A self-taught writer killed the expressway through SoHo
Jane Isabel Jacobs (4 May 1916 – 25 April 2006) had no planning degree, yet The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) called urban renewal a pseudoscience. From Greenwich Village she helped stop Robert Moses's Lower Manhattan Expressway, was arrested in 1968, then fought Toronto's Spadina Expressway after emigrating.
Scranton-born Jane Butzner reached Manhattan in 1935, fell for Greenwich Village's broken grid, freelanced for trade sheets and Vogue, and studied freely at Columbia's School of General Studies until Barnard's rules almost trapped her. At Iron Age she publicized Scranton's wartime decline and pushed equal pay; State Department work on Amerika brought marriage to architect Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr. and a three-story Hudson Street house they refused to trade for what they called parasitic suburbs.
Architectural Forum assignments on blight soured her faith in clearance schemes after Society Hill and East Harlem visits. A 1956 Harvard talk urging respect for street chaos thrilled Lewis Mumford's crowd and scared developers; Fortune's Downtown Is for People in 1958 needled Moses until publisher C. D. Jackson demanded who that crazy dame was. Rockefeller money then funded three years of New School–affiliated research that became Death and Life, coining eyes on the street and mixed primary uses while Moses branded the book libelous junk.
Credentials snobs dismissed her as a housewife interloper; later left critics faulted her thin treatment of race and her soft spot for unslumming. Still, cancelling the Lower Manhattan Expressway spared the fabric that became SoHo, Little Italy, and Chinatown, and Toronto activists gained a fierce ally against Spadina. Richard Florida and Robert Lucas later credited ideas born from a journalist who simply watched how sidewalks actually work.
Source: Jane Jacobs
