2006-04-29 - 1:59 p.m.
It looks like I unfortunately came in just under the wire. Jane Jacobs passed away a few days ago. A hero of mine, a hero to many, and someone whose influence makes your daily life better whether you realize it or not. (I�d refer to her as St. Jane, except that title is already commonly used for turn-of-the-century social worker Jane Addams, who founded the Hull-House settlement house and improved the welfare of countless impoverished Chicagoans.)
Jane Jacobs awesome life is actually pretty nicely summarized on Wikipedia (usually a dubious source for knowledge). I never realized that she�d been a student at Columbia University�s General Studies program, which helped inspire me to go back to college. I also didn�t realize the extent to which her directly (and successfully) taking on Robert Moseswas such an incredible victory of the relatively powerless (but right) against the ultimate power-broker.
Nya got me Jacobs� seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities for holidays last year and the girl who saved me arranged with the publisher for me to send it to her to be signed. I got it back only a month ago, so it�s likely the last book she ever signed. I�m very happy she got to read the letter I sent her with it. Here it is:
Ms. Jacobs:
I�m so honored that you�ve agreed to sign The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It�s hard to explain how much reading it meant to me. I went to Harvard at 18, didn�t know what I was doing there, and left. I went on with life and eventually found myself working for a real estate developer in Boston. Then I read your book in an urban planning class I took at night. Like many others I�m sure, it changed my life.
I was living in Boston�s North End at the time. My sister lived in Manhattan�s Morningside Heights. When some of what was good in both these neighborhoods was laid out in the first pages, I understood that studying cities is what I wanted to learn about full-time and I went back to college (at age 28) at Brown University. College is wasted on the young. I enjoyed it tremendously and did indeed learn a great deal.
Now that I�ve graduated, I don�t work in urban planning or development. (I developed multiple sclerosis and I�ve started a business to produce and market assistive mobility devices that are stylish and don�t have the medical-looking aesthetic often currently found.) However I still have a great interest in urbanism and now live in Chicago, one of the greatest American urban agglomerations there�s ever been.
Thank you again for agreeing to sign this. It means the world to me, as do you.
I received a very touching note back, written by her son:
Geoff -
Jane enjoyed your note and is, of course, pleased that you enjoyed reading Death & Life of Great American Cities. She is just now recovering from some nasty infections and is too weak to write you herself.
- Jim Jacobs (Jane�s son)
One environmental advocacy group suggests we should plant trees in her memory. Well, maybe. But I would suggest that a more fitting tribute would be for you to go out into the city right now. It�s spring. See the trees and flowers in bloom. Hear neighbors talking or yelling at each other, possibly in a hundred languages. Eat something from a local restaurant or just a hot-dog stand on the sidewalk.
If there are no brutal highways plowing straight through your urban fabric, if there are relatively few newly-constructed hulking single-use projects surrounded by a sea of parking, it is due in no small part to Jane Jacobs. As she said: �Please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.� I hope heaven for her is an urban paradise and down here lets enjoy the environment we have.
� 2006 Geoff Gladstone
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