Focus

Part eight of Jane Jacobs‘  Downtown is for People essay, first published in the April 1958 edition of Fortune Magazine:

Focus

No matter how interesting, raffish, or elegant downtown’s streets may be, something else is needed: focal points. A focal point can be a fountain, or a square, or a building—whatever its form, the focal point is a landmark, and if it is surprising and delightful, a whole district will get a magic spillover.

Arlington Church, Night by Charles Tersolo | 24X36, Oil on Canvas

All the truly great downtown focal points carry a surprise that does not stale. No matter how many times you see Times Square,–with its illuminated soda-pop waterfalls, animated facial tissues, and steaming neon coffee cups, alive with its crowds, it always makes your eyes pop. No matter how many times you look along Boston’s Newbury Street, the steeple of the Arlington Street Church always comes as a delight to the eye.

Focal points are too often lacking where they would count most, at places where crowds and activities converge. Chicago, for instance, lacks any focal point within the Loop. In other cities perfectly placed points in the midst of great pedestrian traffic have too little made of them- Cleveland’s drab public square, for example, so full of possibilities, or the neglected old Diamond Market in Pittsburgh, which, with just a little showmanship, could be a fine threshold to Gateway Center.

Unfortunately, most of the focal points that are being planned seem foredoomed to failure. Those ponderous collections of government architecture, known as civic centers, are the prime example. San Francisco’s, built some twenty years ago, should have been a warning, but Detroit and New Orleans are now building centers similarly pretentious and dull, and many other cities are planning to do the same. Without exception, the new civic centers squander space; they spread out the concrete, lay miles of walk-indeed, planners want so much acreage for civic centers now that the thing to do is to move them out of downtown altogether, as New Orleans is doing. in other words, the people supposedly need so much space it must be moved away from the people.

But city halls never have needed much grounds, if any, a fact that our ancestors—who knew why they wanted courthouse squares—grasped very well. Newspapermen who make it their business to know politicians soon discover their own city has a kind of political Venturi—one spot where politicians gather, one stretch of sidewalk where, if you stand there at noon, you will see “everybody in town.”

Even in the largest metropolitan centers you will find the political Venturi easy to spot; it is here that lawyers, officeholders, office seekers, various types of insiders and would-be insiders, cluster and thrive, for information is their staff of life. This vital trading post is never marked on the official city map; nor have the city’s architects found space or color for it in their diagrams of Tomorrow’s City. In fact, if you ask some of them about it, all you get is a blank look, perhaps a bit of scorn.

Big open spaces are not functional for this kind of civic activity; the prestige and attractiveness of a sidewalk garden, such as that of the new Federal Reserve Bank in Jacksonville, or a side garden, such as that of the Federal Reserve in Philadelphia, would be about right for city halls and city-county offices and would enable them to stay where they belong, near the lawyers, pressure groups, and others who must deal with the local government.

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