A TRUE URBAN LEGEND OF NYC
Jane Jacobs, the mother who fought a giant & saved the Village
NEXT time you take a walk down Broome Street from Little Italy into Soho, treasure the little historic churches, the classic Italian restaurants and cafes, the castiron buildings, cobblestone streets, galleries and boutiques. Fifty years ago, they were almost swallowed up by an eight-lane highway called the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), which was slated to cross Broome and tear northward through the West Village to connect the East River bridges to the Holland Tunnel.
One fearless New Yorker stopped it. Her name was Jane Jacobs, a sharpfeatured woman with black-framed eyeglasses and an unvarying bob haircut. She was an author and neighborhood activist who challenged development czar Robert Moses, the power broker who carved up The Bronx to build the Cross-Bronx Expressway and Brooklyn for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, among other roadways. In doing so, 2,000 homes and 10,000 jobs were saved. She was David to Moses’ Goliath.
Jacobs would have turned 100 this year, and a new biography, “Eyes on the Street,” by former Brooklynite Robert Kanigel, chronicles Jacobs’ odyssey from writer to trailblazing urban savior. She is also the subject of the new documentary “Citizen Jane: Battle for the City,” and even a forthcoming off-Broadway rock musical, “BLDZR.”
BORN in Scranton, Pa., Jacobs moved to the city in 1934 and became a journalist, working for Architecture Forum magazine. By Kanigel’s account, she considered herself a writer foremost and had to be “pulled kicking and screaming” into activism. But in the 1950s and 1960s, there were enough changes afoot in her beloved neighborhood of Greenwich Village, where she moved in 1947 with her husband, to merit her attention.
“I wanted to be learning things and writing,” she said. “I resented that I had to stop and devote myself to fighting what was basically an absurdity that had been foisted on me and my neighbors.”
She first did battle with Moses in the early 1950s, joining forces with concerned West Village mothers to stop a plan to put a 120-foot-wide road through the middle of Washington Square Park.
Goodbye, arch; farewell, fountain. Moses, Kanigel writes, had wanted to “move traffic through the Village” since the 1930s. Jacobs wrote a letter to city officials protesting the project in 1955, but she also implored Tammany Hall kingmaker Carmine DeSapio, a Village resident, to support the ban — or lose the support of her mom squad in the re-election campaign of a Tammany-backed veteran assemblyman, William Passannante.
Jacobs and her crew rallied, plastering the neighborhood with posters created by the children who lived there, including her three kids, Ned, James and Mary, and gathering 35,000 signatures. DeSapio stopped the plan, and Moses hit the roof. At a Board of Estimate meeting, Jacobs remembered Moses saying, “There’s nobody against this, nobody, but a bunch of, a bunch of mothers!”
Kanigel describes Moses as a “bully” who “never held elective office” but managed to have his hands “on everything.” A former New York City parks commissioner, he was known as the “master builder” of the city, as well as Long Island, Rockland and Westchester counties. Thanks to Moses, New York is home to Lincoln Center and the United Nations, among other landmarks. Nevertheless, Jacobs insisted he “did more harm to New York City than any other hundred men you can imagine put together.”
WITH her reputation as an author on the rise following the success of her 1961 masterwork, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” and her fame growing as a relentless activist — journalists such as Jane Kramer covered her in The Village Voice — Jacobs was ready to take on anyone.
But before her next battle with Moses, she had to stop a West Village urban-renewal project announced in 1961 that targeted a 14-block stretch from West 11th Street to Morton Street, between Hudson Street — where the Jacobs family lived at No. 555 — and the Hudson River piers. According to Kanigel, approximately 1,800 people lived on those blocks and “thousands more from the outside worked in the neighborhood’s warehouses, factories, retail spaces and small businesses.”
Jacobs and her neighbors set up the Committee to Save the West Village and got to work. Filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer, whose “Citizen Jane” will pre-
miere Nov. 10 at the DOC NYC documentary festival, says she was an inspired strategist. To mirror the buildings slated for destruction, which had X’s taped to the windows, Jacobs “had people wear sunglasses with X’s painted on them,” Tyrnauer says. “This became a really potent visual. She marshaled legions of people. In the film, she says it took thousands of people to save downtown.”
Tyrnauer says Jacobs was also the victim of sexism, sometimes from the highest perches of the media. “Lewis Mumford’s review of ‘The Death and Life of American Cities’ in The New Yorker was called ‘ Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies.’ She was dismissed as a housewife from Hudson Street.”
The New Yorker may have turned up its nose at Jacobs, but the actual New Yorkers who lived downtown needed her. A Catholic priest, Father Gerard La Mountain, reached out to Jacobs when the LOMEX plan, first conceived by Moses in 1941, finally became a reality in 1962, when, according to the real-estate news site Curbed, “construction was slated to begin on a small section of the highway at the corner of Broome and Chrystie streets.”
As pastor of the Church of the Most Holy Crucifix in Little Italy, which fronted onto Broome Street and was directly in the path of the wrecking ball, he was understandably worried. At first, she said no, but her street-fighting sense took over and the battle began. From 1962 to 1968, Kanigel writes, “Jane was in the thick of it.”
SHE pulled some ballsy stunts, showing up with residents at one hearing for the expressway wearing gas masks to emphasize the potential polluting effects from the demolition and resulting expressway car exhaust. Although the plan seemed de- feated in December 1962, it was revived and championed by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and the state Department of Transportation.
At a hearing held in the auditorium of Seward Park HS on April 10, 1968, Jacobs stormed the stage with other protesters, where department planning engineer John Toth was showing drawings of the new expressway. He tried to shoo her off and called for the police on hand to arrest her. A stenographer recording the hearing rose from her chair, waving away the crowd, fearful for the well-being of her machine, which was new. In the chaos, the tape, the only record of the meeting, fell out of the machine onto the stage, where it was stepped on and destroyed. Jacobs told her supporters, “There is no record. There is no hearing.”
“She was arrested and put in jail,” Tyrnauer says. She was charged with three felonies: rioting, criminal mischief and ob- structing public administration. And she had to pay for a new stenotype machine.
THE Jacobs arrest made the papers, and cast a spotlight on the LOMEX controversy. According to Curbed, Moses was beginning to lose influence at City Hall and, in 1969, Mayor John Lindsay formally withdrew his support for the venture and the Board of Estimate formally abandoned plans for the highway.
Moses remained unbowed. In his 1970 book, “Public Works: A Dangerous Trade,” he wrote: “Apparently the expressway has been shelved for the present. On the other hand, most of the parties concerned, including the Downtown Manhattan Association, the Regional Plan Association and others, agree that there must eventually be a Lower Manhattan Expressway.” His fantasy was never to be realized.
With the Moses affair behind her, Jacobs turned her attention to family matters, in particular Ned’s 18th birthday. Kanigel says she “didn’t want to take any chances” that he might be sent to fight in Vietnam. Jacobs, who was still “under indictment” from the Seward Park hearing (the charges were later reduced to disorderly conduct), and her family closed up the house on Hudson Street, collected their necessary papers, packed up the car and moved. To Toronto.
In her lifetime, Jacobs published seven books. She died at age 89 in 2006. Her antagonism with Moses, who passed on to eternity’s expressway in 1981, inspired several books and one opera, “A Marvelous Order,” with music by Judd Greenstein and a libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith. “She was really a whistleblower on a grand scale,” Tyrnauer says.