Jane Jacobs
A Public Celebration
June 12, 2006
Trinity St. Paul's Church.
Most of what I know about Jane Jacobs, I know through informal means. She would come up in conversation often enough, either with friends or at community meetings. In this way and over my two decades of living in Toronto , I became familiar with the broad strokes of her life. For example, I know she grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania (location for the American version of the television series "The Office"); she opposed the mega-highway projects of New York's Robert Moses (whose biography is a scant 1336 pages) in order to preserve neighbourhoods, like Soho; she became a resident of the Annex when her sons reached a draftable age in the era of the Vietnam war; and upon her arrival in Toronto began to use her renowned combination of intellect and community building skills to oppose provincial forces bent on the construction of the Spadina Expressway. And won!
Some things I know about Jane Jacobs, I know through her work. For example in "Death and Life of Great American Cities" she described 35 feet as the ideal width for sidewalks to allow for children's play and for the comings and goings of pedestrians. The only place where I think an example of this still exists today is the sidewalk in front of the Horseshoe Tavern, on the north east corner of Queen and Spadina. But in truth I found reading Jane Jacobs a challenge and only made it three quarters of the way through this seminal work.
With her sad passing in May of this year, probably what she will be most remembered for is her articulation and appreciation of the urban neighbourhood: deftly describing its complexities in a memorable passage of Death and Life of Great American Cities.
R.H. Thomson closed the (almost) 3-hour public celebration at Trinity St. Paul's church with this reading. If you knew nothing about Jane Jacobs before this moment, you would have gained the understanding that she drew on her powers as a keen and comprehensive observer to articulate and defend urban constructions that were vital and invigorating to its dwellers.
This is something I understood instinctually as a child. I grew up in Hamilton in the 1970s. I loved my neighbourhood. As a grade-schooler, I took advantage of all the transportation options I had to get to school. I most often walked/ran/played my way but I also rode my bike and could use the city bus when needed. There were so many routes to choose from: alleys, residential streets or the most direct, Aberdeen Avenue , a four-lane arterial road. To and from school I found the neighbourhood endlessly interesting with the various sizes and styles of houses and lots of points of interests, corner stores, parks and friend's homes. In my last years there, I was expanding my boundaries and making my own way to the downtown area to purchase K-Tel records and sneak into matinee screenings of Saturday Night Fever.
I probably would not have had any significant thoughts about this neighbourhood except as I was about to start high school in 1980 my family moved to Columbia , Maryland . Columbia was a planned community, the brain-child of James Rouse, who started his professional life as a mortgage financier and then became a mall developer with ambition of social reform (he is also, incidentally, the grandfather of Ed Norton). The Rouse Corporation is known for its ambitious commercial developments in Boston and Baltimore . Columbia was its first residential project and it was hoped it would be the paradigm of the new American city.
There is much I could say about Columbia . Suffice to say, it completely depressed me. As a thirteen year old I was trapped. There was no way to conduct my own personal comings and goings as it was landscape designed for the car and very poor public transportation. Within 10 minutes of being in our new home with my parents and sister, a non-descript 3 story townhouse, I could tell we had been short-changed. When we drove "downtown" to see our new city , the berms that lined the city center crushed my curiosity, as I realized there was nothing to see, no streets filled with people and streets lined with stores. There was however, a great big mall circled by a great big parking lot.
I fled this landscape as soon as I was done high school. Since then there have been times when I have wanted to write extensively about this experience or do a documentary. At the height of this time, I wrote Jane Jacobs. I mostly wanted to hear back from someone who might understand the impact of this change of environment on a child.
As I sat in Trinity St Paul's church on Monday night, I had the letter in my pocket that Jane Jacobs wrote to me in March 2004. It was single-space and type-written. It was filled with encouragement, advice on articles to read and an invitation to phone her to arrange a time to visit her and speak about the subject further. She thought she could contribute to my project by talking about the social and commercial thinking of Jim Rouse. I never followed through to this point. At the back of the church, I gazed at the projected image of her behind the pulpit. She had a look of indefatigable delight and interest. And I was thankful for Jane's lifelong work that helped me understand a particularly acute personal experience of the commercial and social forces of our time.