Godmother Of The American City

by James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler interviewed urbanist and author Jane Jacobs in her home in Toronto in March of 2001; the following is an excerpt from their conversation.

KUNSTLER: Tell me how you found yourself venturing into the life of a public intellectual.

JACOBS: I began writing articles right away. And this combined with my afternoons I had spent looking at different areas of the city, and I wrote a series of articles that Vogue bought about different areas of the city. The fur district — you see, they had something to do with the kinds of things that the readers of Vogue were presumably interested in — although I didn’t know who I was writing these for when I wrote them. But then I saw what I was doing, and I tried this.

KUNSTLER: It must have been exciting to sell magazine articles.

JACOBS: It was. I got $40 a piece for them.

KUNSTLER: That was a lot of money then.

JACOBS: A lot of money! Because at the job I had, I got twelve dollars a week. Of course I didn’t sell many of these. I wrote about the fur district, the flower district, the leather district — let me see — the diamond district, which was down on the Bowery then. So I was trying to be a writer all the time. And eventually, not right away, but later on, I got to write Sunday feature stories for the Herald Tribune. But I didn’t get paid as well for those. But then I wrote a few things for Q Magazine — oh, about manhole covers, how you could tell what was running underneath you by reading what was on the manhole covers.

KUNSTLER: You hadn’t gone to college, by the way.

JACOBS: I hadn’t wanted to go to school after I finished high school. I was so glad to get out.

KUNSTLER: Were you a troublemaker?

JACOBS: Yes.

KUNSTLER: I sympathize — I didn’t like school either.

JACOBS: I would break paper bags in the lunch room and make explosions, and I would be sent to the principal, and that kind of thing. I was not really a troublesome person. I was not really destructive in any way, but I was mischievous.

KUNSTLER: Were you a comedian?

JACOBS: Sort of, yeah.

KUNSTLER: One would have to suppose at the time that you wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities that you were pretty ticked off at American culture. For instance you wrote, “It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give.” And you wrote that around 1960, or the late fifties.

JACOBS: Yeah, I began in 1958 and finished it in 1960.

KUNSTLER: So what was your state of mind? Were you ticked off at American culture? Was it the culture of civic design? Was it Robert Moses? Was it some combination of those things? Was it the Bauhaus? What was it that was getting under your skin in those days?

JACOBS: What was getting immediately under my skin was this mad spree of deceptions and vandalism and waste that was called urban renewal. And the way it had been adopted like a fad and people were so mindless about it — and so dishonest about what was being done. That’s what ticked me off, because I was working for an architectural magazine, and I saw all this firsthand, and I saw how the most awful things were being excused.

KUNSTLER: You must have already been acquainted with things like Corbusier’s “Radiant City,” and some of the schemes from the twenties, and the Bauhaus. By this time, Gropius had become installed at Harvard and Mies Van der Rohe . . .

JACOBS: I didn’t have any feeling about these one way or another. It was just another way of building. I didn’t have any ideology, in short. When I wrote “we have become so feckless as a people,” I had no ideology.

KUNSTLER: But you were angry.

JACOBS: But I was angry at what was happening and at what I could see firsthand was happening. It all came to me firsthand. I didn’t have any abstractions about American culture. . .

But I’ll tell you something that had been worrying me: I liked to visit museums that showed old-time machines, and tools and so forth. . . I was very struck with the way these old machines were painted. They were painted in a way to show you how they worked. Evidently, the makers of them and the users of them cared about how these things were put together and how what moved what, so that other people would be interested in them. . .

In the meantime, along had come these locomotives that had skirts on them, and you couldn’t see how the wheels moved, and that disturbed me. And it was supposed to be for reasons of aerodynamics, but that didn’t make sense. And I began to notice how everything was being covered up, and I thought that was kind of sick.

KUNSTLER: So the streamlining of the thirties bugged you?

JACOBS: That’s right. So I remember very well what was in my mind [when I wrote] “that we have become so feckless as a people.” It was those skirts on the locomotives that I was thinking about, and how this had been extended — we didn’t care how our cities worked anymore. We didn’t care to show where the entrances were in buildings and things like that. That’s all I meant. It was not some enormous comment on abstract American society. And I thought, this is a real decadence of some sort.

From Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Used with permission of Melville House. © 2000 by James Howard Kunstler. Expanded from Metropolis, March 2001.