Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs Read Online Free PDF Page B

window looked out past the balustraded terrace onto Monroe Avenue’s quiet, residential harmony. Back on the first floor, kitchen, dining room, and Dr. Butzner’s study branched off the broad expanse of parlor which, with its fireplace and passage to upstairs, lay at the center of things; it would have been hard to plant yourself there and not give yourself over to the life of the family. “It wasa cheerful place,” Jane would say of the house. “We did a lot of talking.”
    It must have been quite a scene when they all got together, the four Butzner kids, in, say, the early 1930s. They looked pretty much alike, actually—the same-shaped heads, the distinctive Butzner features juggled just a bit differently in each. All tall, strikingly so in youngest son Jim’s case. All brainy, and encouraged from early on to use their brains. “Four amazing children,” says Jane’s niece, also named Jane, of the Butzner kids. When they’d get together later, by then older and married, it wasn’t much different, except that then it was the eight of them—each spouse, it could seem, suited not just to one Butzner, but to all of them. All friends, discussing books, ideas, politics, the day’s pressing problems, the crazy, funny, outrageous doings of the world. Years later, a family friend would speak of an almost preternatural Butzner-Jacobs optimism, a community of support that bound them together—not a simpy sweetness but a sense that life was too good, too interesting, to waste on wayward fits of ignorance and pettiness. They were “delightfully and acceptingly nonconformist,” says another family friend of more than thirty years. “They hadno mean streak.” All of them, says Carol, sister Betty’s daughter,“reveled in life. Everything was celebratory. It was joyous. Every meal was joyous. Every walk was an adventure.” It was a family of “no guilt, no regret, no shoulds, no should-nots.”

Jane, at left, in about 1927, age eleven, with brothers Jim and John Credit 3
    Too good to be true, of course. And maybe there wasn’t among them much latitude, or encouragement, to explore personal feelings or doubts, or to let boredom, annoyance, or futility have their day; this was part of the family culture, too. But allowing for memories sweetened by time and a streak of family boosterism, surely something healthy and productive was alive among them. Betty would become vice president of amajor New York interior design firm and was later active in the Esperanto League. John would become a judge, for years a justice of the 4th District U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, from which he’d issue important and controversial antisegregation decisions. Jim, most of his adult life spent in southern New Jersey, would have a successful career as a chemical engineer for a major oil company and, on the civic front, help transform a tiny local college into a major community asset. Jane would write books and change the world. Each remained married to the same spouse their whole lives—mostly, it seems, happily. The four of them found plenty to disagree about. Their voices could rise. But the way their children tell it, they had fun, and were determined to extract every last fresh nugget of pleasure and interest from the world.
    —
    One day when Jane was seven, sister Betty, by then a Girl Scout, took her on a hike. Jane remembered the toasted marshmallows that evening, but more vividly the moment when Betty bumped her foot on a rock. “That’s puddingstone!” Betty cried out. What a great word! Jane thought, and what an interesting geological anomaly: a mass of rounded stones and pebbles embedded in a sandy, cement-like matrix. Here, at age seven, was something of the peculiar doubleness of Jane’s intellect: her lifelong fascination with the world right in front of her nose—an explorer’s fascination, a journalist’s, a scientist’s; and, right beside it, a delight in language and all its nuances of sound and meaning.
    At six