Photos: Main St.Santa Monica; Prince and Broadway, NYC; Woolworth Bldg. NYC.
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The writer and urban activist Jane Jacobs died last week at 89. In college, I read her book, “The Life and Death of Great American Cities”. What she wrote I still remember.
Her ideas weren’t only about cities, but about human life and humanism.
Only last month, I bought her latest book, “Dark Age Ahead” in which she argues that our latest human chapter carries the peril of decline and a new dark age. These five pillars of civilization are collapsing: community and family, higher education, scientific integrity, taxation and government and the self-regulation of the learned professions.
“Dark Age Ahead” brought Jacobs’ ideas to the 21st Century. She criticized colleges that promoted growth and factory-like dispensing of degrees to students. She saw the sad end of taxation for social progress, as cities struggled to pay for education, parks and social services desperately needed. She discussed the false reporting of profits, by major multi-nationals, and the redistribution of income to the wealthiest top percent.
She lamented the loss of indigenous cultures and customs: songs, painting, crafts and languages. If a culture failed to pass along to each succeeding generation ideas and learning, it was headed to extinction.
Jacobs may have traveled around the globe in her critique of humans, but she always came back to the city. Her heroic efforts and energies to prevent New York’s Robert Moses from destroying cast iron Soho to build a crosstown expressway marked an end of a dark age in urban destruction.
But some revisionists are arguing that Jacobs’ ideas are now dated. Modernism is right, we may need a strong urban planner like Moses, and look what happened to the quaint part of the city: it has become a Starbucks and chain store nightmare of consumerism. The NY Times’ Nicolai Ourousoff wrote an article entitled, “Outgrowing Jane Jacobs”:
Ms. Jacobs had few answers for suburban sprawl or the nation’s dependence on cars, which remains critical to the development of American cities. She could not see that the same freeway that isolated her beloved, working-class North End from downtown Boston also protected it from gentrification. And she never understood cities like Los Angeles, whose beauty stems from the heroic scale of its freeways and its strange interweaving of man-made and natural environments.
The threats facing the contemporary city are not what they were when she first formed her ideas, now nearly 50 years ago. The activists of Ms. Jacobs’s generation may have saved SoHo from Mr. Moses’ bulldozers, but they could not stop it from becoming an open-air mall.
It’s strange to argue that a destructive force like a freeway somehow regains a noble purpose merely because it walls off a historic neighborhood or has “heroic scale”. I walk under the dark concrete mass of the heroically scaled 405 as it passes over Victory Blvd. and am continually edified by the dead animals, urine smell, trash and tailpipe emissions underneath. Is Ourousoff living in the same city as we are?
He also takes issue with Jacobs’ alleged disparagement of modernism:
Just as cities change, so do our perceptions of them. Architects now in their mid-40’s – Ms. Jacobs’s age when she published “Death and Life” – do not share their parents’ unqualified hatred of Modernist developments.
They understand that an endless grid of brick towers and barren plazas is dehumanizing. But on an urban island packed with visual noise, the plaza at Lincoln Center – or even at the old World Trade Center – can be a welcome contrast in scale, a moment of haunting silence amid the chaos. Similarly, the shimmering glass towers that frame lower Park Avenue are awe-inspiring precisely because they offer a sharp contrast to the quiet tree-lined streets of the Upper East Side.
Here he defends modernism not by its function, but because of its style! Wasn’t the whole purpose of modernism to make architecture a machine for living? The glass towers of Park Avenue were not built to provide a quiet respite for strolling. They were erected for profit and rentable square footage.
If some of our cities have become gentrified shopping malls, with restored factories converted to luxury lofts and coffee bars, it cannot be credited to Jacobs. Her work pre-dated the era of the Faneuil Hall and Pike Place Market. She pointed out the obvious, that the organic city of the pre-automobile age had its merits.
Moses built a way to escape the city. Jacobs told us to make it better.
Here in Van Nuys 
“It could have been a San Francisco like area today with restored homes.”
My neighbor never said anything specific about that part of downtown LA, and I’m not old enough to know what it was like in its original state. However, I did saw a rather detailed model of the area on display at the Natural History Museum several years ago, and that along with some photos I’ve come across on the public library’s web site lead me to believe the hill was mostly clapboard-sided boarding houses and apartments (only a few of them that apparently were once fashionable), interspersed with small buildings housing things like liquor stores on their first floor, all largely unremarkable. A lot of it seemed to be an earlier version of the city’s “dingbat” apartments of the 1950s or 60s and mini-malls of the 1970s, or a place where mom-and-pop stores could operate.
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Maus-
That’s right about how things can be remembered wrongly. I think LA made a big mistake, however, when they demolished Bunker Hill. It could have been a San Francisco like area today with restored homes. They should have built the office down in the area south of downtown.
My opinion of course.
Andrew
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“The vibrant and crowded one from the 1940s”
I spoke with a neighbor some time ago, who’s over 80 years old, about the downtown Los Angeles she’d visit around or before the time you mention. She recalls women going to the department stores there wearing white gloves, which was de rigeur at the time, and the crowds you speak of—and the city’s Red cars too. However, I remember her also saying that even then the area was starting to get long in the tooth, with a down-on-its-luck shabbiness becoming more noticeable throughout, or that always had been a part of, various streets throughout the community.
People (at least other than her) sometimes filter things through rose-tinted glasses and forget the origins of and reasons for the exodus of people from one part of town to another.
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Andrew,
* Dr. NO is amusing read, while Ms. JJ is not. Her latest book of alaming prophecy is basically useless, nothing original or constructive (if you tend to subscribe to pessimism, that book is a perfect sadcord- plus some really good new basis of Non-Western world bashing for the New Left- recall the 1970’s Paul Ehrlich or an 18th century Thomas Malthus ). I agree with Maus2 that she would never “get” the complexity and challenge as well as the rewards and redemption of L.A. and other tomorrow metropolis. Ms. JJ would not understand the High Line design. She would not get the meaning of Park Duisburg. She did not know how to stop Moses as well as any profit driven developer of today. It is not even clear that she appreciated the new diversity of American cities; she was mostly a detached observer and that mostly had to do with her generation.
Many (not you, Andrew) who subscribe to Ms. JJ’s “values” or at worse, paraphrase her readily, have been the biggest unabashed gentrifiers and NIMPBY’s. ANd that’s where Dr. NO nails Ms. JJ, who ultimately was NOT able to inspire new, visionary forms, process and programs for cities (and worse, was appropriated to pander to selected upper middle class suburbanites to bring about “lite Urbanism”). Ms. JJ and her laments, hence, have become unintended basis for developing bland and homogeneous urban spaces and structures across the country. Trully a shame. You could say that it was not intended by her, but her perspectives and texts did NOT stimulate the true progressives, but alas, more the reactionary.
It’s not that Ms. JJ contributed nothing tremendous to the discourse of urban history of USA. She did. However, to do her real justice, I would suggest that she be read and appreciated with historic perspective, mainly as a brighter voice signifying a transitional pivot point of urban evolution history.
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That depends on which LA downtown we are talking about. The vibrant and crowded one from the 1940s, or the knocked down, cleared out one in the 70’s, or the Gehryland of the future?
True that LA is almost symbolic of everything she argued against….and it’s hard to argue that she was wrong in condemning a city built around the automobile.
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I wonder how Jane Jacobs and her idealism would have dealt with Los Angeles, particularly its downtown? In that regard, she may have been the kind of person who, when it came to populism, talked a good game but wasn’t necessarily happy playing it. So while she’d bemoan the “loss of indigenous cultures and customs” and “colleges that promoted growth”, I can see her eventually dismissing the urban center of LA because too much of it was too low income, too devoid of big-city energy and wealth, too lacking in residents who at least were high school graduates, too shabby.
“I’d rather live in Toronto, not Calexico, Cleveland or Detroit!” she’d sniff quietly to herself.
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