Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs Read Online Free

p.m.”; the story would probably not have been told at all, ever, were Jane a man. She was not insulated by wealth or circumstances from most of the 101 distractions of everyday domestic life; like so many accomplished women, she did all she did by carving out space and time from among them. Inescapably, her life as a woman, navigating the shoals of domesticity, balancing, juggling, responding to the needs of others, largely unbuffered by the little props and perks that often support the professional lives of men, are part of this story, too.
    Certainly it’s not the case that there was no “trajectory” to Jane’s career. She’d been on a trajectory, all right, but it wasn’t the recognizably vaulting intellectual and professional arc that elite universities look for in their tenured faculty, or that literary and arts agents look for in their top young clients. It was a distinctly modest one—graduation from high school, a succession of low-paying secretarial jobs, a first decent white-collar job at age twenty-seven, ten years in the federal bureaucracy, then back to the private sphere as one of a dozen others like her at a mid-level professional magazine. The trajectory of someone we would have no cause to remember, who would live out a mostly unmemorable career, loved by family and respected by colleagues but otherwise making no great impact on the world. She did not, in the Jane Austen sense, “marry well”—though she did in the most important sense, of marrying someone by intellect and temperament supremely suited to her, whom she would love, respect, and enjoy all her life. She was not particularly ambitious. She’d never been singled out by an influential mentor as an up-and-comer and launched into the upper reaches of a national community. She hadn’t had one of those early, explosive career successes at twenty-two or twenty-seven that propelled her into the ranks of the must-be-noticed. She had remained hidden, unknown, a married woman, mother of three, with a job she liked, living over a former candy store a few blocks from the warehouses and docks down by the Hudson River, who commuted to her job in Midtown Manhattan by bicycle.
    And that should have been that.
    Except that one day in 1956, four years into the last regular job she would ever hold, her boss asked her to stand in for him at a conference. Go up there and give a talk, would you, Jane? He couldn’t go; he was going to be in Europe. No, she said, she didn’t like to get up and talk in front of people. Please, he said, he needed her to. All right, she replied, but only if she could say whatever she wanted.
    She did, which changed her life and, in time, the world.
    The first part of this book tells of the curious, tangled path by which she got to that point.
    The second, of what happened when she did.
    The third, of the new life she made for herself afterward, in a new land.

 PART I 
    An Uncredentialed Woman
    1916–1954

   CHAPTER 1   
    A GENEROUS PLACE TO LIVE
    O N WINTER DAYS when she was a child, Jane’s grandmother told her, they’d skate on the canal, along twenty miles of it frozen solid near their house.Back in the 1850s, before the railroad finally won out against it, the canal was how you got clean-burning anthracite coal from the mines of central Pennsylvania to big-city markets. It would be loaded on shallow-draft boats, maybe fifteen tons of it at a time, then towed down the canal that ran alongside the North Branch of the Susquehanna River, by mules on the adjacent towpath. A dollar a ton, you could figure, from Wilkes-Barre, in the heart of anthracite country, to Philadelphia. Making the boats, and repairing them, was its own little industry. And since the 1830s a key center of it was Espy, a town of a few hundred drawn out along the north bank of the canal, home to lock tenders and canal maintenance workers, as well as a tannery, a pottery, and a brickyard. From early spring, when the ice melted, until late fall,