The Jane’s Walk tours, which began in 2007 in Toronto, her adopted city, and spread to New York last year, will be conducted around the world on Saturday and Sunday to honor the legacy and life of the woman who personified urbanism.
Maybe it takes a village to accomplish things in some places; in others, a neighborhood. In New York it typically takes only a single block to characterize its occupants and to mobilize them to a common cause. Jacobs, who died in 2006, celebrated that block-by-block ballet in her 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” which became a bible for civic boosters everywhere.
“Jane Jacobs believed strongly that local residents understood best how their neighborhood works,” and how to strengthen and improve where they live, the organizers of the tours write on their Web site. “Jane’s Walks are meant to be fun, engaged and participatory.”
There will be twice as many walks this year as last in New York.
Time seems to be harder to come by lately, but when I can find some, I still relish taking the subway to an unfamiliar stop and discovering what the surrounding streetscape has to offer. Sometimes the character of a block, for better or worse, seems to endure longer than any single building. Other times, buildings, which go up and then may be gone in a blink, transform the block’s singularity.
Walking is the best way to contemplate the demography and geography of the sidewalks of this city, how much has changed and yet how much has remained the same. I never fully understood the derivation of “pedestrian,” or why seeing someplace on foot was considered prosaic compared with the definition of equestrian, or being on horseback. Maybe that’s because I come from Brooklyn.
Jacobs wrote that “you can’t rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there,” but by the same token (or MetroCard), she added that “by its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.”
She meant the unexpected, rather than necessarily the bizarre, and you are likely to find it even on a tour of your own neighborhood through wider eyes, free of time constraints and digital distractions.
One Jane’s Walk tour starts at the Christopher Street subway station in Greenwich Village, where Jacobs arrived after moving from Scranton, Pa., to pursue a writing career. Another sticks to Roosevelt Island, focusing on how it evolved from a purely institutional setting of mostly almshouses and hospitals into a planned residential community. You can explore the Rockaways in Queens or visit “Main Street U.S.A.” in Tottenville, on Staten Island.
Vin Cipolla, the president of the Municipal Art Society, is leading a tour of Broadway between Columbus Circle and 23rd Street, in keeping with Jacobs’s maxim that “it is most important to look at the real world, not at what somebody has said is right.” That tour will encompass the contentious bike lanes and greenway of the new Times Square.
What does he want participants to walk away with?
“The big message of the whole thing is really having an understanding of the environment, not just the built environment but the green environment, and pointing out elements of sustainability,” Mr. Cipolla said. “This is all about Jane Jacobs’s legacy, and she was all about what we see. We can take away the best lessons of our city if we observe what’s around us, what we think works and doesn’t work, what makes for a vital and interesting place.”
Original Article
Source: ny times
Author: SAM ROBERTS
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