Jane Jacobs has her Way

Opinions vary, but New York City has renamed a small portion of Hudson Street: “Jane Jacobs Way.”

• Village Voice: Jane Jacobs’ Son Denounces Coney Island Plan, Mom Gets Nice Streetsign
• New York Times: Jane Jacobs Way Comes to the Village
• The City Fix: Does This Actually Honor Jane Jacobs?

More: News and Blogs

At first, I thought renaming a portion of Hudson Street to honor Jane Jacobs might be a teachable moment. She thought enough of the address long after she moved away to put it prominently in her epigraph for Systems of Survival; she wrote about it plenty in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

As The New York Times coverage shows, the street’s changed. Businesses at 555 (under her old address) and 557 are gone, storefronts vacant. Is Jacobs really having her way? Does this honor, or mock her?

I’m still convinced this is a teachable moment, despite the self-destruction of diversity that she writes about in Death and Life.

The city is living and changing. Our hopes that it would be hermetically sealed in the era Jacobs documents are pure folly. We preserve a city, not a museum.