Jane's Walk Phoenix

Downtown Express photo by Lorenzo Ciniglio, 2004

Jane Jacobs moved from New York to Toronto in 1968 (to make sure her two sons were not drafted), but she continued to play close attention to the city that shaped her urban ideas and ideals.

The Williamsburg Greenpoint News + Arts recently shared the following letter, which may very well be the last one she wrote (at least publicly). The letter focuses on her (ultimately unsuccessful) objection to a rezoning proposal affecting Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Nevertheless, the arguments she puts forth are valid  to a wider audience.

Source: Williamsburg Greenpoint News + Arts

If you have trouble reading the scann of the original letter, here is a transcription of the text:

Jane Jacobs
69 Albany Avenue
Toronto, ON M5R 3C2
CANADA

April 15, 2005

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and all members of the City Council c/o City Council President Gifford Miller

Dear Mayor Bloomberg,

My name is Jane Jacobs. I am a student of cities, interested in learning why some cities persist in prospering while others persistently decline; why some provide social environments that fulfill the dreams and hopes of ambitious and hardworking immigrants, but others cruelly disappoint the hopes of immigrant parents that they have found an improved life for their children. I am not a resident of New York although most of what I know about cities I learned in New York during the almost half-century of my life here after I arrived as an immigrant from an impoverished Pennsylvania coal mining city in 1934.

I am pleased and proud to say that dozens of cities, ranging in size from London to Riga in Latvia, have found the vibrant success and vitality of New York to demonstrate useful and helpful lessons for their cities—and have realized that failures in New York are worth study as needed cautions.

Let’s think first about revitalization successes; they are great and good teachers. They don’t result from gigantic plans and show-off projects, in New York or in other cities either. They build up gradually and authentically from diverse human communities; successful city revitalization builds itself on these authentic community foundations, as the community-devised plan 197a does.

What the intelligently worked out plan devised by the community itself does not do is worth noticing. It does not destroy hundreds of manufacturing jobs, desparately needed by New York citizens and by the city’s stagnating and stunted manufacturing economy. The community’s plan does not cheat the future by neglecting to provide provisions for schools, daycare, recreational outdoor amateur sports, and pleasant facilities for those things. The community’s plan does not promote new housing at the expense of both existing housing and imaginative and economical new shelter that residents can afford. The community’s plan does not violate the existing scale of the community, nor does it insult the visual and economic advantages of neighborhoods that are precisely of the kind and that demonstrably attract artists and other live-work craftsmen, initiating spontaneous and self-organizing renewal. Indeed so much renewal so rapidly that the problem converts to how to make an undesirable neighborhood to an attractive one less rapidly.

Of course the community’s plan does not promote any of the vicious and destructive results mentioned. Why would it? Are the citizens of Greenpoint and Williamsburg vandals? Are they so inhumane they want to contrive the possibility of jobs for their neighbors and for the greater community?

Surely not. But the proposal put forth before you by city staff is an ambush containing all those destructive consequences, packaged very sneakily with the visually tiresome, unimaginative and imitative luxury project towers. How weird, and how sad, that New York which has demonstrated city successes enlightening to so much of the world, it seems unable to learn lessons it needs for itself. I will make two predictions with utter confidence: 1) If you follow the community’s plan you will harvest success; 2) If you follow the proposal before you today, you will maybe enrich a few heedless and ignorant developers, but at the cost of an ugly and intractable mistake. Even the presumed beneficiaries of this mis-use of governmental powers, the developers and financiers of the luxury towers may not benefit, misused environments are not good long-term economic bets.

Come on, do the right thing. The community really does know best.

Sincerely,

Jane Jacobs