100 Years After Her Birth, Jane Jacobs Might Not Recognize New York
- indotplace
- Dec 14, 2016
- 1 min read
Sam Hall Kaplan
Sam Hall Kaplan reviews "Eyes on Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs" and offers insight gained from personal experience with the "Saint of City Planning."
This past year was the100th birthday of Jane Jacobs, whom many consider the Saint of City Planning. Topping off a year of accolades for Jane's 100th birthday was a new book extolling her life, prompting some reflections from me as a friend of Jane's in a distant past.
First, briefly, the book, titled Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs, by Robert Kanigel. It is a sweeping biography, comprehensive and complimentary, and so I comment on public radio and select websites.
Traced is Jacob's liberal leanings from her youth in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to New York City, as a struggling journalist, settling in the then rough hewn neighborhood of the West Village, and after success as an author and activist, moving on to an evolving urban Toronto.
Her's was a life championing the social and economic life of neighborhoods, with an appealing practical street smarts. This is captured by Kanigel in a direct narrative. No doubt Jane, as a plain-spoken, self-taught historian, would have approved. A passionate thinker, she was not a passionate writer.
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