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?

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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.

555 Hudson Street, For Sale

More missteps in the “Science of Planning” are going to have to wait until tomorrow (and Monday).

Jane Jacobs’ old house is for sale! You could live in the New York City townhouse where she wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It will only cost you $3,500,000.

While I’ve introduced the conditions for diversity that Jane Jacobs outlines in that book, I’ve yet to talk about the self-destrucion of diversity.

The West Village that Jane Jacobs knew and wrote about is gone. The process is simple. Diversity makes for an attractive and popular place. Its success encourages building owners to charge higher and higher rents, encouraging only the narrow selection of uses that can afford such high rents. Diversity disappears.

But things could always cycle back around, eh?