How much do New Yorkers and even tourists love Washington Square Park and the Village!
There is something special about this park. If you sit on a bench and observe , you can see so many “Worlds” passing in front of you, each one with their unique reality and all of them with one thing in common…New York. Try for a moment to imagine New York without this park or the Village or Soho… It could have happened, it almost did. If today we can enjoy the magic created in this area we only owe it to this woman. A small, blond firecracker with “très chic” glasses. Her name was Jane Jacobs.
Jane Jacobs was born in Pennsylvania in 1916 and moved very young to NYC during the Depression years to live on Orange street in Brooklyn Heights. She soon felt the need to adventure in the subway to cross the East River and explore Manhattan. She randomly chose Christopher Street subway stop, just because she liked the name, emerging in what it was going to be not only her permanent home, but her “Life Mission”… the Greenwich Village. She soon convinced her sister to move with her to the Village, having fallen in love with the unique vibe of the neighborhood, more similar to her character and far from the middle class that surrounded them in Brooklyn Heights. After she married Craig Jacobs , in 1947 they even decided to buy a run down row-house on Hudson Street, on the far side of the West Village, at the time occupied by working class immigrants, and fix it up. The house is still standing today and next to the entrance there is a plaque commemorating Jane Jacobs and her great accomplishments.
She became a journalist for an architecture magazine, and it’s here that she became more interested in architecture and urbanism. Living in the Village gave her the opportunity to study and appreciate what she later called “The Sidewalk Ballet”, a never-ending interaction between neighbors, passers by and shop owners. Like she describes in her revolutionary book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” .
“…Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations..The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet …”
In this “micro-village” people can feel safe, family can raise their children in a “healthier” way, small businesses can thrive and she believed it was the only way big modern cities could survive.
She made headlines when in 1954 her perfect “micro-village’ was threaten by NYC Planning Commissioner, Robert Moses. In pursuing his vision of a modern city dominated by high rises, highways and extreme mobility thanks to the more affordable cars, Robert Moses introduces his “urban renewal” and the “slum clearance” that will lead to the destruction of so many areas of NYC, like in the South Bronx and Harlem. For Lower Manhattan he had envisioned a massive highway (LOMEX) that would connect 5th Av to the Williamsburg and Brooklyn Bridge (and consequentially to Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island) passing through the Village, Soho ( not yet called so) and Little Italy. In particular Washington Square Park would have been completely destroyed and the beautiful and picturesque neighborhoods changed forever. Jane Jacobs organized with citizens of the Village, many of whom were well known artists, writers, journalists to form the “Village Preservation”. Even the former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt helped them in this important mission! They protested and fought their way to the Supreme Court, suing the City of New York for letting developers destroy an historically important part of the city while gaining economic interests. Luckily on June 25, 1958 they won and Lower Manhattan was saved. They celebrated not by cutting a ribbon, but by wrapping one around Washington Square Park.
So, while you stroll through the charming and winding street of the Village or when you have lunch on a sunny day on a bench in Washington Square Park while listening to the usual jazz musicians, remember Jane Jacobs.
