ancient cities

412 Jacobs, Jane
Further Readings
Jackson, Kenneth T. and David S. Dunbar. 2002. Empire
City: New York through the Centuries. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Jackson, Kenneth T., John B. Manbeck, and Citizens
Committee for New York City. 2004. The
Neighborhoods of Brooklyn. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Jackson, Kenneth T. and Stanley K. Schultz. 1972. Cities
in American History. New York: Knopf.
Ja c o b s, Ja n e
Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) is among the most influential
writers on cities in the twentieth century,
both in the academic and popular spheres. Many
of her most powerful ideas can be found in her
first book, The Death and Life of Great American
Cities, published in 1961. She argued powerfully
against urban renewal projects of the mid-twentieth
century and was a proponent of preserving the
social and cultural life of neighborhoods. Jacobs
was also an activist who played a pivotal role in
protecting areas like New York City’s West
Village and SoHo from a variety of threats, paving
the way for their eventual designation as historic
preservation districts. Jacobs’s goal was not simply
preserving a neighborhood’s buildings but
rather sustaining the mix of people and activities
that made up a vibrant community. She played a
similar role in Toronto, Canada, after moving
there to protest the Vietnam War.
Early Years
Born into a prosperous Scranton, Pennsylvania,
household, Jacobs nevertheless observed the tenuous
economic conditions faced by the miners in that
anthracite coal region and the poor Appalachian
farmers she encountered while accompanying her
aunt on Presbyterian missionary work in North
Carolina. These exposures—combined with the
onset of the Great Depression as Jacobs was entering
her teens—implanted in her a lifelong concern
with the forces of community growth and decay.
Her formal education in Scranton’s public schools
was unremarkable, and she recalled secretly reading
books of her own choosing under her classroom
desk. Her intellectual curiosity, however, led her to
a long life of bucking academic authorities.
Although she never obtained a degree beyond a
high school diploma, a six-month course in business
stenography armed Jacobs by age 20 to follow her
sister to New York City and obtain work as a secretary.
At the same time, she began selling articles as a
freelance writer on urban life to publications such as
Vogue and the Sunday Herald Tribune.
Following two years of continuing education
courses at Columbia University, Jacobs joined the
New York branch of the Roosevelt administration’s
Office of War Information. She continued
after 1945 in the State Department’s Overseas
Information Agency, essentially producing propaganda
pieces about the United States for publication
abroad. Her wartime writings included an
appeal for federal action to aid rusting industrial
centers like Scranton. In 1952, she left the State
Department in the wake of a series of McCarthyera
interrogations about her labor activity in the
United Public Workers of America.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Jacobs lived first
in Brooklyn, then near Washington Square in
Greenwich Village. She married architect Robert
Hyde Jacobs, and in 1947, the couple purchased a
converted candy store at 555 Hudson Street in the
West Village neighborhood, where they had three
children.
Writing About Cities
After leaving the State Department in 1952, Jacobs
worked as an associate editor at Architectural
Forum. Her work there brought her into contact
with influential ideas and individuals during the
high-water mark of government-funded urban
renewal programs. She soon became skeptical
about these large-scale redevelopment projects. An
encounter with William Kirk of the Union
Settlement in East Harlem alerted her to the social
shortcomings of new high-rise public housing projects,
which replaced the traditional street pattern
with superblocks. Meeting renowned Philadelphia
city planner Edmund Bacon, Jacobs was struck by
his abstract, aesthetic preoccupation with modernization
and his insensitivity to the vitality in older
(even impoverished) neighborhoods.
Jacobs first expressed her criticisms publicly
when her boss, Douglas Haskell, offered her the