The Life That Shaped Jane Jacobs
Robert Kanigel’s Eyes on the Street is the Jane Jacobs biography I’ve been waiting for. A biographer and science writer, Kanigel takes on the daunting task of chronicling the life of the urbanist giant, Jacobs, without descending into the exulted “St. Jane” hagiography that would have surely bothered Kanigel’s subject to no end.
The book starts with Jacobs’ early life. We get a deep portrait of Jane Butzner’s middle-class upbringing in Scranton, including the famous “toothbrush” incident, in which she was expelled for warning her fellow students against making the impossible promise to brush their teeth every night. There are glimpses into the origins of her fascination with words, her training as a typist, and her first unpaid foray into journalism at a local newspaper.
Kanigel then follows Jacobs’ move to New York’s Brooklyn Heights in 1934 at the height of the Great Depression, decades before The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Kanigel shows how Jane strung together her early writing career working for a variety of magazines, including such varied titles as Vogue and Iron Age. The book takes an especially close look at her early writing for Amerika, a State Department magazine about the U.S. published for a Soviet Union audience, where she wrote about cities and slums. It also gives us a glimpse into her time covering architecture, cities, and planning for Architectural Forum, where her boss sent her to give a last-minute speech at Harvard that later led to an article for Fortune: “Downtown Is for People,” the original germ of Death and Life.
We also learn how she becomes Jane Jacobs—her affinity for alliteration overcoming her urge to keep her maiden name—marrying the architect Robert Hyde Jacobs, Jr. after a lightning-fast courtship: He proposed on their first date after knowing each other for a week, which she initially declined but changed her mind about a few days later. We learn about their family life, as well as intellectual lives, on New York’s Hudson Street.