Submitted by Benjamin Hemric, Sep 28, 2007 22:04

As the article already points out, Jacobs was writing about the Upper West Side as it existed in the late 1950s -- NOT the Upper West Side as it exists in 2007, or the Upper West Side as it existed in 1997, or 1987, or 1977, or even 1967. ("Death and Life of Great American Cities" was essentially finished in early 1961 and was published, I believe, in the fall of 1961.) So for any Upper West Siders to take umbrage at her comments as though she were describing the Upper West Side of today is kind of silly! The fact of the matter is that in 1959 and 1960, when Jacobs was writing "Death and Life," the Upper West Side was as she described it. What was of concern to Jacobs in "Death and Life of Great American Cities" was why some cities (and city neighborhoods) have more resilence than others -- in other words, why some cities (and city neighborhoods) go downhill faster than others and have a harder time coming back up again, and what should -- and should NOT -- be done in order to prevent decline and to encourage regeneration. So the comment by Prof. Fuchs that, "This neighborhood was always beautiful, but it was caught in a decline caused by forces way beyond the city's control . . . " is not only untrue (since during its period of severe decline the area was indeed by most reasonable accounts less beautiful than it is today) but it also appears to largely miss the point of Jacobs' discussions of the Upper West Side in particular and, perhaps, the point of "Death and Life" in general. (In other words, why the Upper West Side declined and had a harder time coming back than, say, the Upper East Side, Brooklyn Heights, Greenwich Village, etc.) Furthermore, it's hard to find fault with Jacobs analysis of the decline of the Upper West Side (and other similar city neighborhoods) when, contrary to stereotyped thinking about her work, a not insignificant portion of her analysis is devoted to a discussion economics and social policy and the mixture of the two, as in discussions of the cheap FHA mortgages that subsidized the flight to suburbia and the redlining (she calls it credit blacklisting) of city neighborhoods that starved them of the capital that was needed to fend off decay. (See, for instance, on page 394 of the Modern Library edition, "One of these few [studies of blacklisting] was a research report on a cataclysmically deteriorated area of New York's West Side, by Chester A. Rapkin . . . . ")

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