Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs by Robert Kanigel

Scranton.” They called their concoction “catchabeano,” because “it had lots of beans in it and we just thought it was a catchy name.” Compared to Pablum, “it was our equivalent of a grand gourmet thing.” At some point, Mrs. Butzner gave them a copy of The Fanny Farmer Cookbook; when once Jane complained to her that she’d never taught her how to cook, Mrs. Butzner shot back, “Well, Itaught you how to read, didn’t I?”
    Later, Jane never made much fuss about the difficulties she faced in adapting to New York; it was adapting to the Depression she remembered with a shudder. “I think that’s the hardest time I ever had,” she’d say. And yet, it wasn’t as hard for her as for many others. For people in their thirties who’d watched newly launched careers crash, or those in their forties or fifties flattened by rejection and idleness, the Depression was devastating. Back in 1929, the national unemployment rate had been 3 percent; in 1935, it was 20 . But for Jane and some of her young friends, she’d write, they could still “make stories out of ourrejections and frugalities and the strange people we met up with in our futile searches and could bask in the gasps or laughs we generated.”
    The short-lived, ill-paying jobs Jane held during these years might seem the most justly omitted element of a successful woman’s résumé, the kind that, further along in your career, you simply forget to mention. Jane, though, was grateful for them. “It was not what I wanted,” she’d write, “but it was interesting and I enjoyed myself.” Indeed, they were just the jobs her Powell training had prepared her for; Jane could take shorthand at110 words per minute and type 70—not extraordinary, but respectable—and she was proud of it. Jobs like hers gave her a peek into the underside of American business that many of her college-bound classmates probably lacked.
    Many mornings, after scanning the classified ads for work, Jane took the subway into the city. Sometimes, though, she hiked into Manhattan across John Roebling’s eternally glorious Brooklyn Bridge, along its wood-slatted promenade, under and through its great Gothic towers. The bridge’s four muscular steel cables began their ascent from their moorings on either shore, climbed up to the towers, reached across the river. From the cables dropped steel suspenders, and from the towers diagonal stays; the two were clipped together where they met, shivering in the wind and traffic. At mid-span, the cables swung down to the roadway,then disappeared beneath it. So when Jane reached that spot, equidistant from either shore, high above the water, it was just her, and the river, and the great city below.
    Sometimes Jane would be sent off for a shorthand or typing test. Sometimes she’d be turned down flat. But by late morning, in any case, there’d often be nothing left but to explore wherever she found herself, or else invest a nickel on the subway and take it to some random stop. There, she’d climb the stairs to the street, maybe pause for an instant as she emerged into an unfamiliar prospect of buildings, people, signs, and shops, then push off into the surrounding streets. “Ididn’t know where I was most of the time,” she’d say. She had only the dimmest sense of the colossus that was New York. “But it fascinated me. It was wonderful. Every place I came out I was amazed.”
    Mornings scrounging for work, afternoons exploring the city—that was the pattern. It was toward the end of her first year in New York that one such voyage of exploration landed her in Manhattan’s fur district, west of Sixth Avenue in the West Twenties, crowded with carts hauling pelts of mink, muskrat, and ermine, sometimes an errant tiger skin, on their way to becoming wraps and scarves. Jane’s face must have betrayed her wonder, for at one pointa man stepped from his shop, introduced himself, and soon was regaling the eager nineteen-year-old with tales of the fur