About cities, she dished out uncomfortable truths

Two scenes from the life of Jane Jacobs, who died this week at age 89:

The first takes place in the early 1960s. New York City’s urban-renewal czar, Robert Moses, rises to speak at a community meeting in Greenwich Village about his plan to run a new six-lane expressway through the neighborhood. Jacobs, who has already pilloried Moses in her landmark 1961 book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” and who lives nearby, sits in the audience. This is the first time she has ever seen Moses in person. When he starts to dismiss the opposition to the project as the work of a bunch of hysterical “mothers” with no better way to spend their time, Jacobs has to be restrained from trying to throttle him. Moses storms out. The expressway never gets built.

Zoom ahead four decades, to spring 2004. As part of her final book tour, for the cheerfully titled “Dark Age Ahead,” Jacobs appears at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre. She’s as feisty and sharp-witted as ever, but she is also closing in on 90. When the time comes for Q&A;, Jacobs pulls out an old-fashioned ear trumpet -- no newfangled hearing aid for her! -- turns in her chair and seems to lean into every question from the audience.

The episodes suggest Jacobs’ long run as a complex, down-to-earth Cassandra: a woman who wore comfortable shoes while dishing out uncomfortable truths, who kept her ear to the ground while trying to topple giants. What Jacobs hated most -- what she saw in Moses, and what she always tried to avoid in her own public appearances after she gained a measure of fame -- was what she called the “Olympian vantage point” of the planners who were trying in the postwar years to apply the spare, muscular forms of Modern architecture to the design of entire cities, hollowing out old neighborhoods and running giant overpasses along waterfront promenades. Her enemies were always those who displayed what she called “a deep contempt for ordinary people” and for how cities allowed or forced them to live.

That whole mixture can be found within the first few pages of the stirringly sensible, radically empirical “Death and Life.” Its famously pointed first line says, “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” But it also promises, just a few sentences later, to explore and explain “how cities work in real life.”

The result is a book that takes a sledgehammer to the utopianism of Moses and Le Corbusier -- and also the Garden City and City Beautiful movements, for good measure -- but is ultimately more concerned with a remarkably detailed analysis of what Jacobs called “the ballet of the good city sidewalk.” Her vantage point was the front stoop of the building at 555 Hudson St., where she lived with her architect husband. From there, she drew up her recipe for a successful urban neighborhood: short blocks, wide sidewalks, and a mixture of new and old buildings and commercial and residential uses -- enough diversity to keep the streets full of activity and watchful eyes from morning to night.

In its final pages, as the book finishes its perfectly executed turn from despair to optimism -- the order of the words “Death and Life” in the title is no accident -- Jacobs writes, “The processes that occur in cities are not arcane, capable of being understood only by experts. They can be understood by almost anybody.” If a book could take questions from the audience, this one would have.

Of course, her audience wasn’t limited to neighborhood activists. The book changed how cities were made. It helped end Moses’ reign in New York in the 1960s and, more recently, its theories led directly to the quick decision, after the World Trade Center was destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, to restore the old street grid at the site, which the Twin Towers and their superblock had wiped off the map. That turned out to be the only part of the ground zero rebuilding process that everybody involved could agree on.

The book also marked a turning point in journalism and narrative nonfiction. Jacobs’ clear, unpretentious style and her effort to begin with stories and evidence and then move toward unifying theories inspired writers of all specialties hoping to tackle complex ideas for a broad audience. Malcolm Gladwell is an obvious heir. So is Jared Diamond.

In the 1960s, though, that accessibility was often mistaken for a lack of sophistication. Lewis Mumford, the architecture critic for the New Yorker, was an early champion of Jacobs; after hearing her give a speech at the New School in 1958, when she was still an unknown editor at Architectural Forum, he wrote to commend her “refreshing clarity” and called her analysis of urban renewal “devastatingly just.”

When the book landed on his desk, he changed his tune. Perhaps he found its arguments too bold or too grand to be made by an amateur, which is surely how he viewed Jacobs. (She had no college degree and no professional training as a planner or architect.) Her gender was surely part of the equation: Mumford’s review carried the dismissive headline “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies,” and it rapped “Death and Life” for its “mingling of sense and sentimentality, of mature judgments and schoolgirl howlers.”

There is something sentimental about the book, particularly in the way it describes Greenwich Village as a kind of urban Mayberry, a place where even the vagrants look out for the little ones. “On my return home,” Jacobs writes at one point, “as I passed the relative genteel playground near where I live, I noted that its only inhabitants in the late afternoon ... were two small boys threatening to bash a little girl with their skates and an alcoholic who had roused himself to shake his head and mumble that they shouldn’t do that.”

That sentimentality continues to provide ammunition for Jacobs’ current antagonists, of whom there are a surprising number. Some are defenders of cities such as Los Angeles, diffuse places whose attractions have more to do with space and freedom than close neighborhood ties. Indeed, one persistent charge is that her work was so concerned with how cities used to be, and with the old Manhattan model in particular, that it offered little practical help for anyone living in Phoenix or Tampa. Still, how to understand Frank Gehry’s recently unveiled design for a $750-million mixed-use project along Grand Avenue except as an attempt to bring some sidewalk vitality to downtown Los Angeles at long last?

Her foes have lately included a few architecture critics as well, who see in the work of New Urbanists, shopping “centres” and other too-sweet revivals of American Main Streets -- the whole nostalgic-commercial complex in our cities and suburbs -- a reflection, even a natural extension, of Jacobs’ deep reservations about the new and the modern. But those critics miss a crucial point, namely that Jacobs loved old buildings, objects and streets -- not new ones designed to look old. That difference is precisely the difference between sentimentality and blind nostalgia and between preservation and Disneyfication.

Jacobs, who moved with her family to Toronto in 1968, sat for many interviews late in her life -- enough to leave a clear record of her disdain for many New Urbanist projects and the way her theories had been misunderstood by policymakers and scholars alike. But she never managed to write a book extending her earlier critique or taking on the next generation of city planners. She had moved on to new and broader topics, writing in 1992’s “Systems of Survival” and in “Dark Age Ahead” about economics, the environment and history.

Those books are hard to get through precisely because of their rush to generalize -- because, surprisingly and frustratingly enough, of their tedious Olympianism. “Dark Age Ahead” includes whole chapters made up of sentences like this one: “Diets changed, with gruel displacing bread, and salt fish and wild fowl almost displacing domesticated meat.”

What the later work was missing, what her fans kept waiting in vain for Jacobs to get back to, is the fine-grained, closely observed analysis that made “Death and Life” so vital and bracing -- and so entertainingly revolutionary. The book is urban history written at street level, from behind a barricade in the form of a shady sidewalk bench.