I’m still reading through Anthony Flint’s excellent book on the battle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses over the fate of New York City’s neighborhoods in the 1960s . Last night, I reached the chapter where Jacobs is struggling to write her definitive work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The biggest problem Jacobs faced in writing the book was that she had more than enough examples of what destroyed city neighborhoods, but no way to make a clear argument for what makes a vibrant city neighborhood. After spending enough time watching the street life outside of her home on Hudson Street in the West Village, she slowly found what she was looking for:

“Jacobs settled on a description that would endure for years to come: [a vibrant city neighborhood] was like a ballet. From morning into night, her neighbors and the shopkeepers and the workers all seemed to be part of an improvised dance, she observed, ‘in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of a good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always complete with new improvisations.”
Having seen my share of American cities, I always felt the more horrific ones were places that had no neighborhoods within the city center. In the worst cases, the hub of these cities was nothing more than a business center that shut down at 5pm everyday, leaving the city desolate and lacking in any rhythm (contrary to Jacobs’ theory). And one block radius of bars does not a vibrant city make. The Gas Lamp district in San Diego doesn’t save it from being a ghost town. Nor the Flats in Cleveland. In my older younger days, I would’ve said this was due to the fact that those cities, well… just suck. But in my older wiser days, I’m a little more understanding. Those cities suck, because the city planners and real-estate developers never fostered the type of neighborhood living that gives a city its life.