan. The jobs she got that first year were all in Manhattan, as were the better jobs she sought now. So were Broadway, Times Square, Fifth Avenue, the tall towers, the publishing houses, the galleries, and practically all the other iconic places of New York. It was hard not to feel the pull. Jane had only to glance down Henry Street, at the great stone arches that were the Brooklyn Bridge approaches, to take herself in her mind’s eye to Manhattan. For Jane, as for any young person of curiosity and spunk, the city beckoned.

On one of her forays into Manhattan near the end of that first year, probably in late summer, Jane got out at the Christopher Street subway stop; she “liked the sound of the name,” she’d say. She had no idea where she was, “but I was enchanted with this place . . . I spent the rest of the afternoon just walking these streets.”

As she got off the train, she’d have seen the name of the station set in mosaic tile, as in most of New York’s four hundred–odd subway stations:
 
CHRISTOPHER ST.
SHERIDAN SQ.
 
Sheridan Square was no “square” at all, of course. But out of its irregular and unlovely expanse radiated Seventh Avenue South and wide West Fourth Street. Stroll along them, or on Grove Street, Washington Place, or Waverly Place, which all converged there, and soon you found yourself among a warren of little streets south and west of the square, the clubs and bars lining West Fourth Street that drew revelers from the outer boroughs, art galleries, small shops, modest apartment buildings.

It was here, in a low-lying bowl of cityscape mostly off the tourist maps, far from the great employment centers, not grand, not rich, maybe a little ragtag, that Jane now found herself. No neatly defined shopping districts here in the streets near Sheridan Square, nothing like upscale Fifth Avenue or proletarian Fourteenth Street—no neatly defined anything. Blocks of handsome brownstones across Sixth Avenue that could have stepped out of a Henry James novel, musical Italian filling the shops and stoops of the tenements to the south, gritty warehouses and a sprinkling of small-scale industry to the west. Along Bleecker Street, a bakery selling Italian bread for a nickel a loaf, a cheese shop selling ricotta for twenty-five cents a pound. Peasant smocks, antique jewelry, and second-hand books for sale arrayed on one block. A drugstore selling cosmetics and contraceptives. An ice cream parlor where the neighborhood’s young Italian men hung out. The scale was small, the range and variety stunning, the streetscape obeying nothing like cool Cartesian order. This wasn’t New York in its bigness, its numbers, its densest crowds that Jane found here. If anything, it was New York in all its smallness, its irregularity, its turn-the-corner-and-what-do-you-find little shocks and surprises.

The Manhattan street grid fell apart here, as if by an abrupt, invasive fault in an otherwise orderly crystal matrix. West Fourth Street, obediently grid-bound just to the east, at Sheridan Square abruptly veered northwest and, after a few blocks, dared to run, against all sense and logic, into West Eleventh Street. Other streets, like Carmine, Cornelia, and Jones, simply disappeared after a block or two. A conscientious student of urban life, Professor Caroline Ware of Vassar College, had recently tallied the “contents” of one block of Jones Street. She counted old-law tenements and 1840s-vintage houses, an apartment house that went up only in 1929, factories that made feather mattresses, children’s toys, and Italian ice cream; an old stable, a settlement house, two grocers, a tobacco and candy store, an ice dealer’s cellar, a French hand laundry, a barber shop, a tea room, an “Italian men’s café,” a wrought iron workshop, and (it still being Prohibition at the time of her census) three speakeasies. All in a single block. Behind this line of five-story façades—inside, unseen, hidden—life played out each day and night, in all its struggles, pains, and pleasures; on the busy sidewalks outside, traces and whispers only of those silent stories, spilling out into the city’s everyday jangle.

Spend an afternoon on streets like Jones Street, as Jane did, and any part of the brain habituated to easy order was bound to come away bruised. But Jane? She “liked the little streets,” she’d remember. “I liked the variety of it and there were craft shops of hand-made things of ingenuity and artistry. I had never seen shops like those. I just thought it was great.” The whole neighborhood was great. Could she have said why, exactly? Maybe not. She was nineteen. She was all enthusiasm.

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