LU o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2006-04-26 published
She wrote the book on cities
By Warren GERARD, Special To The Star with files from Paul
MOLONEY,
Royson JAMES and Vanessa
LU
Jane JACOBS was an urban fable.
She was a writer, intellectual, analyst, ethicist and moral thinker,
activist, self-made economist and a fearless critic of inflexible
authority.
JACOBS died yesterday in a Toronto hospital. She was 89. Her
90th birthday would have been next week.
An American who chose to be Canadian,
JACOBS was a leader in
the fights to preserve neighbourhoods and kill expressways, first
in New York City, and then in Toronto.
Her efforts to stop the proposed expressway between Manhattan
Bridge on east Manhattan and the Holland Tunnel on the west contributed
toward saving SoHo, Chinatown, and the western part of Greenwich
Village.
In Toronto, her leadership galvanized the movement that stopped
the proposed Spadina Expressway. It would have cut a swath through
the lively Annex neighbourhood and parts of the downtown.
Toronto
Mayor
David Miller, who called
JACOBS both a friend and
a mentor, interrupted yesterday's city council meeting to announce
to his colleagues that
JACOBS had died.
"The power of her ideas is what helped make this city choose
a different path, a path where you have vibrant downtown neighbourhoods
where people could live, a path where you didn't have expressways
cutting through neighbourhoods," Miller told reporters.
"She gave me all sorts of advice over time. The way she gave
you advice was she invited you over for tea. And you had tea
and you talked and if you were smart, you kept quiet and you
listened because you could really learn from Jane
JACOBS."
Her son, Ned
JACOBS, said in an interview from Vancouver that
his mother had been in hospital for a few days.
"She died of old age. She just wore out," he said. "Every part
of her was worn out. She was working as best she could right
to the end."
Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
published in 1961, became a Bible for neighbourhood organizers
and what she termed the "foot people."
It made the case against the utopian planning culture of the
times -- residential highrise development, expressways through
city hearts, slum clearances and desolate downtowns.
She believed that residential and commercial activity should
be in the same place, that the safest neighbourhoods teem with
life, short winding streets are better than long straight ones,
lowrise housing is better than impersonal towers, that a neighbourhood
is where people talk to one another. She liked the small-scale.
Former
Toronto mayor David
CROMBIE said that while people see
her as a city builder, affecting the city form, her impact was
much bigger and deeper.
"The most important thing she did for me and us was remind us
that ideas matter, and the ideas that were most important are
the ones that mattered to us,"
CROMBIE said. "She also believed
you take action. You don't have ideas and go away. There is a
direct connection of thought and action."
JACOBS, born May 4, 1916, grew up in Scranton, the centre of
Pennsylvania coal country.
"I came from a family where women had worked, mostly as schoolteachers,
for quite a few generations. I had a great-aunt who went to Alaska
and taught Indians. My mother had worked as a schoolteacher,
then a nurse. She became the night supervising nurse at an important
hospital in Philadelphia," she was quoted.
"Those were traditional women's occupations, to be sure. But
I did grow up with the idea that women could do things, and in
my own family I was treated much the same as my brothers."
Finishing high school, she trained as a stenographer but got
an unpaid job as a reporter at the local newspaper.
JACOBS moved
to New York City in the Depression years and wrote a few articles
for Vogue.
Then, at age 22, she went to Columbia University, but that didn't
last and after two years she returned to writing.
She married Robert
JACOBS in 1944. He was an architect and it
was his work that got her interested in Architectural Forum,
a monthly magazine, where after a short time she went to work,
becoming a senior editor.
Theirs was a close relationship and a happy marriage. It was
to last for 52 years before he died of lung cancer at Toronto's
Princess Margaret Hospital, a hospital he had designed.
In 1958, after writing about downtowns for Fortune magazine,
Mrs. JACOBS received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation
to write about cities.
In 1968, JACOBS and her family moved to Toronto. They didn't
want their two draft-age sons, Jim and Ned, to serve in the Vietnam
War.
Toronto was ripe for
JACOBS.
She wasn't here long before plans
were revealed to build the Spadina Expressway, which promised
to cut a strip through the city, making it easier for suburbanites
to commute in and out of the downtown. She wrote a newspaper
article highly critical of city planners for their vision to
"Los Angelize" what she described as "the most hopeful and healthy
city in North America, still unmangled, still with options."
In an unrequited sentiment, odd as it might seem, planners adored
JACOBS.
She described them this way, however. "First of all,
our official planning departments seem to be brain-dead in the
sense that we cannot depend on them in any way, shape or form
for providing intellectual leadership in addressing urgent problems
involving the physical future of the city."
JACOBS galvanized local citizens against the planners and politicians
in what became known as the Stop Spadina movement.
For the most part,
JACOBS' books were an intellectual progression,
each taking her thoughts on cities and economies a step further.
Paul BEDFORD, retired Toronto chief planner, said
JACOBS had
been a key supporter of the radical plan in the mid-'90s to relax
planning rules to spur new ideas in the King-Spadina and King-Parliament
areas that were formerly industrial and in decline.
BEDFORD credited
JACOBS for encouraging him to take risks and
experiment.
"We abolished the density numbers, the land use designations
and put in place an urban design framework. Really it was about
encouraging re-use of buildings and opening up the uses to allow
residential.
"I remember her words specifically, to me and
to Barbara
(HALL:)
She said this must work. You must be successful at this and get
it right.
"She gave me the notion as chief planner that I had to take the
lead, be visible, communicate with the people on all fronts.
It was to bring planning to the people and demystify it. It gave
me the courage to be an agent of change rather than an agent
of the bureaucracy."
As well as The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Economy
of Cities, and The Question of Separatism,
JACOBS wrote other
books including Cities and the Wealth of Nations; Systems of
Survival: A Dialogue; A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska; The Nature
of Economies and Dark Age Ahead.
Following the death of her husband,
JACOBS continued to live
in her three-storey brick house on Albany Ave., a tree-lined
street in the Annex neighbourhood she helped preserve.
She wrote in an upstairs office on a typewriter, refusing to
use a computer. Her son, Jim, an inventor, lived close by and
another son, Ned, worked for the Vancouver Parks Board and is
a musician. Her daughter, Burgin, is an artist and lives in New
Denver, B.C.
The shelves of her study were filled with books on chaos theory
and the sciences, subjects that stimulated her own thinking.
Shortly after writing The Nature of Economies, she was quoted
as saying: "I think I'm living in a marvellous age when great
change is occurring. We now see that there is no straight-line
cause and effect. Things are connected by webs.
"This understanding comes from advances in the life-sciences,
and it opens up the possibility of understanding all kinds of
things we haven't understood before. I think it's very exciting."
As for her own life, she said the following: "Really, I've had
a very easy life.
"By easy I don't mean just lying around, but I haven't been put
upon, really. And it's been luck mostly. Being brought up in
a time when women weren't put down, that's luck. Being in a family
where I wasn't put down, that's luck. Finding the right man to
marry, that's the best luck! Having nice children, healthy children,
that's luck.
"All these lucky things."
How 2 letter Surnames like LU work in OGSPI
L... Names LU... Names LUA... Names Welcome Home