Eyes On The Street: The Life Of Jane Jacobs - Plot & Excerpts
She saw “an atmosphere of hope” there, in the initiative of private citizenry “thriving in the little and the large.” She marveled at the sheer scope of the city’s efforts, scattered over more than a dozen sites and ten thousand acres. She wrote of sunken gardens; of a food distribution center that would eliminate squatters’ shacks and burning dumps; of the architect Louis Kahn’s “clever and practical devices” for improving a poor district called Mill Creek. She lauded an “embrace of the new” that in Philadelphia “has by some miracle not meant the usual rejection of whatever is old.”At intervals, Jane quoted the city’s planning commission director, the already legendary Edmund Bacon, on his way to the cover of Time for his leadership of the city’s redevelopment programs. A native Philadelphian, forty-five, born of a staunchly conservative publishing family, Bacon was a graduate of Cornell’s school of architecture. He’d used an inheritance from his grandfather to travel the world, had wound up in Beijing, won a fellowship to study city planning at the University of Michigan, worked as a planner in Flint.
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