Becoming Jane Jacobs by Peter L. Laurence

Author:Peter L. Laurence [Laurence, Peter L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812292466
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

“Pavement Pounders and Olympians”

In April 1956, a few months after Jacobs came to understand East Harlem’s plight, she presented an enthusiastically received paper at the first Urban Design Conference at Harvard University. Although she hated making speeches, the “Harvard Planning Conference”—as those who had not yet embraced “urban design” called it—would make Jacobs’s name familiar in architectural and planning circles. “A few years ago, Mrs. Jacobs stepped into prominence at a planners’ conference at Harvard,” Lewis Mumford recalled in his mostly bitter review of Death and Life in 1962. “Into the foggy atmosphere of professional jargon that usually envelops such meetings, she blew like a fresh offshore breeze to present a picture, dramatic but not distorted, of the results of displacing large neighborhood populations to facilitate large-scale rebuilding.”6

Like other serendipitous events in Jacobs’s life, her presence at the conference was a lucky accident. In January 1956, around the time that Jacobs followed up on the East Harlem story, Josep Lluís Sert, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), sent Haskell an invitation to be part of a distinguished gathering of planners, architects, and landscape architects who would seek a “common basis for joint work of the three professions in urban design.” Although Haskell initially accepted the invitation, after the conference co-organizer and GSD professor Jaqueline Tyrwhitt telephoned to confirm, he sent Sert regrets that he would not be able to attend due to a trip to Europe. In his stead, he recommended Forum’s redevelopment specialist. “If another woman beside Miss Tyrwhitt would not be out of place,” he wrote, “might I suggest that my substitute be Mrs. Robert Jacobs—Jane Jacobs on our masthead. She has handled more of our redevelopment stories than anybody and will be fresh back from Ft. Worth.”7

Despite her unanticipated participation in the conference, with her eyes recently opened to the effects of urban renewal “on the ground,” Jacobs was one of the most knowledgeable people present. Having no professional training or credentials, she was condescendingly described as Haskell’s “assistant” and a “layman,” but her talk was nevertheless among the conference’s highlights, and the reaction to it testified to both the novelty of her presence and the soundness of her ideas. A conference summary in June 1956 noted among the high points “the warm and direct appeal of Jane Jacobs …, who pointed out that a supermarket may replace thirty little stores but doesn’t replace thirty little storekeepers and their social place in the community—and a lot of other things that only a layman of considerable feeling could tell a group of planners and architects.” In a letter, Victor Gruen told Haskell that Jacobs was the best of the conference’s speakers:

The conference was an interesting one, but it suffered under the weakness of all professional conferences—that too many high-hat words are used which, because they are worn out by now, are ineffective. Everyone was using the expressions “human scale” and “warmth” but Jane was the only one who really talked about it, without ever using any of the big words.

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