The passing of Jane Jacobs has provided bittersweet evidence that obituary writing needn’t be a morbid task delegated to dreary journalism school recruits, even if the craft risks becoming a casualty of newspapers being reduced to a series of blog blurbs. Then again, few intellectuals have played a role that is so literally public, or continue to be active iconoclasts until the cusp of age 90. Waiting to be discovered by the American press, it seems, is how the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities interacted for nearly four profound decades with her adopted home, even if the local media tributes are able to swirl around the world. By contrast, the newspaper in her birthplace of Scranton, PA, The Times-Tribune, didn’t have a story about Jacobs the day after she died, while the Philadelphia Inquirer’s architecture critic offers an appreciation that fails to detail anything beyond her apparently hostile research visit to that city in 1962: “It didn’t help that she was a woman commenting on a largely male profession, or that she wore her hair in a childish page-boy with self-cut bangs and owlish glasses.” A diary post from Daily Kos contributor SoCal Liberal heaps praise upon Jacobs in light of the “increasing pollution, mind numbing traffic, continued inner city decay, new inner suburb decay, and increased poor health and obesity” although the Toronto Star‘s obit points out she was wrongly perceived as left-wing, given how her views “embraced the marketplace, supported privatization of utilities, frowned on subsidies, and detested the intrusions of government, big or small”. Yet, her name was often evoked during the debate after Starbucks snatched the lease of Dooney’s Café in The Annex, a conflict resolved once they settled on a less contentious alternative just down the block from her house on Albany Ave. Coincidentally, the Jane Jacobs vs. Starbucks discussion was posthumously revived in feedback to a memorial post on NYC real estate blog Curbed, where the current intrusion of its trademark into the West Village is debated relative to her theories: “Starbucks may be depressing in its sameness,” a reader argues, “but at least it does not have a parking lot, and it encourages people to meet and linger.” Curbed is also holding a contest to proclaim The Most Jane Jacobs Block in New York City – whereas, in downtown Toronto, her legacy remains most signified by what isn’t there. (And, with that in mind, Dan Bryk’s elegiac song “Spadina Expressway” can be heard here.)

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• January lazy linking
• Becoming Jane
• City Journal on Jane Jacobs’ Legacy