Metropolis - Moses - Jacobs - Charyn
Friday, March 28, 2014
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| Jane Jacobs |
Serendipity is particularly salient when one looks back on it. When the events that combine for that serendipity happen, the connection is not immediately obvious.
Consider that in October 1995 I traveled to
New York City to interview and photograph a
favourite author, Jerome Charyn in his Greenwich Village
apartment. A month later I received a phone call from
Vancouver Magazine columnist Sean Rossiter who told me:
“Jane Jacobs is in town. I strongly
recommend you take her picture. Let me arrange this for you, if you are
interested."
I was.
The soft-spoken urbanologist knocked on my
door and stepped in. She faced my camera and said,
"Don't try to soften up
my face, this is who I am."
What would be the connection between these
two, the urbanologist who in her later years resided in Toronto and Charyn the Bronx novelist?
Back that October I went to a lovely
bookstore, Posman Books in Rockefeller Centre and found a 1986 book by Charyn,
Metropolis – New York as Myth, Marketplace,
and Magical Land. I paid $20.00 for the first edition. I do not remember if Charyn told
me about the book and where I could find it. The book has a dedication by
Charyn to me. I remember little else.
But on page 147 (Chapter 7 – The Pharaoh
and the Unicorn) of this non fiction memoir of Charyn’s relationship with New York (especially with the Bronx
of his childhood he writes:
The Arsenal is a nineteenth-century fort in
Central Park that Robert Moses had seized
during his long rule of the City’s parks, playgrounds, and beaches. Moses had
been a hurly-burly man. The Parks Department was only a tiny portion of his
empire. He’d ruled bridges, tunnels, highways, dams and state parks. New York, city and state,
had had fifty years of Robert Moses, and for a while it seemed like he was the
most powerful son of a bitch on earth. He feuded with Franklin Roosevelt and
won. He hoodwinked La Guardia half a dozen times. He established is own
mayoralty under the Triborough
Bridge. He destroyed the Bronx with one of his expressways. And he would have
destroyed Greenwich Village too, declared it a slum and barreled a highway
under Washington Square Park, if Jane Jacobs and thousands of other people hadn’t screamed their heads off. He’d
become an ogre, an imperial wizard who couldn’t be reached. But there wouldn’t
have been much of a Parks Department without Robert Moses. He was an authentic New York creature, the
worst and best of men. But powerful as he was, the City has buried him under layers of dust and
sand. He’d become another ancient baron, half remembered.
What does Charyn write of Jane Jacobs in
Metropolis?
Chapter Two - Land of the Spider Lady
In 1961 Jane Jacobs, a forty-five-year-old
editor at Architectural Forum, published her first book, The Death and Life of
Great American Cities, and our sense of the city has never been the same. Until
Jane Jacobs, we had Lewis Mumford, a graduate of Stuyvesant
High School, who’d been predicting the
death of New York
since 1938. “Each great capital sits like a spider in the midst of its
transportation web, “Mumford told us. New
York had little more to give than “shapeless giantism”
and “megalopolitan growth.” It was a “Plutonian world in which living forms
became frozen in metal.” Mumford offered us an entire schema, “A Brief Outline
of Hell,” from the birth of cities through their decline as Parasitopolis and
Pathopolis until their final state as “Nekropolis, city of the dead.” …and
there were few dissenters until Jane Jacobs came along. “I like dense cities best
and care about them most,” she said.
That October/November serendipity closed
in 2007 when the Rockefeller Foundation created the Jane
Jacobs Medal and paid me good money for the photograph you see here.
Jane Jacobs Medal
Jane Jacobs and Viveca Lindfors
Malamud, Singer, Roth, Bellows, Doctorow & That Bronx Gypsy
Jane Jacobs and Viveca Lindfors
Malamud, Singer, Roth, Bellows, Doctorow & That Bronx Gypsy
