Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York

Edited by Timothy Mennel, Jo Steffens, and Christopher Klemek

Municipal Art Society and Princeton Architectural Press, 2007, 64 pp., $17.95 paperback

This slender paperback is one of the liveliest little collections of urban essays you’re ever likely to come across. Nearly 40 writers from varied fields, including Tom Wolfe, Adam Gopnik, Christopher Alexander, Malcolm Gladwell, Tony Goldman, and John Norquist, have their say, usually in just a page or two, about some aspect of Jane Jacobs’s thinking that’s reflected in today’s New York. Plus, there’s a brief photo essay of disappearing shopfronts; a cartoon strip by the melancholy romantic Ben Katchor (“over time, the most prosaic view yields a form of poetry,” Katchor very characteristically writes); and a recipe for fried tomatoes with gravy, attributed to Jacobs’s grandmother.

A certain sadness seeps into some of the observations. “I now find neighborhood less in the gentrified and chain-stored city and more in the rural hamlet,” says New York architect Michael McDonough. Gopnik, the New Yorker staff writer, acknowledges “the sense that the city’s recovery has come at the cost of a part of its identity.”

City College professor Marshall Berman wonders whether Jacobs, in her evocative portrayal of her block of Hudson Street nearly half a century ago, had “occlusions in her vision.” “Are there really no personal or social conflicts on this block? No larcenies or adulteries? …” Berman asks. “Jacobs’s vision seemed so direct and straightforward forty years ago. Today, we’ve got to wonder, is this pragmatism or pastoral? Is it direct experience of city life or a grid of prescribed happy meanings forcibly imposed on city life?”

Sociologist Nathan Glazer muses, “In the world of ideas, Jane Jacobs was completely dominant. In the world of practice, matters were not so simple. … the giantism she never found attractive or properly urbanizable was still the preferred style of redevelopment in older American cities, including New York.” Horrifying though it may sound, Glazer thinks “the prophet of the future city may turn out in the end to be not Ebenezer Howard or Jane Jacobs but Le Corbusier.”

Urban writer Roberta Brandes Gratz is more encouraging. “Jacobs is thought to only favor small things,” Gratz says. Quite the contrary, Gratz contends, Jacobs “also believed in big  projects” — if they were the right kinds of undertakings, such as mass transit, boulevards, and transit-accessible parks that functioned as gathering places.

Editor Andrew Blum, noticing the coexistence of neighborhood life and ubiquitous cellphone conversations, suggests that “in a community where common ties are electronically buttressed, we may be able to reap the global environmental benefit of high-density living without sacrificing the local ties of a medium-density neighborhood.”

Block by Block abounds with stimulating thoughts. Fittingly, the book is sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, which had the foresight to aid Jacobs’s work in the 1950s, when it was such an affront to the planning establishment.