Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs by Robert Kanigel Page A
Authors: Robert Kanigel
Tags: United States, History, Biography & Autobiography, 20th Century, Political Science, Women, Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development
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And just then, in the late summer or early fall of 1935, Jane Butzner took a giant step into her life’s work. Back at Central High, being a writer mostly meant poetry. But a few times, something or someone capturing her interest, Jane had looked, listened, taken notes, and written of it not in poetry but in prose. Then, at the Republican , she’d taken her turn as unpaid cub reporter. Now, she would get paid by a national magazine, Vogue , for what in Scranton she’d given away free.
“Everyone in the New York fur district seems toknow everyone else—but not everyone speaks to everyone else.” That’s how she began the article she’d write about it. Competition was intense. “Each packet of furs, in its journey from trapper to fur-farmer, to auctioneer to dresser, stirs up feuds.” She was astonished by all she saw and heard. She wrote of racks and handcarts, heaped with furs, parading up and down Eighth Avenue; of an auction catalog promoting the sale of the hides of ten thousand mountain lions, seventeen thousand wolves; of fur theft so common that trucks had “hold-up horns” and shops had inner doors of iron bars.“Inside the barred doors and behind the wire grating back of the shop-windows,” she wrote, “the shops are dark and eerie. Mounted heads of ferocious animals project from the walls. Mounds of furs cover crates and hand-carts, filling the shop with a rank, musty odour.”
Jane would later minimize what she had done, would say her fur district account owed “practically word for word” to the gentleman, Mr. Edgar Lehman, who’d stepped from his shop to talk to her. But in her piece, you could see a real writer’s sensibility at work, one alive to curious details. “Every Christmas,” she concluded it, “thousands of white whiskers made of strips of Angora goat are sold for department store Santa Clauses. Just now, the district is hopeful that the hanging of red fox tails on radiator caps, a fad started by some taxi-drivers, will bring a boom to the fox-tail business.”
In the November 15, 1935, issue of Vogue , fashion-conscious readers learned of the recent Paris collections, read about wool and fur pom-poms on hats, one-shouldered gladiator necklines, crocheted Spanish shawls, fringes dangling from tailored black dinner jackets. Modern women were advised that now they were free to “Dine in Suits” or “Dance in Pleats.” A jeweler showed off rings with bands of alternating rubies and diamonds. Jane’s one-thousand-word story, “Where the Fur Flies,” fit right in.
It was quite a coup for a nineteen-year-old just out of high school. She’d written the piece, impressed an editor enough to have it accepted, and pocketed $40—two or three weeks’ worth of typing and dictation in the uninspiring office jobs she had such trouble finding—and finally was pleased to see it appear in print, her name right there at the top of page 103. And her editor wanted more. Over the next year and a half, she delivered three more pieces to Vogue , each celebrating another of Manhattan’s specialized wholesale districts: leather, flowers, and diamonds. Jane wrote of bullfrogs and sheep intestines made into novelty leathers. Of how on flower district sidewalks the “damp, sweet perfume [of cut flowers], blowing across the pavement, filters from hampers and crates piled beside doorways.” Of how it took pawned diamondsthirteen months to reach the auction house; outside, meanwhile, on the Bowery, “the ‘El’ roars, trucks rumble, bums sprawl beside the curbstone, Chinamen from Mott Street mince by, snatches from foreign tongues are caught and lost in a reek of exotic and forbidding odors.”
Each article offered a peek into the business of fashion; that’s why they were in Vogue in the first place. Each delivered a streetside grittiness thatcould seem to foreshadow its author’s life, forever linked to cities. But more than anything “urban” about them, each displayed a love
And just then, in the late summer or early fall of 1935, Jane Butzner took a giant step into her life’s work. Back at Central High, being a writer mostly meant poetry. But a few times, something or someone capturing her interest, Jane had looked, listened, taken notes, and written of it not in poetry but in prose. Then, at the Republican , she’d taken her turn as unpaid cub reporter. Now, she would get paid by a national magazine, Vogue , for what in Scranton she’d given away free.
“Everyone in the New York fur district seems toknow everyone else—but not everyone speaks to everyone else.” That’s how she began the article she’d write about it. Competition was intense. “Each packet of furs, in its journey from trapper to fur-farmer, to auctioneer to dresser, stirs up feuds.” She was astonished by all she saw and heard. She wrote of racks and handcarts, heaped with furs, parading up and down Eighth Avenue; of an auction catalog promoting the sale of the hides of ten thousand mountain lions, seventeen thousand wolves; of fur theft so common that trucks had “hold-up horns” and shops had inner doors of iron bars.“Inside the barred doors and behind the wire grating back of the shop-windows,” she wrote, “the shops are dark and eerie. Mounted heads of ferocious animals project from the walls. Mounds of furs cover crates and hand-carts, filling the shop with a rank, musty odour.”
Jane would later minimize what she had done, would say her fur district account owed “practically word for word” to the gentleman, Mr. Edgar Lehman, who’d stepped from his shop to talk to her. But in her piece, you could see a real writer’s sensibility at work, one alive to curious details. “Every Christmas,” she concluded it, “thousands of white whiskers made of strips of Angora goat are sold for department store Santa Clauses. Just now, the district is hopeful that the hanging of red fox tails on radiator caps, a fad started by some taxi-drivers, will bring a boom to the fox-tail business.”
In the November 15, 1935, issue of Vogue , fashion-conscious readers learned of the recent Paris collections, read about wool and fur pom-poms on hats, one-shouldered gladiator necklines, crocheted Spanish shawls, fringes dangling from tailored black dinner jackets. Modern women were advised that now they were free to “Dine in Suits” or “Dance in Pleats.” A jeweler showed off rings with bands of alternating rubies and diamonds. Jane’s one-thousand-word story, “Where the Fur Flies,” fit right in.
It was quite a coup for a nineteen-year-old just out of high school. She’d written the piece, impressed an editor enough to have it accepted, and pocketed $40—two or three weeks’ worth of typing and dictation in the uninspiring office jobs she had such trouble finding—and finally was pleased to see it appear in print, her name right there at the top of page 103. And her editor wanted more. Over the next year and a half, she delivered three more pieces to Vogue , each celebrating another of Manhattan’s specialized wholesale districts: leather, flowers, and diamonds. Jane wrote of bullfrogs and sheep intestines made into novelty leathers. Of how on flower district sidewalks the “damp, sweet perfume [of cut flowers], blowing across the pavement, filters from hampers and crates piled beside doorways.” Of how it took pawned diamondsthirteen months to reach the auction house; outside, meanwhile, on the Bowery, “the ‘El’ roars, trucks rumble, bums sprawl beside the curbstone, Chinamen from Mott Street mince by, snatches from foreign tongues are caught and lost in a reek of exotic and forbidding odors.”
Each article offered a peek into the business of fashion; that’s why they were in Vogue in the first place. Each delivered a streetside grittiness thatcould seem to foreshadow its author’s life, forever linked to cities. But more than anything “urban” about them, each displayed a love
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