| that rare type: the fighting planner Action, Not Just Words
Ms. Jacobs did not limit her impact to words. In 1961, she and other protestors were removed from a City Planning Commission hearing on an urban renewal plan for Greenwich Village that they opposed, after they leapt from their seats and rushed the podium. In 1968, she was arrested on riot and criminal mischief charges for disrupting a public meeting on the construction of an expressway that would have sliced across Lower Manhattan and displaced hundreds of families and businesses. The police said she had tried to tear up the stenographer's transcript tape. The battle against that highway pitted Ms. Jacobs in an uphill fight against Robert Moses, the autocratic and immensely powerful master builder of that era. The expressway's opponents won. Ms. Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1968 out of opposition to the Vietnam War and to shield her two draft-age sons from military duty, and quickly enlisted in Toronto's urban battles. No sooner had she arrived than she led a battle to stop a freeway there. She became a beloved intellectual pioneer characterized by a dumpling face, an impish smile, sneakers, bangs and owlish glasses. But Roger Starr, a former New York City housing administrator and sometime opponent of Ms. Jacobs, keenly noted the steel just beneath her folksiness. "What a dear, sweet character she isn't," he said. After she was removed from the Planning Commission hearing in 1961, her own words underlined her feistiness. "We had been ladies and gentlemen and only got pushed around," she said. But fighting with government, even being arrested with Susan Sontag and Allen Ginsberg in an antidraft protest, was something she said she had repeatedly been forced into by "outrageous" governmental actions. What she hated most about those actions was that they took time away from her writing, which she said was her way of thinking. And in at least five fields of inquiry, she thought deeply and innovatively: urban design, urban history, regional economics, the morality of the economy and the nature of economic growth. http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=1934 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/books/26jacobs.html http://www.pulse24.com/News/Top_Story/20060425-016/page.asp _______________________________________________ in-enaction mailing list http://mail.architexturez.net/mailman/listinfo/in-enaction + Architexturez collaborative at http://portal.architexturez.org/
