Jane Jacobs Was a Bicyclist

She Commuted by Bike in Manhattan in the 1950s

Boardwalk, Asbury Park. Not Jane's bike.

Jane Jacobs didn't drive, but her husband, Bob, did. They had a car, which largely sat in a garage on Greenwich Street, near their home at 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, and got used mainly for vacation trips. For a number of years, the family car was a Fiat Multipla, an odd-looking little van that was famous in the Jacobs family for a highly temperamental fuel pump. Later, as they were moving to Canada, they purchased from friends a VW bus that was on its third engine.

Jane Jacobs didn't dislike cars. She just thought there were too many of them. And she hated what cars were doing to cities: "Traffic arteries, along with parking lots, gas stations and drive-ins, are powerful and insistent instruments of city destruction. To accommodate them, city streets are broken down into loose sprawls, incoherent and vacuous for anyone afoot. Downtowns and other neighborhoods that are marvels of close-grained intricacy and compact mutual support are casually disemboweled." (Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961, p. 338.)

Jane the Cyclist
Jane got started cycling as a child in Scranton, Pa., where she competed for saddle time on two tricycles in a family that eventually included four children. She was one of the few in her era who continued bicycling into adulthood - the nadir of American bicycling may be considered the 1930s to the 1960s, and she cycled right through them.

(This article relies heavily on Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs, 2016. For the paragraphs above, see pp. 25, 114, 207, 261, 262, 277.)

Fortunately husband Bob was also an avid cyclist. When he was nineteen years old, in 1936, he toured through Europe by bicycle, even spending some time in what was then Nazi Germany. (Kanigel, p. 95.)

In addition to practicing architecture (he specialized in hospitals), Bob taught and wrote. Here's something from one of his articles: "We run the risk," he wrote, "of letting verbalized symbols overwhelm, smother and even negate the direct data actually supplied by our senses." (Kanigel, pp. 97, 123, 281.)

I think I like Bob.

Jane was also no stranger to bicycle touring. In 1940, she had taken a week-long bicycling trip in Quebec with her older sister, Betty. So it should come as no surprise to us that, after their wedding in 1944, the couple found themselves on a cycling honeymoon, riding through northern Pennsylvania and southern New York State. (Kanigel, pp. 25, 81, 96.)

In the early days of their marriage, they would go "hitch-hiking with the fish," as she put it. Here's what her biographer, Robert Kanigel, has to say: "they'd load their bikes on the train, get off somewhere within cycling distance of a fishing port, and, with their beat-up bags, hitch rides on fishing boats plying East Coast waterways. No reference to what Jane called this 'intricate network of unofficial transport' appeared in any atlas or tourist map. They made no hotel reservations, yet always found someone to take them in. In a little town on Pamlico Sound in North Carolina, it was the owner of a local shrimp-packing plant. In Maine, it was the island butter maker and her lobsterman husband." (P. 135.)

When at home in New York they would go for Sunday bike rides in the city, and after they had children, the little ones would come along too. (P. 135.)

But it is Jane's bike commuting that is, for me, the most arresting part of this picture. After all, Americans have historically viewed the bicycle primarily as a recreational vehicle. There was an awareness of the concept, even though very few adults were riding by this time. On the other hand, riding a bike to work between Greenwich Village and midtown Manhattan, in the starchy, gray-flannel suit days of the 1950s - that has a decidedly transgressive feel, at least to me. I love it.

Jane kept her bike parked just off the kitchen in their home on Hudson Street. It was accoutered with a wicker basket attached to the handlebars. In the morning, wearing conventional office attire, "sometimes even pearls," she would get the bike out and pedal through highly congested streets to her office at Architectural Forum, in Rockefeller Center - all this without bike lanes or even a helmet. Standard comments were "Get a horse!" and "Watch out, girlie, you'll get hurt." (Pp. 134-135, 200.)

Jane the Street-Fighter
Jane Jacobs is of course mainly known for her epochal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She is also remembered as an early and important community activist. She fought a whole series of battles in defense of her West Village neighborhood, and in two of them she faced off directly with uber-highwayman Robert Moses.

They were oddly matched antagonists. Moses was the quintessential insider, amassing vast power without ever getting elected to anything. And there was Jane, the quintessential outsider, organizing her neighbors to crack open the doors of power and give residents at least a little bit of say about what happened to the place where they lived. It was a long time ago, and it's difficult to imagine today how radical this whole concept of community involvement was.

There's something called asymmetric warfare -  it's one of the reasons we lost in Vietnam - and I think the asymmetry between Moses and his world and Jacobs and her emerging world was one of the keys to her success. In the two battles she had directly with Moses, over Washington Square Park and over the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, she won. I think Robert Moses just didn't see it coming. (See Kanigel, chapters 15 and 17.)

I've searched around for something, anything, that Moses and Jacobs had in common. And I did find one thing. Neither one of them drove. Bob Jacobs drove Jane, and Bob Moses had a chauffeur. He never learned to drive.

I think there's something ironic about the fact that, in these two crucial battles over making space for more cars, neither side was led by a motorist.

(In 1958 Jane Jacobs wrote a story for Fortune magazine that provides an early summary of her ideas. I found it online; it's quite a lot of fun, and substantially shorter than the book. To see it, click here.)

See also Cars and Bikes - the Back Story, Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different?