{"id":14167,"date":"2020-05-04T23:33:34","date_gmt":"2020-05-05T03:33:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=14167"},"modified":"2020-07-22T11:47:40","modified_gmt":"2020-07-22T15:47:40","slug":"jane-jacobs-philadelphia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2020\/05\/jane-jacobs-philadelphia\/","title":{"rendered":"Jane Jacobs\u2019 Philadelphia"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Site of Society Hill Towers, July 7, 1961 (PhillyHistory.org) with Frederick Pillsbury. \u201cWe viewed the acres of rubble that one day will be apartment house towers and new houses. ‘You see, the planners always want to make a big deal of everything they do,’ Mrs. Jacobs said. ‘In urban renewal you need new buildings\u2014I have no quarrel with that\u2014but there were plenty of good buildings here. Why tear them all down?'”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u2018You’ve got to get out and walk!\u2019 urban journalist Jane Jacobs implored her readers.<\/p>\n

It was 1958 and her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities<\/em>, wouldn\u2019t appear for another three years. Jacobs ideas were still forming, still considered \u201cradical and outlandish.\u201d In time, her approach would prevail and come to influence both urban theory and redevelopment.<\/p>\n

So why not take the occasion of Jacobs\u2019 104th birthday, to share some of her thoughts on urban design in general, and Philadelphia in particular? Jane Jacobs had much to say about both.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook at some lively old parts of the city,\u201d she wrote. \u201cNotice the tenement with the stoop and sidewalk and how that stoop and sidewalk belong to the people there. \u2026 Notice the stores and the converted store fronts. \u2026think about these examples of the plaza, the market place and the forum, all very ugly and makeshift but very much belonging to the inhabitants, very intimate and informal. \u2026 the least we can do is to respect\u2014in the deepest sense\u2014strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order.\u201d<\/p>\n

That \u201cweird wisdom,\u201d wrote Nathaniel Rich in The Atlantic<\/em>, \u201cwas the wisdom of crowds: the customs and habits that people in cities, left to their own devices.\u201d And it was often counter to what planners wanted. \u201cThe planners had been guided by aesthetic concerns, favoring clean lines, geometric shapes, and vast boulevards that were beautiful so long as they were seen from the window of an airplane. But Americans didn\u2019t need a new utopia,\u201d says Rich. \u201cThey already had a system that, while messy and imperfect, produced a thriving society.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Jacobs studied \u201cthe ecology of cities,\u201d she would reveal \u201cnothing less than a new \u2018system of thought\u2019 about the city.\u201d And, when \u201ccompared to the bird\u2019s-eye view and arm\u2019s-length approach of professional theorists,\u201d according to Peter L. Laurence, Jacobs\u2019 \u201capproach, like her activism, was eye level and hands on; her urban theory was the corollary of her activism, and vice versa<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
10th Street, Brown to Parrish Streets, December 4, 1959 (PhillyHistory.org) “We drove through a dreary, rundown area on North 11th Street.” Frederick Pillsbury “asked\u00a0Mrs. Jacobs what she would do about it if she had the authority. ‘I don’t believe in panaceas,’ she said. ‘The problems in a place like this are too complicated for offhand suggestions. The first thing would be to learn about the life here.'”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jacobs\u2019 \u201cgreat accomplishment, writes Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, \u201cwould be to translate that \u2018weird wisdom\u2019 into terms we could all understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, one might argue, it all started in 1954, when the editors of Architectural Forum<\/em> assigned Jacobs\u2019 to cover the legendary Philadelphia city planner Edmund N. Bacon. According to Alice Sparberg Alexiou, Bacon, \u201clike everybody else at the time believed wholeheartedly in the bulldozer approach to urban renewal.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Alexiou, Jacobs would later recall Bacon taking her \u201con a tour of a black neighborhood . . . to show her a recent renewal project. \u2018He took me along a crowded street, where there were a lot of recent arrivals in the Great Migration, . . . Obviously they were very poor people, but enjoying themselves and each other. Then we went one street over [where there were the new high-rise projects]. Ed Bacon said, \u2018Let me show you what we\u2019re doing.\u2019 He wanted me to see the lovely vista. There was no human being on the street except for a little boy kicking a tire. I said, \u2018Where are the people?\u2019 He didn\u2019t answer. He only said, \u2018They don\u2019t appreciate these things.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In an instant, \u201cJacobs realized that the high-rise projects that Bacon was so proud of had been designed with total disregard for the people who inhabit them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat a revelation that was to me!\u201d said Jacobs of her encounter with Bacon. She returned to New York with the realization that \u201call the hyped new projects the planners and architects were building in cities\u2026 bore no relation to what people actually needed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jacobs had learned the truth by trusting \u201cwhat her own eyes told her, what she had seen in Philadelphia.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Sources: Alice Sparberg Alexiou, Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary<\/em>. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006); [Jane Jacobs], \u201cA Lesson in Urban Redevelopment: Philadelphia\u2019s Redevelopment, A Progress Report,\u201d Architectural Forum<\/em> (July 1955); [Jane Jacobs], \u201cThe Missing Link in City Redevelopment,\u201d Architectural Forum<\/em> (June 1956); Peter L. Laurence, \u201cJane Jacobs Before Death and Life,\u201d Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,<\/em> (March 2007); Frederick Pillsbury, ”\u2019I Like Philadelphia with some big IFs and BUTs.’\u201d An Interview with Jane Jacobs,” The Sunday Bulletin Magazine,<\/em> June 24, 1962; Nathaniel Rich, \u201cThe Prophecies of Jane Jacobs,\u201d, The Atlantic<\/em>, November 2016; Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, “An Ad Hoc<\/em> Affair: Jane Jacobs\u2019s clear-eyed vision of humanity.” The Nation<\/em>, February 3, 2017.]<\/span><\/p>\n

Next Time: More of Jane Jacobs\u2019 Philadelphia<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018You’ve got to get out and walk!\u2019 urban journalist Jane Jacobs implored her readers. It was 1958 and her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, wouldn\u2019t appear for another three years. Jacobs ideas were still forming, still considered \u201cradical and outlandish.\u201d In time, her approach would prevail and come to influence both […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}