What Can We do With the City?
Goodman, Percival
THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES, by Jane Jacobs. Random House. $5.95. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the kind of book which suggests a two-column discussion;...
...Her ideal city consists of small blocks so there will be plenty of corners to turn, for long blocks are boring...
...The author is no theorist, no believer in prognostication or forecast...
...In a society where schools become gigantic baby-sitting operations rather than educational institutions, where the man is fitted to the work rather than the work to the man, where watching a baseball game on TV makes a man an athlete, such a spectacle has reality and so by contrast is entrancing...
...That a superblock can be designed so it has life and variety in the buildings and in the spaces around them, that the plan can foster community is, to her, obviously sheer fantasy...
...he wants to stay here...
...For example, at Washington Square a great victory was won...
...If you chopped all the 800' long Manhattan blocks in half there would be twice as many corners to turn and things would be more interesting...
...a good part of the chapter on the "need for primary mixed uses" in the city...
...This pamphlet, written by the national secretary of the Socialist party, is a useful survey of the right-wing groups now springing up in the United States...
...Much of what she says is common sense and many of us have long attacked, as she does, the anti-urban, pro-automobile teaching and practice of city planning, legislation that establishes low-income ghettos, segregation and the like...
...So, no planning is required, just the strategy and tactics involved in immediate situations...
...Traffic problems are solved by "attrition of the automobile by the city...
...She finds the superblock an abomination...
...She is practical, she believes only what is in front of her nose...
...She finds parks dangerous and the book describes horrendous episodes which show Boris Karloff lurking in shadows amid the forsythia...
...People who stay don't have to, you know, they like it...
...Jacobs' essential weakness is in her anti-utopianism...
...much about what she says on the failure of the present subsidized dwelling legislation and its results...
...This is a nibbling away process...
...Mrs...
...Jacobs' city there are small stores, in each of which is found a jovial but watchful shopkeeper...
...Everything is active and noisy, radios blare, and the fusillade of trucks backfiring, the shattering starts and halts of buses, grindings of garbage trucks, orchestrate the scene, keeping the teeth on edge and the nerves tensed...
...New America (303 Park Avenue So...
...Having said all of this, allow me to hope that this book will fall into hands that can appreciate its merits...
...Here the author finds Puerto Ricans and Negroes from the South long-time dwellers (at least 10 to 15 years) who chose their dwellings as the most desirable, are delighted with their ghettos and enjoy living many in a room paying (according to Charles Abrams) more than anyone else for these pleasures...
...It is not their intention to spy on their neighbors as happens in small towns, the Soviet Union and used to happen in Mussolini's Italy and Nazi Germany...
...In rough and tumble politics such a method applies and in fact is the statesmanship of our time...
...The writing is economical and restrained, only occasionally falling into the agitational mannerisms that have traditionally been a curse of left-wing pamphleteering...
...The author is no mere theorist—it was she that led the fight to "save" the West Village and when the New York Times reported her as saying that "in addition to a well-knit neighborhood organization the Committee had been successful because it had refused to discuss any planning whatsoever with the Planning Commission" she stated her position...
...jovial for the neighborhood needs someone who is a friend, and watchful, because a concierge is required...
...For safety, according to Mrs...
...You don't have to remove a street from the city map, all you do is put up a chain barring its use...
...It is mainly a factual presentation, bringing together material about the Birch Society, the "Christian AntiCommunist Crusade," etc...
...Perhaps the most noteworthy section of the pamphlet deals with the political activities of military men who have openly aligned themselves with the Birchers and used their authority to pump reactionary propaganda into the ranks beneath them...
...one labeled right, one wrong...
...the chapter on the erosion of cities by the automobile including the 1890 English Architectural Review description of London in the horse and buggy days...
...So, when the author says, "fix the buildings up but leave the people" she is on safe ground for obviously the best our architectural talents can do is to create new housing that look like penal institutions (only not so solid...
...Successful unslumming means that enough people must have an attachment to the slum so they wish to stay and it also means that it must be practical for them to stay...
...And in this ideal city, the landlord will "unslum" and not raise the rent...
...Jacobs wants...
...Why," he asked, "do you tear down permanent buildings and build temporary ones...
...Parks and playgrounds are unnecessary, according to the author, for children don't want them, they are boring...
...THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES, by Jane Jacobs...
...This was surely not the intention...
...I would maintain, it was not because the single goal of the Committee was to remove the "blighted" designation from the neighborhood that no planning was discussed, but rather that the existing plan, such as it is, is all the plan Mrs...
...She finds all city planning theory of modern times in error, whether it favors garden cities, cities beautiful, skyscrapers or detached single-story houses...
...especially when fees paid to architects by housing authorities are too low to profitably study a job (especially for the big offices that get the jobs), and especially when the regulations of the housing authority in essence forbid any original thinking, for such thinking is experimental—impractical and will not be approved by the State or Federal agencies...
...All this is good, the shrewd and accurate personal observations of the facts of city life are first rate, the bother is the limited viewpoint...
...There is an idyllic passage dealing with the foot of Christopher Street: "You could not find a happier place on a hot summer day or a lazy summer Sunday...
...It's all very integrated and not at all utopian for isn't this to be found in the West Village— pattern for the ideal city...
...The city must consist of mixed uses and it doesn't seem to matter whether these are pleasant or disgust ing...
...It is not only the grocer chained to his counter that watches, everybody is hanging out of the windows watching and there are sidewalk characters who also watch— these are the "eyes of the street"—keeping the streets safe...
...It is also bound to be popular for inherent in it is a disbelief in new forms and new ideas, a lack of understanding of the function and relation of art to life and not least a tacit defense of the status quo circa 1920...
...In the author's ideal city there will be a high concentration of people and not only the buildings' uses are mixed but ethnic and income groups as well...
...Here you find as typical, the statement of a north-end young butcher who "pointed out a threestory brick house, told me that the family that lived there just spent $20,000 modernizing it (out of saved earnings...
...The naive question of Sir Hugh Casson comes to mind...
...Slums in the ideal city "unslum" themselves...
...The problem is to win the battle not the war...
...Make streets narrower, impassable to thru traffic: Barricades not planning is the slogan...
...and added, that man could live anywhere...
...needs a basic rethinking of the physical patterns of the city for these will have (are having) a colossal impact on its structure...
...The end result, in spite of excellent observations, reasonable recommendations, and a good heart is that Jane Jacobs' book suggests we leave everything pretty much as it is except we paint the walls...
...Thus this book is bound to be popular...
...This the author explains is not "pretty-pretty...
...In addition, teenagers and adults in the same predicament can't molest the little tykes...
...So it is when the architect designs buildings as if he were using a cooky cutter but the author does not question the reason why this is current practice...
...In Mrs...
...The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the kind of book which suggests a two-column discussion...
...These are kindly people who keep the streets safe, for unfortunately much as we love the Puerto Rican and Negro people they tend to be, shall we say, and especially when not watched, er—antisocial...
...She should (as a beginning) ponder Oscar Wilde's, "A map of the world which does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the country in which humanity is always landing, and when humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country sets sail...
...Indeed the dullness of the Park Department's prefabricated swings and slides suit the toddlers but once a child has reached 5 or 6 the straitjacket of school arouses an opposite reaction and there being no reasonable occupations in the city for a child to engage in, suggests unreasonable occupations...
...Progress is the realization of Utopias...
...What a pleasure to have more curbs so that more cars can be parked, shining or grimy, forming the ideal foreground to the background of her street activity and architecture...
...Such handling of space might make a beautiful city but the city beautiful is not for us—probably unsafe, and probably immoral and decadent...
...The sidewalks are filled with children playing...
...Naturally, in an affluent society such as ours, we can afford to demolish good buildings and put up bad buildings since it makes a profit for the entrepreneur both in demolition and reconstruction and further, guarantees that in 20 years the son of the entrepreneur can repeat the process...
...From time to time, a great slushing and clanking fills the air as a sanitation truck dumps its load into a waiting scow...
...I. H. they are, and for that matter, the political institutions such as they are, as ultimate, byzantine, unchangeable...
...Suall suggests, with some plausibility, that we have here an incipient group of military Ultras, somewhat like the Salan gang in France, who would become an important power center for a mass movement on the right...
...to prevent unreasonable occupations, is my interpretation...
...It is obvious that a law banning the private automobile in Manhattan is also fantasy, so let's keep our streets as parking lots...
...Finally she said all right...
...1962...
...and finally, and best of all, Jane loves the great city and this love shines through...
...65 pp...
...No relocation outside the neighborhood" is a good slogan when you have no idea of better community, no idea of city plan, but a very good idea of how entrepreneurs make an honest dollar by converting a neighborhood from low rent to high rent...
...Ahl dolce vita, all side by side, nuisance factory, fancy office building, the corner candy store, wino, matron in her mink, bar and grille, baby in his shiny pram, artist in his beret, parking lot, pizza parlor, mauvais garcon, minister, black and white, hot dogs and caviar and God in his heaven...
...When you live in a world of deodorants, after a while even a bad odor has the advantage of proving you haven't lost your sense of smell...
...Unlike LeCorbusier, who is simple minded and finds seven different kinds of streets from path to superhighway, the author sees all streets alike, only more of them...
...Thirdly, she should consider whether her assumption that it is reasonable to accept the technology as it is, the work and leisure as it is, the education of child and adult as it is, the mores as THE AMERICAN ULTRAS, by Irwin Suall...
...Equally fantastic, as she sees it, is to think of breaking the gridiron pattern by creating visual barriers (bridge building, for example) to close vistas, keep others open and in general plastically model space...
...The author attacks city planners, architects, administrators, private enterprise, public works, reformers, utopians, bankers...
...Naturally, part of the activity will result from this — instead of whooshing down thru streets you can have the pleasure of a roller coaster, sounding the horn as you whirl around corners on two wheels...
...She italicizes "The city cannot be a work of art...
...Secondly, she should consider the combination of the doubling of in-city populations in the next 40 years with the more than halving of work hours...
...Old buildings are needed—not for beauty or tradition but "plain ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some run-down old buildings...
...I agree it is not pretty but at least it has meaning...
...The intention was to attack the absurdities of academic city planners, the venal interests of real estate speculators and their cohorts in government...
...Massive urbanization and mass freed time (leisure...
...A miraculous rescue of a 9-year-old boy who was pushed down a sewer by an unidentified assailant—in a park of course" —the New York Times reported, "The mother had told the boys earlier in the day not to play in Highbridge Park...
...No need for planning, "strategy and tactics" are the words...
...If the children play on the street then they can be easily watched...
...It is unfortunate when a warmhearted and well-meaning woman plays into the hands of her avowed enemies because she does not see longrange objectives...
...Among these I find: a well formulated indictment of present bureaucratic thinking...
...The boy's frightened companions intelligently raced out of the park and back to the evil streets where they enlisted help quickly...
Vol. 9 • April 1962 • No. 2
