Read Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs for Free Online

or seven, Jane was reading pretty much everything, sometimes trailing her mother around the house, book in hand, asking about words she didn’t know. She liked nursery rhymes and traditional songs, thought about what they meant. “When Good King Arthur Ruled This Land” tells of pudding stuffed with “great lumps of fat as big as my two thumbs”; Jane saw in ita distaste for profligacy. She loved The Three Musketeers. She buried herself in The Book of Knowledge , a children’s encyclopedia, popular and fun—if, in son Jim’s words, “chock full of egregious misinformation, and racist.” She discovered Dickens’s compulsively readable A Child’s History of England:
So, Julius Caesar came sailing over to this Island of ours, with eighty vessels and twelve thousand men. And he came from the French coast between Calais and Boulogne, “because thence was the shortest passage into Britain”; just for the same reason as our steamboats now take the same track every day. He expected to conquer Britain easily; but it was not such easy work as he expected.
    As a young girl Jane may not have talked of it so freely, but much later she’d often refer to the chats she’d have in her imagination with historical figures. “Since I was a little girl I’ve beencarrying on dialogues with them in my head just to keep from being bored.” First was Thomas Jefferson—until, that is, “I exhausted my meagre knowledge of what would interest Jefferson. He always wanted to get into abstractions.” She turned to Benjamin Franklin, who, she advised an interviewer once, was interested in “nitty-gritty, down-to-earth details, such as why the alley we were walking through wasn’t paved, and who would pave it if it were paved. He was interested in everything. ” She’d tell him how traffic lights worked, observe his surprise at how modern women dressed.
    She set no limits to her imagination and apparently no one tried to do it for her. “Where I grew up in Pennsylvania,” she’d write, “the children believed that on a night in Augustthe lakes turned over.” Later, she learned better, but just then “I imagined this marvel as a dark, whispered heaving and slipping of the waters with bright fish tumbling through. We knew when it had happened because we would find floating fragments of bottom weeds and in the top few feet of water, usually so clear, bits of fine muck and a rank smell.”
    Early on, Jane fell into poetry. In the 1950s, her mother gathered some of her youthful efforts and bound thirty or so of them into a little packet. Playfully or modestly, it’s not clear which, they were “published” as the work of oneSabilla Bodine, a forebear, five generations back, on Bessie’s side. Jane’s poems bore names like “A Mouse” and “Washing” and “Winter,” and look their age; they seem very much the juvenilia they are. Mostly, they rhyme: “I wonder if by any chance / Zebra babies like to dance.” Mostly, too, they are sweet, sometimes cloyingly so. On the other hand, they are striking for their varied subject matter and style. They include Aesop-like fables involving flies, fleas, and mice; micro-histories of Abraham Lincoln, the pirate Blackbeard, and the French poet François Villon. And warm recollections of Girl Scout camp: “In the dusky moonlight / by the flickering fire / Listening to the whispering leaves / That never seem to tire…” And delight in silly wordplay: “The baby is crying ’cause puss caught a mouse / Dingsy, dangsy, dito…” Or: “One day thewillowing Willow / Willowing like a willow / Saw a waddling / Wallowing / Dolphin / A-wallowing in the sea.” A few, just a bit more sophisticated, draw young Jane closer to us: “Small puddles, token of a rainy day / Have always lured me from my schoolward way / I want the crash of thunder, and the rain / I want it beating on my head again! / How can I stay at home, a warm dry place / When I have felt wet hemlock cross my