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

of color and oddity, a curiosity about how the world worked, that reflected her deepest sympathies.
    —
    Living on Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights, Jane and Betty Butzner were New Yorkers—more or less, sort of.
    Betty’s daughter, Carol, would grow up hearing of the charming triplet of streets—Orange, Pineapple, Cranberry—that defined their Brooklyn neighborhood. Jane would adjudge it “delightful.” Back in Walt Whitman’s time, before 1898, when it relinquished its independence to become a mere “borough” of the City of New York, Brooklyn was its own city, sitting contentedly across the river from New York; until the Brooklyn Bridge went up in 1883 it was linked to New York only by ferry. When Jane moved there its population, at 2.6 million, was more, by 800,000, than that of Manhattan; just by itself, it was the third largest city in the United States, after only New York as a whole and Chicago. It had its own downtown core, its own stately blocks of brownstones, its own slums, its own shopping and industry; even in places like Flatbush or Midwood its own suburbs. On Orange Street, Jane lived closer to Lower Manhattan’s luster, growl, and grit than most Manhattanites did. After a two-block walk to the Clark Street subway station and the elevator down to the tracks, she was fifteen minutes from Times Square, four from Wall Street.
    But of course none of that counted; Brooklyn wasn’t New York.
    It couldn’t have been long into her life there that Jane learned what every New Yorker knew, that “the city” was Manhattan, period. The fur district she’d stumbled upon so fortuitously was in Manhattan. So was the diamond district. Vogue itself, New York fashion personified, was in Manhattan. The jobs she got that first year were all in Manhattan, as were the better jobs she sought now. So were Broadway, Times Square, Fifth Avenue, the tall towers, the publishing houses, the galleries, and practically all the other iconic places of New York. It was hard not to feel the pull. Jane had only to glance down Henry Street, at the great stone arches that were the Brooklyn Bridge approaches, to take herself in her mind’s eye to Manhattan. For Jane, as for any young person of curiosity and spunk, the city beckoned.
    On one of her forays into Manhattan near the end of that first year, probably in late summer, Jane got out at the Christopher Street subway stop; she “liked thesound of the name,” she’d say. She had no idea where she was, “but I was enchanted with this place…I spent the rest of the afternoon just walking these streets.”
    As she got off the train, she’d have seen the name of the station set in mosaic tile, as in most of New York’s four hundred–odd subway stations:
CHRISTOPHER ST .
SHERIDAN SQ .
    Sheridan Square was no “square” at all, of course. But out of its irregular and unlovely expanse radiated Seventh Avenue South and wide West Fourth Street. Stroll along them, or on Grove Street, Washington Place, or Waverly Place, which all converged there, and soon you found yourself among a warren of little streets south and west of the square, the clubs and bars lining West Fourth Street that drew revelers from the outer boroughs, art galleries, small shops, modest apartment buildings.
    It was here, in a low-lying bowl of cityscape mostly off the tourist maps, far from the great employment centers, not grand, not rich, maybe a little ragtag, that Jane now found herself. No neatly defined shopping districts here in the streets near Sheridan Square, nothing like upscale Fifth Avenue or proletarian Fourteenth Street—no neatly defined anything. Blocks of handsome brownstones across Sixth Avenue that could have stepped out of a Henry James novel, musical Italian filling the shops and stoops of the tenements to the south, gritty warehouses and a sprinkling of small-scale industry to the west. Along Bleecker Street, a bakery selling Italian bread for a nickel a loaf, a cheese shop selling