What Would Jane Jacobs Do?

The Times’ David Dunlap pays his respects to Jane Jacobs, and gives some current examples of her influence:

The idea that city planning should be informed by the city block — its people, texture, layering, scale and age — can be traced in good measure to her 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” written while she lived at 555 Hudson Street, a little block between Perry and West 11th Streets peppered with old buildings.

She liked short blocks with a lot of diversity.

On Tuesday, she died at age 89 in Toronto, where she had moved in 1968. Along Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, diversity still reigned around the unremarkable three-story structure at No. 555 (“modest” seems too grandiose a word for it), now home to the Art of Cooking, a cookware and accessories store. Elsewhere on the block are the White Horse Tavern, three restaurants, a cafe, a news dealer and a combination card store, florist and T-shirt shop.

Farther downtown, Ms. Jacobs’s hand can be seen in the redevelopment plan for the World Trade Center. A central tenet of that plan is to break down the super-block site into four smaller blocks through the re-establishment of Greenwich and Fulton Streets.

It is no coincidence that this framework was developed while Alexander Garvin was vice president for planning at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. His roommate at Yale gave him a copy of “Death and Life” as a Christmas present in 1961. “It changed my life,” Mr. Garvin said.

. . .

Another example of her influence, Mr. Garvin said, was the neighborhood preservation program that he oversaw as New York’s deputy housing commissioner from 1974 to 1978. “We were trying to save old buildings,” he recalled, “which was something I always had an inclination toward but until I read that you needed a mix of old and new buildings to have a healthy neighborhood, it wasn’t part of my repertoire.”

John E. Zuccotti was so taken by “Death and Life” that he wrote his Yale Law School dissertation in 1963, “Some Tools for Mrs. Jacobs,” on whether diversity could be enforced by zoning. He is now chairman of Brookfield Properties in the United States, whose holdings include enormous buildings on either side of the trade center site.

“Her ideas are as pertinent today as when she wrote,” Mr. Zuccotti said. “Take our problems down here. We’re talking about a 24-hour community, residential uses mixing with office uses, different kinds of commercial uses.”

. . .

“She taught us how to look at blocks,” said Ada Louise Huxtable, who was the architecture critic of The New York Times when Ms. Jacobs was battling Robert Moses and other powerful advocates of urban renewal and slum clearance.

“The intimate view of the city and its humanity really is indebted to her,” Ms. Huxtable said.

New York returned the favor yesterday. The owner of the Art of Cooking, Kate Humphrey, arrived at work to find several bouquets on the doorstep of No. 555.

One, a mixture of lilies and daisies and other springtime flowers, carried this unsigned message: “From this house, in 1961, a housewife changed the world.”

From the op-ed assignment desk: Are city-affiliated fundraising offices (e.g., the Department of Education’s Fund For Public Schools and the City Parks Foundation, to name just two) in danger of becoming the 21st century equivalent of Robert Moses’ Title I-assisted shadow government? Or to put it another way, by more fully integrating private fundraising into the daily routine of city agencies (e.g., The Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City) are we creating a situation in which bureaucrats can bypass City Council/elected official oversight vis a vis agency budgets in order to promote programs or projects over which the public has no oversight? The problem isn’t with the types of programs that are being funded — I’m sure there is a de facto consensus that education and parks are worthy aims — but rather the method they are being funded — i.e., through shadow budgets without public oversight, which was the way Robert Moses, through federal Title I funding, bypassed the municipal legislative structure. I don’t know that Jane Jacobs ever commented on the potential pitfalls of this new system of fundraising but I’m guessing she would raise questions. If any writers want to take a stab at this topic, they should strike while the iron is hot — say, for this Sunday’s Week in Review!