On Jane Jacobs (2017)

Summary

The legend of Jane Jacobs centers on the writer who revolutionized our thinking about cities with her now-classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and the fearless activist who stood up to planning czar Robert Moses’s rampaging road construction, thereby saving Gotham. A recent, rather cartoonish film on the subject is even titled: Citizen Jane: The Battle for New York. It is an irresistible David vs. Goliath story with a feminist twist. Not surprisingly, she has become a secular saint in oppositional circles: “What would Jane Jacobs do?” was a graffiti at the Occupy Wall Street site. In retrospect Jacobs got many things right and many others half-right, but it may take some doing to separate one from the other, or to pry loose the contemptuous loner from the feisty, socially engaged persona. “Jane Jacobs verges on a cult figure, with Death and Life a kind of gospel, like Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book in its time, or the Bible,” writes Robert Kanigel, in the first full-scale biography of her, Eyes on the Street (Alfred A. Knopf). The previous author of seven books (including The Man Who Knew Infinity, recently filmed), Kanigel is a skillful biographer, and his latest effort is thorough, well-researched and polished, if overly cautiously in probing his subject’s contradictions. It sits squarely within her own approving self- definition: if she says her childhood was untroubled, so be it. There are chummy reports of lobster-eating summer vacations. Her children, riding bikes, “never had an accident. They always had fun.” Kanigel occasionally alludes to Jacobs’ testy, insular side. But an opportunity is lost to account for the strange trajectory of her career: how she caught lightning in a bottle in one book and then went on to write eight more that failed to ignite. Jane Butzner was born in 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the third child to her doctor-father and nurse-mother. Her Presbyterian churchgoing parents were nurturing and encouraging: “‘I grew up...