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Jane Jacobs and the Now and Future City

Imagine New York City with an eight-lane highway running through the heart of SoHo, Little Italy and the Lower East Side? Or 14 lively tree-lined blocks of the West Village under the wrecking ball to make way for urban renewal? Writer and community leader Jane Jacobs organized her neighbors and waged long and tough campaigns to prevent these urban defacements. At a public hearing on the highway proposal, she was even arrested for inciting to riot.

New Yorkers would exist in a very different and less livable city were it not for Jacobs, who died in 2006 at age 86. What she accomplished in the face of enormous odds in the late 50s and 60s and what her work means for city life in the 21st Century are on display through January 26 at New York’s Municipal Art Society Urban Center Galleries (457 Madison Avenue).

Author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs came to New York after high school in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the 1930s, and found work as a stenographer and freelance writer. Through her own close observation, an editing job at Architectural Forum and the work of her architect husband, she learned what makes a large city vibrant. Deciding that the actions of establishment urban planners and government officials revealed a deep-seated contempt for cities and their inhabitants, she took on the powerful interests with no holds barred: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding….on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding.”

Appropriately, “Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York” is an activist show. Sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, which supported Jacobs while writing her landmark book more than 50 years ago, the show functions as a lab introducing us to her working methods and principles for a diverse city. We’re asked, in her words, to “please look closely at real cities” and observe the “ballet of the sidewalk”—the complex movements, gestures and rhythms of pedestrians as they circulate through large cities day and night. We learn her four driving principles: mixed use to keep streets active day and night, frequent short blocks, buildings varied in age, and concentrated populations rather than dispersed as in the suburbs. The city’s future is clearly not solely Manhattan’s, with new residents expected to settle primarily in other boroughs. Accordingly, a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, block appears over and over again as a “ballet of the sidewalk,” illustrating diversity at work.

Jacobs held strong ideas about the geography of culture. Photos of Lincoln Center, before and after construction, portray her argument against the concentration of culture, even more objectionable to her than the razing of a 16-acre neighborhood to make way for the complex. She believed that cultural institutions should dot the city, as they are catalysts for new businesses and services, boosting the economy and spreading diversity and safety. Ironically, Carnegie Hall almost suffered the wrecking ball because officials felt Lincoln Center would drive it out of business.

Public spaces were undervalued, in Jacobs’s view. She fought so that parks and sidewalks would not be overtaken by the private sector or sacrificed to construct fast exits to the suburbs. We see a photograph of jubilant activists she joined in 1958, ready to burn a mock car at the Washington Square Arch after they stopped the threatened penetration of a four-lane street and achieved a permanent ban on traffic through the park. At its side is the High Line story, a new success of activists in the Jacobs tradition of preserving and celebrating public space. The unused and overgrown elevated railroad tracks were marked for demolition under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, pressured by developers who owned land under it. In 1999 two men organized the Friends of the High Line and saved the mile-and-a-half long structure. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has come on board, making the future promenade stretching south from West 34th a part of a larger greening of the city.

“Learning to See” is the exhibit’s short and brilliant exercise, asking us to test our skills in measuring diversity on the spot. A Plexiglas sheet hangs in front of a gallery window facing the corner of 51st and Madison. It’s inscribed with Jacobs’s four principles, each with a little information specific to that site. In the gallery, a monitor plays a 24-hour time-lapse video of the corner’s activity. While watching the video we can glance through the Plexiglas out the window at the street’s goings-on in real time. How might diversity be improved? We’re asked such questions here and elsewhere as we move through the show.

In opposition to the Vietnam War, Jane Jacobs and her family left New York for Toronto in 1968. She continued her urban activism in her new city, inspiring others as she did in New York, and turned to writing on the economy of cities and nations, producing five more books. To honor her spirit and contributions, the exhibition also marked the inauguration of the Rockefeller Jane Jacobs Medal, awarded annually “to two individuals whose actions and accomplishments ‘Jacobsean’ principles in New York City.”



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