Cities & Urban Renewal

Getting back to one of the intents of this blog, to provide quality backyard reviews of slected books, I am currently reading The Life and Death of Great American Cities By Jane Jacobs. Who knew a book about the ills of urban renewal (yes the ills of urban renewal, not the ills of the urban space itself) could be so interesting to read. It is the writing and the clear opinion that sucks me in. Though I can't say I have an activist slant myself (yet) I love the clarity which comes from a true interest and belief in what Jacobs is talking about. I enjoy the absolutes that are peppered throughout her narrative. She adds illustrative stories help her concepts stick, and she apologizes up front, in the introduction, for the fact that many of her illustrations come from New York City where she lives.

One more point and I'll add an excerpt. I'm reminded of my Organic Chem professor's completeness of explanation, and his ability to head off loopholes and 'but what ifs.' Jacobs intelligently adds caveats when her parallels are only making a certain point and not completely applicable. One example of this is her comparison of urban planners to doctors in the sense that many urban planners (probably more true in her time) are incorrectly inundated with the 'right' way to plan an urban space the same way doctors of the 19th century were incorrectly inundated with bloodletting as the 'right' way to cure illness. She makes it clear that she is only illustrating the ability of an institution to perpetuate the wrong approach.

In this excerpt she is talking about what makes some streets safe and some streets unsafe. One element she says is that there needs to be eyes on the street, either from the windows, from the shop fronts, or from passers by.

My block of the street, I must explain, is a small one, but it contains a remarkable range of buildings, varying from several vintages of tenements to three- and four-story houses that have been converted into low-rent flats with stores on the ground floor, or returned to single-family use like ours. Across the street there used to be mostly four-story brick tenements with stores below. But twelve years ago several buildings, from the corner to the middle of the block, were converted into one building with elevator apartments of small size and high rents.

The incident that attracted my attention was a suppressed struggle going on between a man and a little girl of eight or nine years old. The man seemed to be trying to get the girl to go with him. By turns he was directing a cajoling attention to her, and the assuming an air of non-chalance. The girl was making herself rigid, as children do when they resist, against the wall of one of the tenements across the street.

As I watched from our second-floor window, making up my mind how to intervene if it seemed advisable, I saw it was not going to be necessary. From the butcher shop beneath the tenement had emerged the woman who, with her husband, runs the shop; she was standing within earshot of the man, her arms folded and a look of determination on her face. Joe Cornacchia, who with his sons-in-law keeps the delicatessen, emerged about the same moment and stood solidly to the other side. Several heads poked out of the tenement windows above, one was withdrawn quickly and its owner reappeared a moment later in the doorway behind the man. Two men from the bar next to the butcher shop came to the doorway and waited. On my side of the street, I saw that the locksmith, and the fruit man and the laundry proprietor had all come out of their shops and that the scene was also being surveyed from a number of windows besides ours. That man did not know it, but he was surrounded. Nobody was going to allow a little girl to be dragged off, even if nobody knew who she was.

I am sorry -- sorry purely for dramatic purposes -- to have to report that the little girl turned out to be the man's daughter.

Throughout the duration of the little drama, perhaps five minutes in all, no eyes appeared in the windows of the high-rent, small-apartment building. It was the only building of which this was true. When we first moved to our block, I used to anticipate happily that perhaps soon all the buildings would be rehabilitated like that one. I know better now, and can only anticipate with gloom and foreboding the recent news that exactly this transformation is scheduled for the rest of the block frontage adjoining the high-rent building. The high-rent tenants, most of whom are so transient we cannot even keep track of their faces, have not the remotest idea of who takes care of their street, or how. A city neighborhood can absorb and protect a substantial number of these birds of passage, as our neighborhood does. But if and when the neighborhood finally becomes them, they will gradually find the streets less secure, they will be vaguely mystified about it, and if things get bad enough they will drift away to another neighborhood which is mysteriously safer.