It’s Jane Jacobs Day in Toronto, Friday May 4, 2007
The City of Toronto has officially proclaimed today as Jane Jacobs Day starting what would have been Jane Jacobs’ 91st birthday weekend.
Jeff Gray has an item in today’s Globe and Mail titled City honours urban vision of Jane Jacobs.
Tomorrow, we’ll post a complete listing here of all the Jane’s Walks along with maps and directions to starting points, making it easier to choose your one or two walks for your day.
For today, now that Jane Jacobs is gone, let’s wonder who the NEXT Jane Jacobs is and where do we find her?
Paul Smalera pens a piece in the New York Press:
SWEEPIN’ DOWN BROOME
Observing the inevitable changes of one of the city’s last great nabes
Taking it to the Streets
…If New York has a Jane Jacobs anymore, she probably lives in Brooklyn. But maybe, maybe she might live in the Lower East Side somewhere: nose rings, body tats and polka dot dresses. She observes the “sidewalk dance,” as Jacobs put it, playing out on her block of Broome, while she gets her coffee at 88 Orchard on the way to the subway. It’s not as pretty a dance as it used to be, but then again, maybe we want to remember the dance as being pretty, when it’s always been a little dirty and gritty….
Before Jane Jacobs arrived in Toronto, she was a New Yorker who stood up to Robert Moses and his desire to entomb the Lower East Side with his Lower Manhattan Expressway.
You can read the rest of Paul Smalera’s vision of Neo-Jane Jacobs here.
May 6th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Let’s hope there never will be another Jane Jacobs. That woman was a disaster for Toronto. Thanks to her and the champagne socialists, this city is drowning in gridlock and going bacnkrupt. I look forward to throwing out these socialists and getting a new administration that will cancel Jane Jacobs Day, forget about her and get back to common sense of building new roads and expressways that we need.