A Divergence of Modernities 93
A Divergence of Modernities: Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses and the over Moses' plans for a Lower Manhattan Expressway ("Lomex") that
Re-Visioning of New York City
George L. Scheper
A clash of two very strong and very colorful personalities surfaced in New
York City in 1958 in conflict over a plan to run a modern thoroughfare
through Washington Square Park in the heart of Greenwich Village. One
principal was perhaps the most powerful individual in New York City's
outsized world of urban planning; the other was an as yet obscure Village
housewife and novice neighborhood activist. The clash was to have an
unexpected outcome and made for a meaty journalistic story, but more
importantly the clash foregrounded two incompatible visions of cities and
of what cities are for. And beyond that, this very specific and localized
urban planning conflict was, in effect, a dramatic culmination of a conflict
over competing versions of modernity that had been building throughout
the modern era and which intensified in the twentieth century, coming to
this particular head in nineteen-fifties New York City.
Proposing the roadway, in the name of rational and progressive
planning for the perceived economic and traffic needs of mid-century
New York City, was Robert Moses, at the peak of his career as the
"Master Builder" of New York, head of a number of "public authorities,"
the somewhat arcane administrative structures that had become the
driving and enabling organizational entities behind the most gargantuan
and ambitious urban building program in—well, in the history of the
world. Moses had come to personify a totalizing vision of what was good
for the public and of what was necessary for New York City to function as
a twentieth century metropolis and world city.
Opposing the road was a motley crew of Greenwich Village residents
combining old-time ethnics and new-time bohemians, and one
neighborhood voice in particular: a young mother with no college degree
or any other professional background, named Jane Jacobs. Jacobs was
positioned as a significant voice because of her personal qualities of
energy and persistence and an absolute lack of intimidatability. It helped
that she had an editorial job at the journal Architectural Forum, but her
soon to emerge prominence would come from a book that she had begun
in the Fall of 1958, the writing of it interrupted by the road battle, and
which she would complete in January 1961. It was a first book, by an
unknown without professional credentials, but immediately upon
publication it was on its way to becoming one of the great talked-about
books of the decade and eventually a controversial classic of American
literature to be picked up both by Modern Library and Penguin: The
Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961).
The story of this particular urban planning battle over Washington
Square—and its related follow-up, the larger battle in the early sixties
Published in the Community College Humanities Review, Vol. 28 Fall 2008
would run through the neighborhood now known as SoHo, through Little
Italy and the Lower East Side to connectors to the Williamsburg and
Manhattan Bridges—has been told a number of times, and by now the
literature on Robert Moses and on Jane Jacobs has become quite large,
and of course the literature on the mid-twentieth century controversies
over urban planning is vast. My purpose here is not to retell or summarize
those matters, except as needed for clarity, but rather to re-contextualize
the clashes over Washington Square and over the Lomex, attempting to
place the issues in broader cultural contexts. In particular, I'd like to
reframe the controversy as a component of broader currents in the
humanities having to do with the multiple meanings(s) of modernity.
Robert Moses is known by virtually universal reputation today as the
Master Builder of New York and—ever since Robert Caro's
extraordinarily thorough 1974 biography and critique—as the Power
Broker. Caro's book remains the requisite starting point for study of
Moses, and the picture it gives, while thorough and in a sense "balanced,"
is quite a devastating portrayal of both a brilliant omnivorous mind and a
towering drive that found expression not in quiet professionalism or
academicism on the one hand, or in elective politics on the other, but
rather in an innovative third way, and a very direct way, to the exercise of
power: the expert manipulation of the old English institution of "public
authorities."
As head of the Triborough Bridge and New York City Tunnel
Authority, perhaps his most important position of leverage, and a rack of
similar posts (at the peak of his career he held simultaneously at least
twelve different appointed state and city positions), he collected and
managed his own monies, was not subject to election or other direct
accountability to the public, and was seemingly not vulnerable to
dismissal or "dis-appointment" because he had made himself appear to be
indispensable to the continuance of long range, ongoing public works
projects in a forty year plus career that spanned the terms of five mayors
and six governors.1
The roll-call and scope of Moses' projects is mind-boggling; they
include major highways: the New England Throughway, Henry Hudson
Parkway, Southern State and Northern State Parkways, the Long Island
Expressway, the Interboro Parkway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway,
the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway; major
bridges and tunnels: the Triborough Bridge, Bronx-Whitestone Bridge,
1
For an excellent summary of the "public authority" structure, see
Jameson W. Doig's essay, "How to Rein in and Reshape Robert Moses:
the Port Authority's Varied Strategies."
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 94 Scheper
Throgs Neck Bridge, Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and Henry Hudson
Bridge; the queens-Midtown Tunnel and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel;
dozens of state parks, including: Fire Island, Jones Beach, Flushing
Meadow, Jacob Riis Park, Rockaway Park; and scores of playgrounds and
swimming pools. In addition Moses played a leading role in the
construction of such monumental public facilities as Idlewild (now
Kennedy) Airport, Lincoln Center, the New York Coliseum, the United
Nations Headquarters, Shea Stadium (just recently demolished), and the
infrastructures of two World's Fairs (1939 and 1964-65). In addition he
oversaw construction of "ninety-five blocks of public housing in eastern
Manhattan that housed almost 150,000 people and was responsible for the
building of apartments housing more than a half-million tenants" (Short
37; cf. Naylor 10-11; and Ballon and Jackson).
Clearly, such a pharaonic accomplishment was achievable only at the
expense of a certain arrogance and ruthlessness, as Caro was not the first
to document. Moses himself acknowledged that "When you operate in an
overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax" (Caro
849) and he frequently cited Stalin's maxim that "You can't make an
omelette without breaking eggs" (Berman 294), the eggs in this case being
the quarter of a million people displaced by Moses, projects. As he
himself said, "There are people who like things as they are. I can't hold
out any hope to them. They have to keep moving further away.... Let
them go to the Rockies" (Caro 275). As Caro succinctly sums up, "Any
time someone got in Moses' way, Moses kicked him in the balls" (507).
Caro and other critics like to point out that what Moses and his like
regarded as urban renewal was really a program of urban removal, that
there was never a follow through on the promise to provide as much
affordable housing replacement for the poor and for minorities as got
eliminated, that out of the 255 playgrounds built in NYC in the 1930's,
only one was built in Harlem, and that with regard to public housing,
"Among the frills Moses objected to were covers on toilet bowls, doors on
closets" (Caro 758). Perhaps the greatest negative impact on the city as a
whole, in the eyes of his critics, was Moses' unwavering priority of
accommodation to the automobile at the expense of mass transit. Caro's
influential book proclaimed its critical perspective in its very title and
subtitle: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York City.
It was published in 1974, when New York City saw its economic and
social fortunes sink lower than at any time since the Great Depression; it
was the era that saw the infamous Daily News headline, "Ford to City:
Drop Dead" (October 30. 1975) conveying the President's refusal of a
federal bailout. The once lionized Robert Moses began to serve as a
scapegoat for the city's ills. An early proclaimer of this judgment was
Jane Jacobs herself; as she said in 1961 in The Death and Life of
Community College Humanities Review
A Divergence of Modernities 95
American Cities in the concluding paragraph of her chapter "Erosion of
Cities or Attrition of Automobiles":
[I]t is understandable that men who were young in the
1920's were captivated by the vision of the freeway radiant
city, with the specious promise that it would be appropriate
to an automobile age. At least it was then a new idea; to men
of the generation of New York's Robert Moses, for example,
it was radical and exciting in the days when their minds were
growing and their ideas forming. Some men tend to cling to
old intellectual excitements, just as some belles, when they
are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their
exciting youth. But it is harder to understand why this form
of arrested mental development should be passed on intact to
succeeding generations of planners and designers. It is
disturbing to think that men who are young today, men who
are being trained now for their careers, should accept on the
grounds that they must be 'modern' in their thinking,
conceptions about cities and traffic which are not only
unworkable, but also to which nothing new of any
significance has been added since their fathers were
children. {Death and Life 371)
Marshall Berman offers an eloquent and highly personal account of
the ruinous devastation of a flourishing neighborhood wrought by Moses
in the name of modernist progress in the construction of the Cross-Bronx
Expressway:
Moses was coming through, and no temporal or spiritual
power could block his way.
For ten years, through the late 1950's and early 1960's,
the center of the Bronx was pounded and blasted and
smashed. My friends and I would stand on the parapet of the
Grand concourse, where 174th Street had been, and survey
the work's progress—the immense steam shovels and
bulldozers and timber and steel beams . . . the giant cranes
reaching far above the Bronx's tallest roofs, the dynamite
blasts and tremors, the wild, jagged crags of rock newly torn,
the vistas of devastation as far as the eye could see—and
marvel to see our ordinary nice neighborhood transformed
into sublime, spectacular ruins. (292-93)
"The Jews of the Bronx" Berman reports, were nonplussed: could a
fellow-Jew really want to do this to us? (We had little idea of what kind of
Fall 2008
 97 Scheper
Jew he was, or of how much we were all an obstruction in his path.)"
(292).
The irony is that this master builder, so catered to in his own day by
the media, and now so often excoriated as the agent of so much ruination,
started out as himself quite the reformer. Berman points out that if you
look closely at the chronology of his projects, you will see that the works
of the 1920's are indeed reflective of an almost Utopian pastoral ideal—
beautiful parkways leading to beautiful beaches and parks 2 or
neighborhood swimming pools, such as the masterly examples in
McCarren Park and Sunset Park in Brooklyn, built in a high art deco style,
with attention to minutest decorative detail. And then in the 30's in the
spirit of the New Deal, came the turn to the massive infrastructure projects
built with federal money. Moses, as Berman notes, was perhaps the first to
grasp "the immense possibilities of the Roosevelt administration's
commitment to public works" (300). What resulted was, as Berman puts
it, "the modern romance of construction at its best—the romance
celebrated by Goethe's Faust, by Carlyle and Marx, by the constructivists
of the 1920's, by the soviet construction films of the five-Year Plan
period, and the TVA and FSA documentaries and WPA murals of the later
1930's" {Ibid).
But then at the end of the 30's beginning with the World's Fair of
1939-40, "Building the World of Tomorrow," featuring General Motors'
Futurama, came a decisive turn to a more commercial and more brutal
modernity, urban highway projects without any of the softening features
of the parkways; 3 relentless urban renewal demolitions of neighborhoods;
and the construction of Title 1 apartment block towers rising above barren
"open spaces," the notorious Le Corbusier-inspired "projects," whose era
finally ended only with the ritual implosion of Minoru Yamasaki's Pruitt-
Igoe buildings in Saint Louis in 1972 after a wretched 20-year life-span,
an event that "became the icon of a failed national policy" (Alexiou 123).
Caro's Power Broker, written at a cultural moment of New York
City's distress, shaped the negative backlash evaluation of Moses' impact
on the city for a generation. And then, not surprisingly, beginning with the
centennial of Moses' birth in 1988, came a round of revisionist
rehabilitations of Moses' life and work, culminating (so far) in the recent
three-museum show "Robert Moses and the Modern City," mounted in the
winter of 2007 at MoMA, the Queens Museum of Art and the Wallach
2
See J. Lance Mallamo, "Building Roads to Greatness: Robert Moses and
Long Island's State Parkways."
3
Compare, for instance, the infamous Long Island Expressway (1940)—
or Long Island Distressway as I remember calling it—with the almost
pastoral earlier Southern State Parkway (1927).
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A Divergence of Modernities 95
Gallery at Columbia University, accompanied by a magisterial catalogue
of the same title co-edited by curator Hillary Ballon and the dean of New
York City scholarship Kenneth T. Jackson (2007). An important
symposium was held in connection with the show, and prominently not
invited to participate was Robert Caro. New York Times and other
reportage convey an understanding that the show and the scholarly
catalogue were to be taken as something of a rehabilitation of Moses (see
Goldberger; Ourousoff; Pogrebin), and indeed the catalogue makes clear
that Moses should be taken as a cultural figure in urban planning and
construction comparable to or surpassing Haussmann in Paris or Otto
Wagner in Vienna. One essay in the catalogue stands out, however, as
consciously less committed to the project of rehabilitation and more
interested in continuing to engage the ongoing controversy over Moses'
work: Robert Fishman's "Revolt of the Urbs/ Robert Moses and His
Critics," which revisits the Washington Square and Lomex controversies
of the late fifties and early sixties, in which the mighty Moses was finally
"road-blocked" by populist resistance and solidarity.
Actually, as noted, the revisionist assessment of Moses had begun
earlier, in connection with the 1988 centennial, notably a conference at
Hofstra University sponsored by the Long Island Studies Institute,
eventuating in the publication Robert Moses/ Single-Minded Genius
(1989). The essays in this volume not surprisingly evince a Long Island
and suburban take on Moses, reflecting the perspectives of communities
historically well served by Moses' seashore recreation areas and
parkways. A particularly dramatic Moses accomplishment on Long Island
is the conversion of what had once been a notorious ash-dump in Queens
(a locale that figures prominently in Fizgerald's The Great Gatsby) into
Flushing Meadows Park (see Harrison, "From Dump to Glory").
To the present day, a drive on one of Moses' Long Island parkways to
a site like Jones Beach (originally a quite derelict stretch of coastline) can
still be for any weary commuter, whether Manhattanite or suburbanite, a
quite glorious experience, even for someone as deeply antagonistic to
Moses as Marshall Berman. Here is Berman on Jones Beach:
so immense that it can easily hold a half million people on a
hot Sunday in July without any sense of congestion. Its most
striking feature as a landscape is its amazing clarity of space
and form: absolutely flat, blindingly white expanses of sand,
stretching forth to the horizon in a straight wide band, cut on
one side by the clear, pure, endless blue of the sea, and on
the other by the boardwalk's sharp unbroken line of brown. .
. . Jones Beach offers a spectacular display of the primary
forms of nature—earth, sun, water, sky—but nature here
Fall 2008
98 Scheper
appears with an abstract horizontal purity and a luminous
clarity that only culture can create. (296).
And therein lies Berman's lyrical insight. If Ferlingetti's "Coney Island of
the Mind" conjures up the rabble and hurly burley of Reginald Marsh's
paintings or Rem Koolhaas' description of Luna Park in Delirious New
York, then a "Jones Beach of the Mind" must conjure up something like
Mondrian and convey, as Berman suggests, an "Apollonian clarity, of
perfect light without shadows, cosmic geometry, unbroken perspectives
stretching onward toward an infinite horizon . . . . a romance at least as
old as Plato" (297)—and, I would argue, carried on in the purist
modernism of LeCorbusier and Mies Van der Rohe.
Thus Moses' vision is aptly situated in relation to the modernist
projects pursued at the Bauhaus and in the International Style, and in the
theorized Radiant City promulgated by LeCorbusier, who in 1929
famously proclaimed, in pursuit of the architectural purity he sought, "We
must kill the street!" The totalizing, Olympian character of LeCorbu's
thought—and Moses' practice—is brilliantly set out in the essay
"LeCorbusier's Finger and Jacobs's Thought: the Loss and Recovery of
the Subject in the City," a Lonergerian analysis by Patrick Byrne and
Richard Carroll Keeley. The authors demonstrate that LeCorbu's vision of
urban planning is inherently a view determined by an aerial perspective
with no reference to lived experience on the ground (or in the street—if
there were a street). In his less theoretic and more pragmatic version of
this perspective, Moses can be seen as someone who thought of himself as
serving the public—for its own good—while at the same time he pretty
clearly manifested a distaste or contempt for the masses of people. As
Frances Perkins has testified, Moses really disliked his clientele: "To him,
they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll
get them! I'll teach them!' He loves the public, but not as people" (quoted
in Caro 318)—just as Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies Van der Rohe
sometimes battled clients over the proper uses of "their" buildings.
A competing modernity to LeCorbu's desire to "kill the street!"
appeared on the streets of Greenwich Village in 1958 as Jane Jacobs
emerged as one of the leaders of a neighborhood coalition that fought the
mighty Moses to a standstill. In her only direct encounter with Moses, at a
Board of Estimate meeting that she and Shirley Hayes and other Village
leaders had forced, Jacobs describes how "He stood up there gripping the
railing, and he was furious at the effrontery of this [opposition] and I
guess he could already see that his plan was in danger. Because he was
saying 'There is nobody against this—NOBODY, NOBODY, NOBODY,
but a bunch of, a bunch of MOTHERS!' and then he stomped out"
(quoted in Fishman 125). Actually, as Fishman points out, the coalitions
that checkmated Moses included an unusual alliance of artists, writers,
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A Divergence of Modernities 101
bohemians, and mainstream old neighborhood representatives including a
young Ed Koch and, most important of all, the last of the Tammany
bosses, Carmine de Sapio.4
Immediately following this local battle Jacob undertook the writing of
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), an eloquently
written outpouring of scorn for the whole school of professional
"rationalized" and theorized city planning that Jacobs saw as completely
disconnected from the lived realities of the street. And that was exactly
the point, as in a most deliberate refutation of LeCorbusier, Jacobs finds
the vital center of community or gemeinschaft not in the well-designed
metropolis or even in the orderly planned neighborhood but in the very
close and messily unplanned and unplannable particularities of actual and
immediate neighborhood streets. A famous and oft-quoted passage in
Death and Life conveys what for Jacobs is this veritable "ballet" of the
streets, specifically of her own stretch of Hudson Street in the West
Village:
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the
old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for
maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the
city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of
sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes.
This order is all composed of movement and change, and
4
The story of the Washington Square conflict does not appear in Caro's
book, but it is nicely set forth in Fishman's recent article cited above; also
see the contemporary article by Charles Abrams in the Village Voice
("Washington Square and the Revolt of the Urbs," July 2, 1958); and,
with lots of additional contemporary documentation, in the section "New
York" in the anthology Ideas That Matter/ The Worlds of Jane Jacobs,
edited by Max Allen (1997). This section also covers later struggles
against Moses road projects, such as the proposed Lower Manhattan
Expressway, and includes Jacobs' own account of a supposedly crucial
hearing on April 10, 1968. Concluding that the hearing was a charade,
Jacobs and other protesters marched across the stage and in the course of
the confusion, the stenographer's tape of the session was torn up, a nice
result which would mean that the (phony) meeting had not in fact legally
taken place! In any case, the action led to Jacob's arrest and contributed to
her radical reputation. Other accounts of these struggles appear in Alice
Sparberg Alexiou's biography, Jane Jacobs, Urban Visionary (2006),
chapters 3 and 6; and in Alabaster Cities/ Urban U.S. Since 1950 by John
Rennie Short (2006), chapter 4, both of which present the conflict in a
light very favorable to Jacobs.
Fall 2008
100 Scheper
although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art
form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-
minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the
same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but
to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and
ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously
reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The
ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from
place to place, and in any one place is always replete with
new improvisations.
The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day
the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. (50)
In succeeding paragraphs Jacobs goes on to record the perceived
choreography of Hudson Street in almost lyrical terms.
Jacobs' counter-discourse did at the time move the discussion from
LeCorbu's "kill the street!" to something closer to Motown's "Dancin' in
the Street." As Berman points out, we have seen Jacob's genre of urban
montage before—in Gogol's "Nevsky Prospect," in Joyce's Ulysses, or in
the silent films Berlin, Symphony of a City by Walter Ruttmann, or Man
With a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov, or Manahatta by Paul Strand.
The messiness of these urban lived realities is precisely what the
theorizing planners had hoped to "correct."
On the other hand, critics of Jacobs' book—and they were many—in
turn heaped scorn on what they saw as her sentimentalized nostalgia for a
city that never was, except maybe for the 500 block of Hudson Street! In
defense of themselves, professional planners who reviewed the book took
Jacobs to task on the one hand for her "irritating" naivete and on the other
for her Greenwich Village elitism in thinking that her uncharacteristic
corner of NYC could somehow serve as a touchstone for all communities.
In the decades since her book's publication some critics continue to see
Jacobs' vision as hopelessly romanticized, even, as James Traub has
recently put it, as "tinged with a hopeless melancholy." Other critics have
pointed out how Jacobs seemed to ignore the elephant in the room, that is,
the problem of race in American cities.5
I would argue, however, that Jacobs' critics were often being, to
quote Marianne Moore, "literalists of the imagination." As Carroll Keeley
has said about one of Jacobs' most persistent early critics, urban planner
Roger Starr, "It seems clear that Starr's measuring stick for city life is the
5
See for instance, Jiménez-Muñoz' critique of Marshall Berman's
celebration of Jacobs' counter-discourse.
Community College Humanities Review
A Divergence of Modernities 101
value of real estate" ("The Vision of Jane Jacobs," 49). The communitas
that Jacobs was portraying (very much in the spirit of Frederick Law
Olmsted's description of the pastoral ideal realized in Prospect Park) was
a vision, not a program, and it was as a vision of an organic, relational
idea of the city that touched a chord with a divers constituency of people
outside the professional urban planning world. It was, however, precisely
the un-credentialed character of her voice that the planners found most
irritating; reviewers and commentators underlined the point by routinely
referring to her as "Mrs. Jacobs."
A particularly revealing example of this kind of patronizing treatment
is that accorded her by one of her earliest supporters, Lewis Mumford,
author of The Culture of Cities (1938). Mumford had first heard Jacobs
speak at a Harvard conference on urban planning (she spoke as a
substitute for her boss at Architectural Forum), and was sufficiently
impressed to urge her to develop her ideas as a book. But Mumford was a
peculiarly ambivalent urbanist, because mostly what he saw were the
problems of cities; consequently he was very committed to ideas about
intelligent planning and to the ideals of the Garden City movement of
Ebenezer Howard as an antidote to urban ills. As for cities as they actually
were, well, it seems he really didn't seem to like them all that much. This
all became clear when Jacobs' book came out. Mumford was wounded by
Jacob's utter scorn for ratiocinative urban planning, including his beloved
Garden City movement. (It didn't help when a number of reviewers made
comparisons between Death and Life to Mumford's own new work, the
voluminous City in History [1961], contrasting her lively and readable
writing to his own dull and turgid prose!) At any rate, Mumford's own
review of Death and Life in The New Yorker ("Home Remedies for Urban
Cancer") must have come to Jacobs as a bit of a shock, because after first
offering rather general praise of "Mrs. Jacob's" book, he went on to caste
aspersions on what he called her book's woeful lack of scholarship, which
led, he said, to its many "schoolgirl howlers" (203).
Jacobs had a more consistent early supporter in T. H. Whyte, best
known today as author of The Organization Man (1956). Subsequently, as
editor of Fortune, Whyte put together a volume called The Exploding
Metropolis (1958), a book meant to address the growing fear and even
hatred of cities in the age of highways and suburbanization. It was a
project reflecting the viewpoint of people who actually liked cities.
Whyte's own initial essay lays out the conflict with his very title: "Are
Cities Un-American?"—a question to be asked in an era of McCarthyism
and xenophobia. The concluding invited essay in the volume was Jane
Jacobs' "Downtown is for People," which, with the aid of a Rockefeller
grant, would become, three years later, The Death and Life of Great
American Cities.
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103 Scheper A Divergence of Modernities 101

Subsequent works by Whyte continued to promote the study of the focused on Jacobs work in the light of the thinking of Catholic
actual lived realities of city life rather than planners' theorizations about philosopher Bernard Lonergan, himself an admirer of Jacobs' work.
it: The Last Landscape (1968); The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces Participants in the symposium stressed the compatibility of Jacobs'
(1980); and City/ Rediscovering the Center (1988). These studies, approach with phenomenology's emphasis on "presencing" and being-as-
observing and documenting how people actually lived their urban lives, known, or, as Yogi Berra more memorably put it, "You can see a lot just
corresponded to Jacobs' own commitment to close observation of the by observing."
particulars of the street. Whyte and Jacobs represent a phenomenological This ad hoc, non-ideological quality of Jacobs' thought has frustrated
modernism diametrically at odds with the totalizing, theorizing many academics who are uncomfortable with the fact that the writings of
modernism of LeCorbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Robert Moses, a this Village lefty, who in fact left the U.S. for Canada to protect her
dichotomy nicely set out in Marshall Berman's chapter on "Modernism in children from the Vietnam war, has sometimes been embraced by neo-
New York" and in Byrne and Keeley's essay "LeCorbusier's Finger and conservatives who draw from her assaults on bad urban planning the
Jacob's Thought." I think a better word for "Thought" in the latter title unwarranted conclusion that all government involvement in social
might have been "Mindfulness," because Death and Life can be read problems is bad. But Jacobs was averse to "theory" and to anything like
throughout as an exercise in what Buddhists call Mindfulness what's now called political correctness, and she wanted no disciples, no
Meditation—as practiced at 333 Hudson Street. Jacobism (or Jacobinism or Jacobeanism), and that apparently makes her a
Without resorting to any suggestion about an early sixties Zeitgeist, it problem for ideological academics.
is nonetheless interesting to note that Jacob's book came out within a year But for a still fresh-feeling and ideologically unencumbered day in
of the publication of two other seminal works by women similarly coming the city, and an invitation to think creatively about city life, especially if
from outside the existing academic and professional establishments: Betty you've just put in a long evening at an urban planning hearing, Jane
Friedan's Feminine Mystique (1963) and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring Jacobs' Death and Life is still a fine book to have in your pocket.
(1962), which received dismissive treatments in early reviews similar to
that of Death and Life. As Berman suggests, Jacobs "makes her readers
feel that women know what it is like to live in cities, street by street, day
by day, far better than the men who plan and build them; so that, while
"feminist" is not a word Jacobs would have used about herself,
"Nonetheless, in unfolding a woman's perspective on a central public
issue, and in making that perspective rich and complex, trenchant and
compelling, she opened the way for the great wave of feminist energy that
burst at the end of the decade" (322).
Over the years, the gathering acclaim for Jacob's work, but especially
for that first trenchant volume, has come not so much for its particular
relevance to the urban planning debate as for its general visionary
character, to its invitation to think about and to re-experience the city in a
new way, new enough that a number of critics have invoked Thomas
Kuhn's sometimes overworked trope of "paradigm shift" to characterize
Jacobs' invitation to us to re-imagine what cities are and what they are for.
Thus we find in the celebratory volume called Ideas That Matter/ The
Worlds of Jane Jacobs, edited by Max Allen (1997), that tributes to
Jacobs come from an extremely divers roster, including authors Susan
Brownmiller and Jan Morris, corporate executive Alana Probst, art critic
Michael Kimmelman, founding editor/publisher of The Whole Earth
Catalog Stewart Brand and, yes, many academics, architects and
"planners-in-recovery." A Boston College symposium on Jane Jacobs,
published as Ethics in Making a Living, edited by Fred Lawrence (1989)

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104 Scheper
Works Cited
Abrams, Charles. "The Case for the City: Washington Square and the
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Community College Humanities Review

 COMMUNITY COLLEGE HUMANITIES REVIEW

Volume 28 Fall 2008

EDITORIAL BOARD

Editor: Ned M. Wilson, Ph.D.

nwilson@ccha-assoc.org

Central Division Pacific Western

Richard Kalfus, Ph.D. Jeffrey Clausen
St. Louis Community College Green River Community College
Kirkwood, MO 63122 Bonney Lake, WA 98391

Robert Sessions, Ph.D. Donald J. Foran, Ph.D.

Kirkwood Community College Centralia College
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 54206 Olympia, WA 352 5733

Raymond Smith Pfeiffer, Ph.D. Southern Division

Delta College
University Center, MI 48710
Eastern Division
Scott Ash, Ph.D.
Nassau Community College
Garden City, NY 11530-6793
Emily S. Tai, Ph.D.
Queensborough Community
College, CUNY
Bayside, New York 11364-1497
George L. Scheper, Ph.D.
Community College of Baltimore
County—Essex
Baltimore, Maryland
Ted Wadley
Georgia Perimeter College,
Decatur Campus
Decatur, Georgia 30034
Southwestern Division
Rebecca Li Balc'arcel
Tarrant County College—
Northeast Campus
Hurst, TX 76054,
Jane England
North Central Texas College
Gainesville, TX 76240-4699
Frank Perez
Tarrant County College
Hurst, TX 76054-3299

iii