Under the Influence of Jane Jacobs

You can never predict, when you read them the first time, which are the books that will most enduringly affect your future behavior. I am and have always been an essentially literary person, and if you had asked me to guess, when I was in my twenties, which books would prove to be the most powerful influences, I would have opted for something by George Eliot, Henry James, or Leo Tolstoy. And it’s true that their novels, which I have read and reread many times over the years, have distinctly shaped the kind of person I turned out to be. Or so I suppose, since I often find myself seeing people and situations through their eyes. But this seems a relatively passive, if not invisible, form of influence. If I examine my actual behavior, I am much more likely to trace it back to a very different kind of author—namely, that great observer and celebrator of cities, Jane Jacobs.

I first read her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in 1968, when I was sixteen years old. The book had been out for seven years at that point, but I hadn’t heard of it until a slightly older boyfriend, a college student studying sociology, recommended it to me. Since I was at the age when one dutifully follows the recommendations of boyfriends, I acquired and read the book—consumed it, rather, with a passion that nearly exceeded (and, as it turned out, massively outlasted) my feelings for the recommender.

At sixteen, I was still living in my hometown of Palo Alto.  In those days it had not yet become the beating heart of Silicon Valley; it was just a quiet, smug, impressively comfortable suburb where nothing ever happened. My neighborhood, which was far from the wealthiest in town, was so safe that a child of seven could walk the four or five blocks to the local swimming pool by herself.  The town’s main street, University Avenue, rolled up its sidewalks at nine.  Most of the restaurants were located in shopping malls and motels.  As a teenager, I thought I was going to die of boredom, and practically my only ambition was to get out, preferably to something resembling a real city.

The Manhattan that Jane Jacobs described in her book, and particularly the Greenwich Village in which she lived, struck me with the force of an concept.  It was not a fantasy or a dream—I don’t mean that kind of concept at all.  The New York of the 1960s was a pretty gritty place, as I had seen on our few family trips to the city.  It did not seem an easy or comfortable place in which to live, and at age sixteen I apparently felt no desire to actually go there. (I did not, for example, end up applying to a single college in the New York metropolitan region.)  But as a result of reading Jane Jacobs’s book, I became fascinated by the idea of cities.

I got a job at a city planner’s office in San Francisco and persuaded my high school to accept this unpaid labor as the equivalent of coursework.  Then, in the hours when I wasn’t toiling away at the tasks assigned me by the partners, I relentlessly patrolled the city streets, observing things in what I even then viewed as a Jane-Jacobs-like fashion, trying to draw my own conclusions about how people behaved in an urban setting. I knew that San Francisco wasn’t New York, but the principles Jacobs had elucidated—the importance of eyes on the street, the necessity for ground-level shops and restaurants that would break up massive blocks, the different habits of locals and intruders, the ways in which architecture and traffic patterns fostered a sense of community or its opposite—seemed to apply equally well to my smaller, newly adopted city. I felt she had opened my eyes to how things worked in the kind of environment I wanted to have around me for the rest of my life.

There have been other writers who briefly or intermittently affected my behavior in this way.  George Orwell, for instance, said in Down and Out in Paris and London that you should always accept flyers from people handing them out on the street and that you should never patronize the Salvation Army.  After reading the book at age nineteen, I took these mottos to heart and obeyed them rigorously for a number of years.  But the impact didn’t last in the same way Jane Jacobs’s has. I still don’t patronize the Salvation Army (for reasons having to do mainly with my attitude toward prayer), but I long ago gave up taking every flyer that was brandished in my face, because I was not convinced that Orwell was always right about the value of supporting those who were employed in this way.  I was able, that is, to think about poverty in a way that was not entirely shaped by Orwell.

I have never been able to think about cities in a way that is not influenced by Jane Jacobs.  And now that I have come to inhabit the very ground she walked on—now that I spend nearly half of every year in Greenwich Village—I trust her even more.  Daily, when I am in New York, I see her principles carried out, her observations verified.  It is amazing that someone I never met could continue to have such an enduring effect on me, nearly half a century after I read her book for the first and only time.  And yet she does.

I find, moreover, that Jacobs’s principles operate even in the much smaller city where I spend the other half of my year.  In Berkeley as in New York, I live in the most Jacobs-ish part of town, the lowrise but densely visited area that is now known mainly for its possession of the original Peets Coffee.  Numerous pedestrians stroll by on the sidewalks, and the streets are so parked up that even the residential blocks are metered. My small urban garden fronts directly on one of these busy streets, and when I am outside weeding or watering, I become one of the local guardians, the protectors of the peace, championed in Death and Life.

The other day, for instance, I heard a small child shrieking violently and refusing to get in a car.  At first I ignored this—small children are basically hardwired to shriek—but when she ran away from the man who was with her and cowered behind another car closer to my house, I thought I should emerge from my garden and investigate.  She turned out to be a child in need of a nap, and he turned out to be her father.  The poor man clearly understood why I was approaching them in a seemingly friendly manner, and he made quick work of the introductions so as to assuage my doubts.  If I were prone to such emotions, I could have felt silly and over-protective.  Alternatively, if I had wanted to feel virtuous, I could have thought of all those Law & Order episodes, all those old New York Times stories, in which people stood by and carelessly allowed a crime to happen on their turf.  But I did not think of any of these things.  Instead, I thought of Jane Jacobs, and felt glad that she was still with me.