Top Quotes: “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” — Jane Jacobs
“The first thing to understand is that the public peace — the sidewalk and street peace — of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.
In some city areas — older public housing projects and streets with very high population turnover are often conspicuous examples — the keeping of public sidewalk law and order is left almost entirely to the police and special guards. Such places are jungles. No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down.
The second thing to understand is that the problem of insecurity cannot be solved by spreading people out more thinly, trading the characteristics of cities for the characteristics of suburbs. If this could solve danger on the city streets, then Los Angeles should be a safe city because superficially Los Angeles is almost all suburban. It has virtually no districts compact enough to qualify as dense city areas. Yet Los Angeles cannot, any more than any other great city, evade the truth that, being a city, it is composed of strangers not all of whom are nice. Los Angeles’ crime figures are flabbergasting. Among the seventeen standard metropolitan areas with populations over a million, Los Angeles stands so preeminent in crime that it is in a category by itself. And this is markedly true of crimes associated with personal attack, the crimes that make people fear the streets.
Los Angeles, for example, has a forcible rape rate (1958 figures) of 31.9 per 100,000 population, more than twice as high as either of the next two cities, which happen to be St. Louis and Philadelphia; three times as high as the rate of 10.1 for Chicago, and more than four times as high as the rate of 7.4 for New York.
In aggravated assault, Los Angeles has a rate of 185, compared with 149.5 for Baltimore and 139.2 for St. Louis (the two next highest), and with 90.9 for New York and 79 for Chicago.
The overall Los Angeles rate for major crimes is 2,507.6 per 100,000 people, far ahead of St. Louis and Houston, which come next with 1,634.5 and 1,541.1, and of New York and Chicago, which have rates of 1,145.3 and 943.5.”
“Some city streets afford no opportunity to street barbarism. The streets of the North End of Boston are outstanding examples. They are probably as safe as any place on earth in this respect. Although most of the North End’s residents are Italian or of Italian descent, the district’s streets are also heavily and constantly used by people of every race and background. Some of the strangers from outside work in or close to the district; some come to shop and stroll; many, including members of minority groups who have inherited dangerous districts previously abandoned by others, make a point of cashing their paychecks in North End stores and immediately making their big weekly purchases in streets where they know they will not be parted from their money between the getting and the spending.
Frank Havey, director of the North End Union, the local settlement house, says, “I have been here in the North End twenty-eight years, and in all that time I have never heard of a single case of rape, mugging, molestation of a child or other street crime of that sort in the district. And if there had been any, I would have heard of it even if it did not reach the papers.” Half a dozen times or so in the past three decades, says Havey, would-be molesters have made an attempt at luring a child or, late at night, attacking a woman. In every such case the try was thwarted by passers-by, by kibitzers from windows, or shopkeepers.”
“The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.”
“The basic requisite for such surveillance is a substantial quantity of stores and other public places sprinkled along the sidewalks of a district; enterprises and public places that are used by evening and night must be among them especially. Stores, bars and restaurants, as the chief examples, work in several different and complex ways to abet sidewalk safety.
First, they give people — both residents and strangers — concrete reasons for using the sidewalks on which these enterprises face.
Second, they draw people along the sidewalks past places which have no attractions to public use in themselves but which become traveled and peopled as routes to somewhere else; this influence does not carry very far geographically, so enterprises must be frequent in a city district if they are to populate with walkers those other stretches of street that lack public places along the sidewalk. Moreover, there should be many different kinds of enterprises, to give people reasons for crisscrossing paths.
Third, storekeepers and other small businessmen are typically strong proponents of peace and order themselves; they hate broken windows and holdups; they hate having customers made nervous about safety. They are great street watchers and sidewalk guardians if present in sufficient numbers.
Fourth, the activity generated by people on errands, or people aiming for food or drink, is itself an attraction to still other people.”
“Last year I was on such a street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, waiting for a bus. I had not been there longer than a minute, barely long enough to begin taking in the street’s activity of errand goers, children playing, and loiterers on the stoops, when my attention was attracted by a woman who opened a window on the third floor of a tenement across the street and vigorously yoo-hooed at me. When I caught on that she wanted my attention and responded, she shouted down, “The bus doesn’t run here on Satur-days!” Then by a combination of shouts and pantomime she directed me around the corner. This woman was one of thousands upon thousands of people in New York who casually take care of the streets. They notice strangers. They observe everything going on. If they need to take action, whether to direct a stranger waiting in the wrong place or to call the police, they do so.”
“The second mode is to take refuge in vehicles. This is a technique practiced in the big wild-animal reservations of Africa, where tourists are warned to leave their cars under no circumstances until they reach a lodge. It is also the technique practiced in Los Angeles. Surprised visitors to that city are forever recounting how the police of Beverly Hills stopped them, made them prove their reasons for being afoot, and warned them of the danger.”
“Guggenheim was working on a him depicting the activities of a St. Louis children’s day-care center. He noticed that at the end of the afternoon roughly half the children left with the greatest reluctance.
Guggenheim became sufficiently curious to investigate. Without exception, the children who left unwillingly came from a nearby housing project. And without exception again, those who left willingly came from the old “slum” streets nearby. The mystery, Guggenheim found, was simplicity itself. The children returning to the project, with its generous playgrounds and lawns, ran a gauntlet of bullies who made them turn out their pockets or submit to a beating, sometimes both. These small children could not get home each day without enduring an ordeal that they dreaded. The children going back to the old streets were safe from extortion, Guggenheim found. They had many streets to select from, and they astutely chose the safest. “If anybody picked on them, there was always a storekeeper they could run to or somebody to come to their aid,” says Guggenheim. “They also had any number of ways of escaping along different routes if anybody was laying for them. These little kids felt safe and cocky and they enjoyed their trip home too.” Guggenheim made the related observation of how boring the project’s landscaped grounds and playgrounds were.”
“Ralph Whelan, director of the New York City Youth Board, reports, according to the New York Times, an “invariable rise in delinquency rates” wherever a new housing project is built.”
“It is this form of unspecialized play that the sidewalks serve — and that lively city sidewalks can serve splendidly. When this home-base play is transferred to playgrounds and parks it is not only provided for unsafely, but paid personnel, equipment and space are frittered away that could be devoted instead to more ice-skating rinks, swimming pools, boat ponds and other various and specific outdoor uses. Poor, generalized play use eats up substance that could instead be used for good specialized play.”
“If sidewalks on a lively street are sufficiently wide, play flourishes mightily right along with other uses. If the sidewalks are skimped, rope jumping is the first play casualty. Roller skating, tricycle and bicycle riding are the next casualties. The narrower the sidewalks, the more sedentary inciden tal play becomes. The more frequent too become sporadic forays by children into the vehicular roadways.
Sidewalks thirty or thirty-five feet wide can accommodate virtually any demand of incidental play put upon them — along with trees to shade the activities, and sufficient space for pedestrian circulation and adult public sidewalk life and loitering. Few sidewalks of this luxurious width can be found. Sidewalk width is invariably sacrificed for vehicular width, partly because city sidewalks are conventionally considered to be purely space for pedestrian travel and access to buildings, and go unrecognized and unrespected as the uniquely vital and irreplaceable organs of city safety, public life and child rearing that they are.”
“In orthodox city planning, neighborhood open spaces are venerated in an amazingly uncritical fashion, much as savages venerate magical fetishes. Ask a houser how his planned neighborhood improves on the old city and he will cite, as a self-evident virtue, More Open Space. Ask a zoner about the improvements in progressive codes and he will cite, again as a self-evident virtue, their incentives toward leaving More Open Space. Walk with a planner through a dispirited neighborhood and though it be already scabby with deserted parks and tired landscaping festooned with old Kleenex, he will envision a future of More Open Space.
More Open Space for what? For muggings? For bleak vacuums between buildings? Or for ordinary people to use and enjoy? But people do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners or designers wish they would.”
“Rittenhouse Square, the success, possesses a diverse rim and diverse neighborhood hinterland. Immediately on its edges it has in sequence, as this is written, an art club with restaurant and galleries, a music school, an Army office building, an apartment house, a club, an old apothecary shop, a Navy office building which used to be a hotel, apartments, a church, a parochial school, apartments, a public-library branch, apartments, a vacant site where town houses have been torn down for prospective apartments, a cultural society, apartments, a vacant site where a town house is planned, another town house, apartments. Immediately beyond the rim, in the streets leading off at right angles and in the next streets parallel to the park sides, is an abundance of shops and services of all sorts with old houses or newer apartments above, mingled with a variety of offices.
Does anything about this physical arrangement of the neighborhood affect the park physically? Yes. This mixture of uses of buildings directly produces for the park a mixture of users who enter and leave the park at different times. They use the park at different times from one another because their daily schedules differ. The park thus possesses an intricate sequence of uses and users.”
“This principal reservoir of users all operate on much the same daily time schedule. They all enter the district at once. They are then incarcerated all morning until lunch, and incarcerated again after lunch. They are absent after working hours. Therefore, Washington Square, of necessity, is a vacuum most of the day and evening, into it came what usually fills city vacuums — a form of blight.”
“The same basic situation occurs in parks where residence is the overwhelmingly dominant neighborhood use. In this case, the single big daily potential reservoir of adult users is mothers. City parks or playgrounds cannot be continuously populated by mothers alone, any more than by office workers alone. Mothers, using a park in their own relatively simple sequences, can populate it significantly for about a maximum of five hours, roughly two hours in the morning and three in the afternoon, and that only if they comprise a mixture of classes. Mothers’ daily tenure of parks is not only relatively brief but is circumscribed in choice of time by meals, housework, children’s naps and, very sensitively, by weather.”
“We can already see that city districts with relatively large amounts of generalized park, like Morningside Heights or Harlem in New York, seldom develop intense community focus on a park and intense love for it, such as the people of Boston’s North End have for their little Prado or the people of Greenwich Village have for Washington Square, or the people of the Rittenhouse Square district have for their park. Greatly loved neighborhood parks benefit from a certain rarity value.”
“The advantages of short blocks are simple.
Consider, for instance, the situation of a man living on a long street block, such as West Eighty-eighth Street in Manhattan, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. He goes westward along his 800-foot block to reach the stores on Columbus Avenue or take the bus, and he goes eastward to reach the park, take the subway or another bus. He may very well never enter the adiacent blocks on Eighty-seventh Street and Eighty-ninth Street for years.
This brings grave trouble. We have already seen that isolated, discrete street neighborhoods are apt to be helpless socially. This man would have every justification for disbelieving that Eighty-seventh and Eighty-ninth streets or their people have anything to do with him.”
“With the extra street, the Eighty-eighth Street man would no longer need to walk a monotonous, always-the-same path to a given point. He would have various alternative routes to choose. The neighborhood would literally have opened up to him.”
“Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. By old buildings I mean not museum-piece old buildings, not old buildings in an excellent and expensive state of rehabilitation — although these make fine ingredients — but also a good lot of plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings.
If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction. These high costs of occupying new buildings may be levied in the form of rent, or they may be levied in the form of an owner’s interest and amortization payments on the capital costs of the construction. However the costs are paid off, they have to be paid off. And for this reason, enterprises that support the cost of new construction must be capable of paying a relatively high overhead high in comparison to that necessarily required by old buildings.To support such high overheads, the enterprises must be either (a) high profit or (b) well subsidized.”
“Zoning for diversity must be thought of differently from the usual zoning for conformity, but like all zoning it is suppressive. One form of zoning for diversity is already familiar in certain city districts: controls against demolition of historically valuable buildings. Already different from their surroundings, these are zoned to stay different from them. A slightly advanced development of this concept was proposed by Greenwich Village civic groups for their area, and adopted by the city, in 1959. On certain streets, the height limitations for buildings were drastically reduced. Most of the streets affected already contain numerous buildings in excess of the new height limitations. This is not evidence of illogic, but is precisely why the new limitations were asked: so that the lower buildings remaining could not be further replaced by excessive duplication of the more valuable high buildings.”
“All such zoning for diversity since the deliberate intent is to prevent excessive duplication of the most profitable uses needs to be accompanied by tax adjustments. Land hampered from conversion to its most immediately profitable potential use needs to have this fact reflected in its taxes. It is unrealistic to put a ceiling on a property’s development (whether the tool is control of height, bulk, historical or esthetic value, or some other device) and then let the assessment on such a property reflect the irrelevant values of more profitably developed properties nearby.”
“Different as railroad tracks, waterfronts, campuses, expressways, large parking areas and large parks are from each other in most ways, they also have much in common with each other so far as their tendency to exist amid moribund or declining surroundings is concerned. And if we look at the parts of cities most literally attractive — i.e., those that literally attract people, in the flesh — we find that these fortunate localities are seldom in the zones immediately adjoining massive single uses.
The root trouble with borders, as city neighbors, is that they are apt to form dead ends for most users of city streets. They represent, for most people, most of the time, barriers. Consequently, the street that adjoins a border is a terminus of generalized use. If this street, which is the end of the line for people in the area of “ordinary” city, also gets little or no use from people inside the single-use border-forming territory, it is bound to be a deadened place, with scant users. This deadness can have further repercussions. Because few people use the immediate border street, the side streets (and in some cases the parallel street) adjoining it are also less used as a result. They fail to get a by-the-way circulation of people going beyond them in the direction of the border, because few are going to that Beyond.”
“Los Angeles’ transit system, once considered the best in the United States (some experts say in the world), has declined to a slow and inconvenient vestige of public transportation.”
“Many problems, particularly planning problems, are common to these governmentally separate settlements of a metropolitan area. This — not the big city — is the unit that means most with respect to overcoming water pollution, or major transportation problems, or major land waste and misuse, or conservation of water tables, wild land, big recreation sites and other resources.
Because these real and important problems exist, and because we have, administratively, no very good ways of getting at them, a concept called “Metropolitan Government” has been developed. Under Metropolitan Government, politically separate localities would continue to have a political identity and autonomy in purely local concerns, but they would be federated into a super-area government which would have extensive planning powers and administrative organs for carrying the plans into action. Part of the taxes from each locality would go to the Metropolitan Government, thus helping also to relieve great cities of part of the financial burden they carry, unrecompensed, for major central city facilities used by the hinterland. Political boundaries, as barriers to joint planning and joint support of common metropolitan facilities, would thus, it is reasoned, be overcome.”
