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Places: For a pioneering 1960s urbanist, a love-in and a big award
Saturday, November 18, 2000 By Patricia Lowry
They came not to bury Jane Jacobs last weekend, but to praise her. A good thing, too, because Jacobs, at 84, is still alive and kicking -- at anything that stands in the way of making cities and city neighborhoods work.
Patricia Lowry is the Post-Gazette architecture critic. Her e-mail address is plowry@post-gazette.com
In 1961 in her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," Jacobs was the first to challenge the federally funded highway and urban renewal projects and public housing policies so devastating to older cities like New York and Pittsburgh -- and their displaced inhabitants.
She was against interstate highways plowing through city neighborhoods and the suburban sprawl they fed. She was for organic growth and economic and cultural diversity; short, walkable blocks with attractive sidewalks; apartments above stores and buildings oriented to the street. She favored all that protected the "social capital" of the city, the human relationships that make the city hum.
For New Urbanists and old urbanists alike, "Death and Life" is both how-to book and bible, part strategic manual, part spiritual guidebook.
A sacred text, architect Robert Stern called it last Saturday afternoon, just before Jacobs accepted the Vincent Scully Prize at Washington, D.C.'s National Building Museum. (I couldn't be there, but the museum kindly e-mailed a transcript.)
'Ultimate freedom'
"Forty years ago, when most Americans held dense urbanism in considerable contempt, Jane Jacobs helped us see the city not as a terrible tyranny but as a great liberation, the ultimate freedom," Stern told the group of more than 700 assembled in the museum's Great Hall.
"She did this with a book, which burst on the scene with a force quite unlike that of any previous book" -- a book "so cogent and so sensible that real people could actually participate in an intelligent discussion of architecture and urbanism."
Imagine that.
"She perceived and convinced a vast public that something which everyone believed was right, was in fact utterly wrong," said Scully, Yale professor emeritus and the country's most influential architectural historian. "She saw that a whole structure of professional thought and practice relating to the city was indeed destructive of the city."
"She was the one who helped us to see and appreciate what was right before our very eyes," Stern said. "She helped us realize that the heart and soul of our cities, our daily bread as it were, was the typical neighborhoods of our metropolis."
Jacobs was the second recipient of the Scully award, a $25,000 honorarium that recognizes exemplary practice, scholarship or criticism in architecture, landscape architecture, historic preservation, city planning or urban design. In accepting the award, the recipient offers an original piece of scholarship on the built environment in the form of a public lecture.
Nearly 40 years after the publication of her landmark work, what would Jacobs, who rarely gives interviews and has turned down more than 30 honorary degrees from universities around the world, have to say?
Jacobs called her talk "Making Time an Ally for Neighborhoods," and in it she discussed four common kinds of failure for city neighborhoods, as well as some remedies.
The first has to do with immigrants and the low-rent neighborhoods they settle in, "enlivening some dull and dreary streets with tiny grocery and clothing stores, secondhand shops, little importing and craft enterprises. Skimpy offices and modest but exotic restaurants."
Neighborhoods that receive wave after wave of immigrants eventually deteriorate physically, Jacobs said, but neighborhoods that hold onto their immigrant populations -- like the country's many Chinatowns and Little Italys -- improve with time.
Idea: Cities should make sure new immigrant neighborhoods receive good municipal housekeeping, maintenance and police services, along with amenities like traffic taming and street trees. And they should support spontaneous economic efforts, like open-air markets. "Time becomes the ally, not the enemy of such neighborhoods."
Room to grow
Her second observation seems to have been aimed squarely at the New Urbanists.
"From time to time I glance at plans and artists' renderings for charmingly designed community hearts closely surrounded by charmingly designed residences with their yards. And I wonder where future overflow of commerce can be pleasantly accommodated."
Where do new businesses go? "[M]ost commonly they register as ugly, jarring, intrusive smears in the residential streets where they were never meant to intrude. Watching this happen, people think the neighborhood is going to the dogs. So it is, visually. And soon, as a sequel, perhaps socially. In the end, perhaps economically as well."
Idea: Build easily adaptable buildings on streets adjacent to commercial districts. "For example, row houses can be designed to convert easily and pleasantly to shops, small offices, studios, restaurants, all kinds of things. Several joined together even convert well to small schools and other institutions."
Third, moderate gentrification is healthier in the long run than excessive gentrification, which prices the original settlers -- usually artists -- out of the neighborhood. The rich, or their children or heirs, eventually grow bored with such neighborhoods, Jacobs asserts.
Idea: Encourage nonprofits or co-ops to buy and maintain housing for artists before gentrification kicks in.
Her fourth observation has to do with another kind of gentrification, that which gradually drives up the price of rents in commercial strips. Success eventually prices out diversity, creating a monoculture (to which Shadyside's Walnut Street creeps ever closer).
Idea: Encourage business owners, through public policy, to also become building owners.
New York inspiration
The woman who, as Stern said, almost single-handedly saved New York was born in Scranton in 1916. She was living in New York and working as an associate editor at Architectural Forum when she wrote "Death and Life," drawing from patient observation of daily life in dense, traditional neighborhoods and in city housing projects.
Because of their opposition to the Vietnam War, Jacobs, her architect husband and their three children left the United States in 1968 and moved to Toronto, where she became active in local and national affairs and wrote several more books about cities and their economies. Her most recent, an invented dialogue among five New Yorkers, is "The Nature of Economies," published this year.
Throughout her work, she has taken a fresh look at that which most of us take for granted, uncovering the economic, social and urban design patterns as well as the public policies that either kill cities or make them work.
And ever always, as Scully put it, she liberated us "from the dead hand of the expert."
"Aluminum in Contemporary Architecture" opens today at the Carnegie Museum of Art's Heinz Architectural Center.
"The objective of the show really is to show the versatility of aluminum in architectural applications and the innovative ways it's been used in the last 10 years, as illustrated through eight projects from around the world," curator Tracy Myers said yesterday. "I decided to show projects in which the use of aluminum is very obvious, but also innovative, unusual or eye-catching."
The show, which we'll review next week, continues through Feb. 4.
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