Ambitious portrait misses its target
URBANIST JANE JACOBS GETS LOST IN ‘WORD-HEAP’
KANIGEL MAKES HER SOUND LIKE NANCY DREW.
Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs By Robert Kanigel Alfred A. Knopf 482 pp; $47
Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was a heroic figure of intellectual life in the second half of the 20th century, and she is nearly always instructive and cheering to read about.
On the page, she gave us The Death and Life of Great American Cities ( 1961), a pioneering book that was a flaming arrow — it travels still, across the decades — through the heart of soulless and arrogant urban renewal projects.
Off the page, she fought against the worst of these schemes, including Robert Moses’ plan to run a 10- lane elevated superhighway through much of what is now SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Without her, New York City might resemble Los Angeles.
Her Greenwich Village house, on Hudson Street, was her war room. So many people came in and out that Jacobs and her husband disconnected the ringer and left the door open at night. She offered guests what she called a West Village martini — gin and vermouth and ice and an olive in any mismatched glass that was handy. “You put your finger in it,” she wrote, “and go swish, swish, swish.”
About her David- vs.- Goliath battles, she told an interviewer: “As long as you’re doing it, you might as well decide to have a good time. Of course, what makes it a really good time is if you win.”
Her ideas about making cities quirky and vibrant — she argued for mixed-use neighbourhoods and short blocks so people can move more freely — seem like common sense to us today. They were hardly so at the time. We are living in a world she helped make.
There have been several biographies of Jacobs, including Alice Alexiou’s Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary (2006). She springs to life, too, in Anthony Flint’s tidy and admirable Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City (2011).
In Robert Kanigel’s Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs, we have the largest and most comprehensive biography of her to date. Alas, the book is a word-heap. Eyes on the Street is graceless, infantilizing of its subject and strangely unbuttoned in tone. It often seems to be muttered as much as written, like one of those garbled subway announcements you cannot understand but suspect might matter.
The sentences in Kanigel’s book do not always track. (“As it was for many newcomers from the hinterlands, New York City could intimidate.”) When they do track, sometimes you wish they did not. “At least once as a child, she flew in an airplane,” we read, “perhaps a biplane like Snoopy’s.” What is Snoopy doing in this sentence?
The ends of Kanigel’s sentences, in this fashion, go back in time, like the Terminator, to assassinate their own beginnings. “One of Jane’s early assignments took her to the South Pacific,” he writes about her freelance writing career, before adding, “if only in her head.” At a dark moment, Jacobs “turned to gambling.” Wait, the author says in the next sentence. She’d simply bought a portion of a lottery ticket. Mentally, you begin to add sad- trombone sounds. ( Whomp-whomp-whomp.)
Jacobs grew up in Scranton, Pa., in a literate and unconventional family. She was a serious young woman, mature for her age and committed to becom- ing a writer when she arrived in New York City in 1934 at 18. Kanigel makes her sound like Nancy Drew.
In 1943, she took a job with the U. S. Office of War Information. Here is the author’s comment on her willingness to travel for the position: “sounds like 27- year- old Jane was up for an adventure.”
Jacobs was a tall, owlish, arresting presence. People stared at her and thought, “Who is that person?” I dissent from Kanigel’s flat assertion that “she was never beautiful.” I dissent further when he writes, “She was not even memorably unbeautiful.” He goes on to call her “pudding- faced” when older and, later, “fat and dumpy.”
Kanigel quotes his interview subjects haplessly. (“I was happy as a clam.”) His analogies are inane. Jacobs’ fight against Moses’ highway through Lower Manhattan was not her first taste of battle, but she was anything but a jaded professional agitator. Here is the tin- eared question Kanigel asks: “Was the Lower Manhattan Expressway by now just more of the same for Jane Jacobs, like an orthopedic surgeon’s 117th hip replacement operation?”
Most worrisome is the way the author seems to be talking to himself throughout Eyes on the Street. After noting that Jacobs seemed to be fearless from the start of her life, he adds in parentheses: “From the very start? Like, in her genes? Good luck teasing that one out.” Good luck to us all.
Kanigel is a science writer and the author of several previous books, including The Man Who Knew Infinity ( 1991), about the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
His book somewhat finds its feet in its second half, as Kanigel increasingly gets out of the way and lets Jacobs’ story tell itself. Many readers will have already returned to their apartments, run their fingers through some gin and ice, and slammed the door.