Jane Jacobs, 89; Urban Theorist, Community Activist Who Fought Lower Manhattan Freeway Plan
Jane Jacobs, an urban theorist and community activist whose books argued for the rehabilitation of neighborhoods on traditional lines, breaking with emerging trends in city development, died Tuesday. She was 89.
An American-born citizen of Canada, Jacobs died at a hospital in Toronto of natural causes, according to publicist Sally Marvin of Random House, Jacobs' publisher. Jacobs was admitted to the hospital late last week and had been in failing health for several years.
She was internationally known as an advocate of cities with distinct neighborhoods, built to a human scale, mixing commercial and residential space.
She was against building highways that cut through city centers and was once arrested at a public hearing after she stormed the podium to express her opposition to a plan for an expressway through lower Manhattan.
"Jane Jacobs' thinking about cities was clear and it came from a person who lived in cities," Toronto Mayor David Miller told The Times on Tuesday. "She didn't just write about urban issues. She acted on her convictions."
Jacobs' most influential work, 1961's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," set the stage for a battle that Jacobs waged for decades. Defying popular theories on how to renew city slums by plowing them under and replacing them with uniform housing projects, she pushed for recycled buildings and new structures scaled to the existing neighborhood.
Her feisty prose often read like a manifesto. "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding," she announced in the opening paragraph of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."
She continued: "It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to Sunday supplements and women's magazines."
In her view a successful city needed vibrant neighborhoods linked by public transportation. Each area needed its own mix of old and new buildings, a constant influx of smaller, independent businesses, and a range of residential and commercial space.
Early critics accused her of being short on realistic solutions to the challenges of urban life. Admirers called her a maverick and a comprehensive thinker. Thirty years later, when her books were required reading in graduate school programs and many of her beliefs about cities were widely accepted, she was praised as a visionary and a pivotal figure in her field.
"It's not that the world was one way before Jane Jacobs and changed 180 degrees because of her," Paul Goldberger, architecture critic of the New Yorker magazine, said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2003.
It was more a case of Jacobs daring to voice her complaints in a firm, public manner.
"Nobody else spoke out against the establishment the way Jacobs did," Goldberger said. "In the '50s, American cities were generally considered messy, undesirable things. Suburban life was considered the ideal. Jane Jacobs fought valiantly in defense of plain, old-fashioned, urban life."
She was opposed to the use of bulldozers as a tool for urban renewal. "From her point of view," Goldberger said, "nothing was being renewed. It was all being destroyed." Referring to Jacobs' "The Death and Life of American Cities" as "arguably the most important book written about cities in the 20th century," he summed up her attitude toward tear-down renewal: "The emperor of city planning has no clothes."
As a writer and community activist, Jacobs' energy was unrelenting. She challenged the views of influential thinkers such as historian Lewis Mumford, author of "The Culture of Cities."
Her most audacious outburst came in the 1960s when New York City planner and power broker Robert Moses announced his plan for an expressway through the Washington Square area in lower Manhattan.
Jacobs attended the public hearing where she and other protesters vocally opposed the plan.
"He was one of the first speakers," she recalled of Moses, in a 2000 interview with the Associated Press. "He was furious and he stood up there, inside the railed enclosure, and not where most speakers spoke outside where the public microphone was. He was privileged.
"He gripped this railing and he said, in dismissing scornfully our plan to have no more than the existing road and better not even that, he said, 'These protests are just by a bunch of
a bunch of mothers!' "
Jacobs, joined by other protesters, then rushed the podium, disrupting the meeting.
She was arrested on several charges, including criminal mischief, which established her as a terror, at least around City Hall. It also reduced to rubble any view that Jacobs was merely a disheveled, jolly-faced lady with the big, round glasses.
Rather, she was "a far-sighted genius who guided cities in new directions," Robert Caro, who wrote a biography of Moses, told the Associated Press on Tuesday. Her battle with Moses was "one of the truly heroic sagas in the history of New York," Caro said.
Jacobs first staked her claim as the bane of the establishment in 1961 when she led the opposition against a tear-down plan for her West Village neighborhood in lower Manhattan. Redevelopers intended to take out the brownstones and small apartment complexes in the area and replace them with a housing project that covered several blocks.
She argued against demolition and offered her own proposal, which preserved existing housing and added a middle-income apartment complex built to scale. Eventually, the plan she helped devise was approved.
"In the '60s, technocrats were leading the way in urban planning," architect Eric Owen Moss told The Times in 2003.
His Los Angeles-based firm has recycled office space for housing and blended recycled buildings with new structures in the Jacobs tradition.
"Jacobs was a unique, sensitive voice for a different point of view," Moss said. "The technocrat said, 'We'll put an expressway here, a dam there, a high-rise here'. She said, 'Let's not build the expressway through peoples' backyards. Let's keep the continuity of the existing neighborhood. And let's have parks.' "
...
