As Discovery moves into its new Worldwide Headquarters (see previous post), I want to salute an article by Marvin Olasky in the November 17 issue of World magazine on the new exhbition on "Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York." http://www.worldmag.com/flash/PowerView.swf?cf=/powerviewdata.cfm&iid=5197
Jacobs, author most notably of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), actually deserves the gratitude of those in any great city (I include Seattle) who have learned to treasure intense human life on the street. I remember living in New York in 1965 when Jacobs' book was being used to argue against Robert Moses' plan to put a big freeway accross the south end of Manhattan. I later had the satisfaction of helping the civic forces in 1970s Seattle that prevented a "Bay Freeway" from walling off the downtown from Lake Union and an "R.H. Thompson Freeway" from despoiling the Seattle Arboretum and the Central Area.
Jacobs' insights, as Olasky notes, were welcomed "by activists of both left and right." She showed why the ideals of modernism--the sort stylishly presented at the "futurist" exhibits of world's fairs over the first half of the 20th century--turned brutish, cold and hostile to human activity when implemented. They were splendid on paper and in models where the people not only "looked the size of ants" but were that size. When realized in steel and concreted they lacked "human scale."
Urban renewal replaced the brownstones where kids jumped rope on the sidewalk and played stickball on the street--to the dismay of urban planners who wanted them in wide open "greenscapes". But through it we lost the "eyes of the street" that gossiping grandmas and bustling shopkeepers provided, and the safety that assured. The new "greenscapes" and recreation grounds became high crime wastelands possessed by drug dealers and gangs. The old neighborhood shopping districts meantime were made barren objects of bureaucratic commercialism.
A few nights ago my wife and I watched that classic film noir, Naked Streets, the one with the closing line, "There are eight million stories in the city..." It's a nice yarn, but what really charmed us was seeing so much film footage of New York in the late 40s.
Jacobs was influential more broadly in opening people's eyes to the rhythms of urban life, the way people act around public spaces. When it came to the big downtown buildings, for example, she said, the modernists also got it wrong. Too often they made gargantuan edifices that people found imposing but made mere mortals feel small. What we want are buildings that make us feel grand and give us something to do.
Jacobs was a pioneer in what would become a revitalized historic preservation movement . Where earlier leaders had saved distinguished landmarks and the homes of notable statesmen and writers, Jacobs called for saving the old cityscapes themselves, the connected fabric that evokes harmony, memory (even vicariously, in the young) and intimacy.
She noted the affinity people in "the knowledge industry", as it would later be called, had for historic or merely old structures. "New ideas often need old buildings."
Marvin Olasky and the new Kings College is now resident in the Empire State Building, that glorious Art Deco icon of New York, a building that makes the individual feel grand, not small. Discovery Institute has found a happy home in a former bank building in downtown Seatttle. We will be contacting you from there from now on.