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October 9, 2007
The missing Jane Jacobs chapter in The Power Broker
Atlantic Yards Report
Norman Oder is participating on a panel this evening on "New Media, New Politics? Jane Jacobs and an Activist Press," sponsored by the Municipal Art Society.
Here's an excerpt from Oder's latest installment, based on his research into Jane Jacobs:
Now that Jane Jacobs is back in the news, with an exhibit at the Municipal Art Society, Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York, we should look forward to a lot more research into her life.
The one extant biography, Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary, by Alice Sparberg Alexiou, was published last year. (Here's a review by the Regional Plan Association's Alex Marshall and a review by architectural historian Peter Laurence.)
It will soon be supplemented by two scholarly books about her and her era. And someday a long-lost portrait of the urbanist by Robert Moses biographer Robert Caro should surface.
...
In May, I observed that "The Power Broker, Robert Caro's monumental biography of Robert Moses, oddly omits any mention of Jane Jacobs, now thought of as Moses's polar opposite, and the successful citizen protest against Moses's 1950s attempt to run a highway through Washington Square Park."I got a response from Ina Caro, the author's wife and research assistant, via his lecture agent, who wrote, "Over 30 years ago, when she typed the original manuscript for The Power Broker, there was a wonderful chapter on Jane Jacobs--as good, she thought, as the one on the Cross Bronx Expressway. Unfortunately, when the book was handed in it was one million words long and had to be cut by a third -- 300,000 words. Entire chapters were cut. One on the Brooklyn Dodgers and Moses, one on the Port Authority, one on the city planning commission, one on the Verrazano Narrow Bridge and one on Jane Jacobs. She hopes those pages are still in storage and can be read someday when a library acquires Mr. Caro's papers."
In other words, Caro, no slouch at research, didn't ignore this angle.
Posted by lumi at October 9, 2007 10:38 AM