Toronto Star - Jane Jacobs - News

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"Letter of protest Jacobs' last act"

Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 01:00 AM

ROYSON JAMES

Sometime soon Toronto will decide on a suitable monument to record that Jane Jacobs lived among us and gave much more than she took.

The American anti-expressway activist who moved here in 1968 gave confidence to proponents of a fledgling Toronto movement that, silly them, believed neighbourhoods mattered; people could live harmoniously downtown; a city is for people, not cars; and the citizen is every bit as wise as the city hall planner.

Those themes still ricochet around Toronto. And we can thank Jacobs, who died yesterday, a week shy of her 90th birthday, in her neighbourhood Toronto Western hospital, following a short illness.

Jacobs, who tapped out seven books on a manual typewriter, was working on two manuscripts at her death. Her last book, Dark Age Ahead was a wake-up call on the dangers facing mankind.

When I finally met the oracle, the guru, she was well into her eighth decade on the planet.

Sitting at a table in her living room on Albany Ave., her hand cupped to her ear to aid her failing hearing, she was a frail shell of her once-robust self.

It was like watching Wayne Gretzky or Babe Ruth or Pele in their final season and wondering what it might have been like when occasional brilliance was the staple of their play. We all grow old and die. The great ones change the way we think or live or experience life.

So it is with Jacobs.

In her last public act, she sent off a letter of support to West Vancouver residents battling expansion of the sea to sky highway through an environmentally sensitive region, son Ned reports.

"I wish to convey my support and admiration to people of West Vancouver who are sacrificing their time, energy and possibly even their freedom to preserve and protect the magnificent and irreplaceable Eagleridge Bluffs and Larson Creek wetlands from this destructive, ill-conceived scheme."

That was sent April 17.

She fought lowly planners and New York's famed municipal boss Robert Moses. She railed against highrise towers and cars cutting through neighbourhoods and runaway development that threatened the viability of downtown neighbourhoods. And wherever citizens gave birth to a cause, her name was used to justify the opposition.

That, of course, is a two-edged sword. For many of her disciples would have been horrified at some of her ideas on the economy, ideas that could be found in any progressive conservative handbook. Maybe that explains why David Crombie cherished her so.

Calling from a vacation spot, the former tiny perfect mayor recalled that he was already teaching Jacobs' ideas, penned in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, when he met her in 1968.

"She dealt in a world of ideas and practical application with a sense of right and wrong," Crombie said yesterday. "She taught us that while ideas mattered, acting on them was important. And she added an ethical dimension."

Over the past two years, Jacobs has carried on her rants about the evils of city planners. Always, the audience listened with rapt attention.

The irony is, says former Star city columnist David Lewis Stein, an Annex neighbour, is that Jacobs' disciples violated one of the guru's principal tenets: avoid orthodoxy.

The idea of protecting neighbourhoods and the expansion of the business district into downtown neighbourhoods saved the downtown as a liveable metropolis. But the corollary is de-concentration. Now they call it urban sprawl.

"She gave us the value of the neighbourhood," Stein says. "What her disciples didn't do was build to the next stage ... how do you knit them together in a construct like the GTA?"

In May 2001 in Winnipeg, Jacobs painfully rose to an arching position, her white, out-of-place hair enhancing her legendary status, and addressed the mayors of Canada's five largest urban regions. It was the first meeting called to fertilize an embryonic movement for a new deal for cities.

In a broadside levelled at Ottawa and the provinces, Jacobs urged the unprecedented gathering of mayors to organize their nearly 6.5 million citizens in what amounted to a campaign to save the country.

Jacobs' monumental work is finished. Ours is just beginning.

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