Jane Jacobs

Her high school marks were bad enough to save her. Once she had banked enough credits at Columbia's School of General Studies, Barnard could have claimed her and prescribed a curriculum, but her record disqualified her, and as she put it later, she was therefore allowed to continue getting an education. That education was two years of geology, zoology, law, political science and economics, and no degree at all. Before it she had spent a year as the unpaid assistant to the women's page editor of the Scranton Tribune, the daughter of a doctor and a nurse in a coal town. After it came stenography, freelance pieces for Vogue and Cue, a trade magazine called Iron Age, and wartime work for the government.

Architectural Forum hired her in 1952 and sent her to admire urban renewal. In East Harlem in 1955 a minister named William Kirk walked her through what the new projects had done to the streets they replaced, and she stopped admiring. Fortune ran her attack on the planners in 1958, prompting its publisher to ask who this crazy dame was, and a Rockefeller grant turned the argument into The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961: eyes on the street, the sidewalk ballet, and the four conditions a district needs to generate diversity. She also fought. Washington Square Park closed to cars in 1958. The Lower Manhattan Expressway died. Robert Moses called her book intemperate and libelous and told his people to sell that junk to someone else.

She argued for keeping old buildings because low value made them cheap, and cheap rent is what lets odd, small, poor enterprises exist. It was the load-bearing claim in the book and it did not survive contact with the market. The West Village became some of the most expensive real estate in the United States, and her own house on Hudson Street, converted from a candy shop, was an early instance of exactly the process. Gentrification is now the dominant criticism of her work, and critics on the left add that Death and Life has almost nothing to say about race. She left the country too. Arrested in April 1968 at an expressway hearing, with sons approaching draft age, she moved to Toronto and took Canadian citizenship in 1974.

The profession that called her a militant dame and a housewife now assigns her. Planners quote eyes on the street without attribution, HOPE VI tore down the towers she condemned, and Vancouver built a doctrine on her. The economics she considered her real work is still largely ignored by economists, though Edward Glaeser has agreed she was right about Moses and Tyler Cowen has said her ideas do not scale. Robert Caro, who called Death and Life the strongest influence on The Power Broker, cut his chapter on her for length and has said he still feels sick about it. She died in Toronto on April 25, 2006, at 89. Jane's Walks now run in dozens of countries every May.

Jane Jacobs's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Downtown Is for People article
  The Fortune piece that first went at Robert Moses in public 1958
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities book
  Written on a Rockefeller Foundation grant over three years 1961
• The Economy of Cities book
  Import replacement, and the claim that cities drive economies rather than the reverse 1969
• Cities and the Wealth of Nations book
  The book she hoped would do for economics what Death and Life did for planning 1984
• Systems of Survival book
  A Platonic dialogue on the commercial and guardian moral syndromes 1992
• Dark Age Ahead book
  Her last and bleakest, on five pillars of a culture she thought were failing 2004

• 1935 aged ~19 Moves to New York with her sister and settles in Greenwich Village
• 1944 aged ~28 Marries the architect Robert Hyde Jacobs They met while she was reporting for the State Department magazine Amerika.
• March 25, 1952 aged 35 Answers a federal loyalty questionnaire by defending the right to radical ideas She was anti-communist, pro-union, and under suspicion anyway.
• 1955 aged ~39 Walks East Harlem with the minister William Kirk and turns against urban renewal
• June 25, 1958 aged 42 Washington Square Park is closed to traffic Moses had wanted Fifth Avenue extended through it.
• 1961 aged ~45 Publishes The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• April 10, 1968 aged 51 Arrested at a hearing on the Lower Manhattan Expressway The crowd had charged the stage and destroyed the stenographer's notes.
• 1968 aged ~52 Moves the family to Toronto The Vietnam draft and two sons approaching call-up age were among her reasons.
• April 25, 2006 aged 89 Dies in Toronto at 89

• Robert Moses 1888–1981
  Master builder whose roads, parks, and public works reshaped metropolitan New York while displacing communities and entrenching car dependence. opposed
• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. backed her Washington Square campaign
• Margaret Mead 1901–1978
  Cultural anthropologist whose studies of Pacific Island societies shaped 20th-century social science. backed her Washington Square campaign
• Frederick Law Olmsted 1822–1903
  Landscape architect who designed Central Park and established public parks as essential American civic infrastructure. the park-making tradition she argued with
• Daniel Burnham 1846–1912
  Architect and planner whose City Beautiful vision shaped downtowns, civic centers, and urban planning. the grand-plan tradition she attacked