Jane Jacobs

Urbanist Jane Jacobs passed away in Toronto yesterday:

In 1952, Ms. Jacobs got a job as an editor at Architectural Forum, where she stayed for 10 years. That gave her a perch from which to observe urban renewal projects. On a visit to Philadelphia, she noticed that the streets of a project were deserted while an older, nearby street was crowded.

“So, I got very suspicious of this whole thing,” she told The Toronto Star in 1997. “I pointed that out to the designer, but it was absolutely uninteresting to him. How things worked didn’t interest him.

“He wasn’t concerned about its attractiveness to people. His notion was totally aesthetic, divorced from everything else.”

Her doubts increased after William Kirk, the director of the Union Settlement in East Harlem, taught her new ways of seeing neighborhoods. She came to see the prevalent planning notions, which involved bulldozing low-rise housing in poor neighborhoods and replacing it with tall apartment buildings surrounded by open space, as a superstition akin to early 19th-century physicians’ belief in bloodletting.

“There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder,” she wrote in “Death and Life,” “and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”

. . .

Her seemingly simple prescriptions for neighborhood diversity, short blocks, dense populations and a mix of buildings represented a major rethinking of modern planning. They were coupled with fierce condemnations of the writings of the planners Sir Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard, as well as those of the architect Le Corbusier and Lewis Mumford, who championed the ideal of graceful towers rising over exquisite open spaces.

One of the mix of buildings she wrote about was 11th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues . . .

For New Yorkers, she lived on in the famous photo of her with a beer and a cigarette in the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village . . .

It’s worth noting that she talked a lot about bars in Death and Life of Great American Cities. Although she might have a problem with the glut of bars in, say, the East Village (where community boards are on the hunt — community boards, by the way, being one of Jacobs’ big suggestions in Death and Life), she definitely saw bars as key to a neighborhood’s diversity — something that helps keep neighborhoods lively and safe well into the evening.

The AP obit features this gem:

During the Depression, on days when job hunts went nowhere, she would invest a nickel in the subway and explore a neighborhood: the diamond district, the garment district, the meatpacking district.

This love of exploration is of course the guiding principle behind the Big Map, so we’re indebted to her in this way, too.

(Les Freres Corbusiers get a shout-out, too: “Her most famous confrontation came in the early ’60s, when she helped defeat a plan by New York City park commissioner Robert Moses to build an expressway through Washington Square, their rivalry immortalized in the 2004 play ‘Boozy.'”)

The Shakedown Went Very Well, Thank You

After clamoring for the Mets to be “better neighbors,” Queens politicians seem happy with whatever deal they’ve struck with the team in exchange for their help financing the new stadium:

The Mets pledged jobs, contracts and other goodies for Queens yesterday to win support for their proposed new stadium.

“We’ve got a deal here,” said City Councilman Hiram Monserrate (D-Queens), whose district includes Shea Stadium. “It’s a home run for the borough.”

The deal paves the way for approval today by the full Council for a $798 million financing deal to build a new stadium for the Mets. The Council is also set to approve a similar $1.2 billion financing deal for the Yankees’ new stadium.

. . .

No dollar amount was given for the Mets pact, but 25% of the team’s annual community and charitable donations and related activities is to be steered to Queens sports, school and community groups.

The Mets also pledged to “use all reasonable efforts” to have at least 25% of construction contracts and jobs go to Queens firms and residents, and another 25% of the contracts go to minority- and women-owned firms.

Did You Hear What They Want To Do With Blackwell’s Island?

Department of Corrections officials announced that they identified a site for a new jail in the Bronx. They just don’t want to say where:

A South Bronx industrial lot is to become the site for the city’s new $375 million jail, officials said yesterday.

John Antonelli, a deputy commissioner of the Department of Correction, told the City Council that the facility would have space for 2,000 inmates and be just two miles away from the courthouse.

“We have identified a site in the Oak Point section that is in reasonable proximity to the courts, appropriately zoned and large enough to accommodate a 2,000-bed facility,” Antonelli testified before the council’s Fire & Criminal Justice Committee.

The proposed site is in an area with garbage dumps, a sewage-treatment facility and power plants.

The site’s prior owners were investigated for possible ties to reputed crime boss John Gotti and declared bankruptcy, leaving behind $60 million in unpaid taxes.

“I would anticipate opposition to this, but I think that your agency is going to have to come forth with a more detailed plan than what we have today,” warned Councilman James Vacca (D-Bronx).

Where, you say, is the “Oak Point” section of the Bronx? It’s not in the Encyclopedia of New York City? Neither Lloyd Ultan nor John McNamara (see here) has written the definitive history of the neighborhood? Maybe that’s because Corrections officials are really talking about Hunts Point, but then we would have known where they were talking about . . .

Next thing you know, they’ll be putting a jail in the Winfield section of Queens, and over in Vandewater’s Heights in Manhattan, one within walking distance of Punkiesberg (uh, scratch that example!), or maybe one in Kreischerville.

For extra credit.

It’s Cross-Promotion!

An opening sequence for Six Feet Under: New York City:

A 24-year-old Manhattan man was thrown to his death into a parking lot at Long Island City’s Silvercup Studios after crashing into a wall on the Queensborough Bridge early Friday morning, Channel 7 News reported.

Luis Colon was pronounced dead at the scene after his 2003 Honda Pilot struck the left wall of the bridge just before 4 a.m., ejecting him 30 feet, police said. Colon was thrown through the driver’s side window and fell into the parking lot of Silvercup Studios at 42-22 22nd St., Channel 7 reported.

Silvercup, home of The Sopranos (get it?), is under the Queensboro Bridge . . . yeesh, what a way to go.

Law & Order Back To Toronto? Of Course Not!

The Law & Order Corporate Welfare Act of 2006:

A group of City Council members yesterday called on the state to expand a program started last year that provides tax credits to film producers who shoot at least 75% of a movie in New York.

“The credit, everyone agrees, has been hugely successful,” Council Member David Yassky, a Democrat of Brooklyn, told reporters at City Hall.

Enacted as part of the “Made in N.Y.” program, the tax break is offered as an incentive for filmmakers who can reclaim a total of 15% of a movie’s production costs as a tax credit. The filmmakers get a 5% break on city taxes and a 10% cut in state taxes. Lawmakers put initial caps of $12.5 million annually for four years in city credits and $25 million a year for the state.

The city’s total share has already been allocated, and a current proposal being negotiated in the state budget would more than double the size of the program. The city would have $30 million an year to give in credits to filmmakers, and the state would have $60 million.

. . .

While critics of the tax credits deride it as a political favor to Hollywood, supporters say they are needed to help New York draw productions that filmmakers might otherwise take to cheaper cities such as Toronto or Vancouver. Other cities that have turned to tax credits for the film and television industry include London, which recently announced that Mr. Allen, whose films have become synonymous with New York, plans to shoot his third movie set in the British capital.