The Death and Life of Great American Cities
by Jane Jacobs
First posted October 2013
I am no longer an Upper East Sider, nor even a New Yorker. Were I still there, the NYC I wrote about in 2013 is dead; churn eternally fixes a “take” so quickly that wonderment at fast-casual salad takeout feels incredibly passé—quaint—even outside of Manhattan, even a few years ago. Here, now, in the twentieth month of the COVID-19 debacle, what remains of the city I knew is as distant from 2013 me as I was in 2013 from the city Jane Jacobs was writing about.
As a resident of New York’s Upper East Side, I still cringe at the memory of my stunned stupor when a colleague proffered a droll, “You know the best part of the East Side? Its view of the West Side!” to me at a during a conference—my very own “The ocean called, they’re running out of shrimp!” moment.
It’s too bad I hadn’t yet read The Death and Life of Great American Cities; if I had, I could have replied with a suave, “Oh yeah?”—about to drop the comeback hammer on the tasteless malingerer—“Well, your blocks are too long, locking pedestrians into rote paths and tedious, repetitious commutes.” That’ll learn ‘em.
Going west from Fifth Avenue, the first three blocks, and in some places four, are 800 feet long, except where Broadway, on a diagonal, intersects. Going east from Fifth Avenue, the first four blocks vary between 400 and 420 feet in length. At Seventieth Street, to pick a random point where the two sides of the island are divided by Central Park, the 2,400 linear feet of building line between Central Park West and West End Avenue are intersected by only two avenues. On the east side, an equivalent length of building line extends from Fifth Avenue to a little beyond Second Avenue and is intersected by five avenues. The stretch of East Side with its five intersecting avenues is immensely more popular than the West Side with its two.
My response might be a bit more pedantic than an oblique reference to the jerk store, but it probably stings more because they know it’s true. Fie on the Upper West Side, with its wide sidewalks and large apartments!
A large part of what makes The Death and Life of Great American Cities so fascinating is juxtaposing what has changed in the sixty years since it was written with what has remained the same. Linguistic shifts are the most straightforward: “Street lights can be like that famous stone that falls in the desert where that are no ears to hear. Does it make a noise? Without effective eyes to see, does a light cast light? Not for practical purposes.” The modern idiomatic equivalent here would be “tree in the forest,” not “stone in the desert.” Was that a quirk of the author or a common saying in the late fifties and early sixties? How and why did that change? Does Peggy Olson ever say it on Mad Men? These obviously burning questions aren’t addressed, nor the fact that the “tree in the woods” is cited to England’s William Fossett back in 1754 as a support for the argument that meaning is a construction unique to the human experience: “To say something is meaningful is to say that that is how we arrange it so; how we comprehend it to be, and what is comprehended by you or I may not be by a cat, for example. If a tree falls in a park and there is no-one to hand, it is silent and invisible and nameless. And if we were to vanish, there would be no tree at all; any meaning would vanish along with us. Other than what the cats make of it all, of course.” The terminus of thought we are pulled down is to conclude that neither the stone nor the tree make any appreciable impact without someone to be acted upon; nor will the lamppost, silently shedding its enveloping light, mean a damn thing without human agency. But the real question here isn’t about sidewalk safety; if a “famous stone falls in the desert” but no one has ever heard that expression before, does it make any sense?
Some of the greatest rifts in time open up through the vantage of what hasn’t changed. While discussing Manhattan’s downtown district the temporal distance seems to close entirely:
What does exist here to draw visitors at leisure hours, for instance on week ends? Over the years, almost every unique appeal to visitors that could possibly be rooted out of this district by plan has been rooted out. The aquarium, which used to sit in Battery Park at the tip of the island and was the main attraction of the park, has been removed and rebuilt in Coney Island, the last place it was needed….A new aquarium should be built, for example, and it ought to be admission-free, unlike the one at Coney. A city of almost eight million can support two aquariums and can afford to show off its fish free.
Modern Midtown remains the vibrant heart of the city, as predicted in an earlier section, by the “rooting out” of non-commercial attractions. Downtown is still a (relative) a ghost-town outside of the crush of bridge and tunnel commuters—lunch spots remain shuttered on the weekend, Stone Street bars dwindle to a slow drip after Happy Hours end. And personally experiencing the sadsack existence of the NY Aquarium as compared with, say, how the city can sustain botanical gardens, of which there are two—New York and Brooklyn—it’s useful to live in New York City and be able to see what has borne true and what has remained an issue. The largest portion of examples derive from here, and it impresses upon the reader a more direct sense or reality. Being intimately familiar with the traffic patterns around Washington Square Park, which I personally need to skirt two or three times per week, made reading about how Fifth Avenue bisected it until 1958 quite surprising. (Though the omission that the author chaired the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway—the committee responsible for the roadway closing, as well as responsible for thwarting the planned Lower Manhattan Expressway (LoMex)—seems a bit obscurist, though perhaps only in retrospect). Mentally comparing NYU’s campus integration, where my office is currently embedded, to Columbia’s walled fortress, where I worked for a year, solidifies the vivid picture Death and Life paints during some of its pontifications: “Big universities in cities, so far as I can see, have given no thought or imagination to the unique establishments they are. Typically they either pretend to be cloistered or countrified places, nostalgically denying their transplantation, or else they pretend to be office buildings. (Of course they are neither.)”
The author is a tad more cavalier with the other “great” American cities than she is with New York:
Even an inherently meaningless landmark in a center of activity seems to contribute to the users’ satisfaction. For instance, in St. Louis there stands a tall concrete column in the middle of a down-at-heel commercial center in declining, gray area surroundings. It once served as a water tower. Many years ago, when the water tank was removed, the local citizens prevailed on City Hall to save the pedestal, which they themselves then repaired. It still gives to the district its name, “The Watertower,” and it still gives a bit of pathetic distinction to its district too, which would otherwise hardly even be recognizable as a place.
There is a strong tone and sense of narrative spirit—without which, for a lengthy tome on a relatively dry subject matter, would be an instant sedative—that propels the monologue, which at times borders on harangue. It’s clearly a pushback against the prevailing wisdom of city planning at the time, and modern American urbanites should be planning yearly pilgrimages to her grave. What is amazing is how valid so many of the points made in The Death And Life of Great American Cities remain. Massive construction supersites are being erected in Manhattan’s Midtown West—closed microcommunities that take no advantage of their proximity to the rest of Manhattan—while tenants flock to the Lower East Side for its excitement, or Greenwich Village for its subtlety. What is avoided, time and again, is the Stuy-Town monolith:
People try hard to create centers and climaxes to a park, even against odds. Sometimes it is impossible. Long strip parks, like the dismally unsuccessful Sara Delano Roosevelt park in New York and many riverside parks, are frequently designed as if they were rolled out from a die stamper. Sara Delano Roosevelt park has four identical brick “recreation” barracks stamped along it at intervals. What can users make of this? The more they move back and forth, the more they are in the same place. It is like a trudge on a treadmill. This too is a common failing in project design, and almost unavoidable there, because most projects are essentially die-stamped design for die-stamped functions.
In orthodox city planning, neighborhood open spaces are venerated in an amazingly uncritical fashion, much as savages venerate magical fetishes. Ask a houser how his planned neighborhood improves on the old city and he will cite, as a self-evident virtue, More Open Space. Ask a zoner about the improvements in progressive codes and he will cite, again as a self-evident virtue, their incentives toward leaving More Open Space. Walk with a planner through a dispirited neighborhood and though it be already scabby with deserted parks and tired landscaping festooned with old Kleenex, he will envision a future of More Open Space.
More Open Space for what? For muggings? For bleak vacuums between buildings? Or for ordinary people to use and enjoy. Because people do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners and designers wish they would.
New York isn’t spared a tongue-lashing, and you can see the essence of the author, who would remain a firebrand for decades and speak louder and louder until she was Robert Moses’ archnemesis.
Before Death and Life I simply didn’t know the ideological battles of the late fifties: the push of the unslumming attempts and the pull of the Garden City ethos. I didn’t know Carnegie Hall was nearly demolished in 1960 to build a commercial skyscraper—I can’t imagine midtown without it. I never thought of the damage a cultural-building sequester can do to a historic district, or how landmarks dotting the landscape are so much better for creating a sense of a city than having one compacted “Lincoln Center” style hotspot. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is not a quick read. It is of high density, but not overcrowded. And if you don’t understand that joke, perhaps this is the right book to pick up next.