Death and Life: Jane Jacobs, Prophet

There are few woman approaching ninety on whom I could honestly admit to have, or to have had, a crush. Jane Jacobs, who died on Monday, was one of those—not just because she could write better than a stadium-full of Ph.D.s even though she was a college drop-out, not just because she moved to Toronto in 1968 to spare her two sons the chance of being drafted to Vietnam (I would do the same for my son and anyone else’s son who’d be threatened with the sort of imbecilic wars that are becoming an American specialty), not just because she stood up and to (and beat) Robert Moses (“the nearest thing to a dictator with which New York and New Jersey have ever been afflicted (so far),” she wrote in her last book; too bad she never took on Donald Trump or Giuliani), not just because she foresaw the mush and muck of suburban landscapes, and the cultural, economic and environmental costs they would impose on us (see yesterday’s trees, today’s gas prices), and not just because she is one of the few serious American thinkers who’s taken on the purpose and morality of economic growth the way she took on Moses, but because, like Henry Adams, she could be the most scathingly pessimistic social critic while simultaneously writing in a more hopefully optimistic—a more substantially optimistic—way than any critic out there, pseudo-optimists à-la-Prada like David Brooks and John Tierney among them. Read the rest...