Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York: Urban Detectives

JJ_web_logo.jpg

In the spirit of Jane Jacobs, children ages 8 to 12 can go and explore Greenwich Village — the neighborhood she called her home and fought to save. Equipped with detectives’ notebooks, junior detectives will investigate the city fabric, secretly observe people moving through town, discover the history of older buildings, learn to read building facades and ghost walls, search for an underground brook, and maybe even make sense of Village street patterns! During this fun and interactive tour, children will gain some understanding of the huge impact that urban planning has on our lives and the importance of being involved.

Leader: Sylvia Laudien-Meo, art historian

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

555 Hudson Street

By Aaron Naparstek |
Jane Jacobs lived at 555 Hudson Street when she wrote "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." I happened to be in the neighborhood yesterday afternoon and I saw this bouquet of flowers and card on the front door. The card reads, "Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006. From this house, in 1961, a housewife changed the […]

Atlantic Yards Planner: “Space on Streets is Useless Space”

By Jason Varone |
In this week’s New York Observer, Matthew Schuerman talks at length with Laurie Olin, the landscape architect who may or may not have been teamed up with starchitect Frank Gehry on Forest City Enterprise’s Atlantic Yards project "to compensate for Mr. Gehry’s reputed lack of urban-planning skills." Schuerman writes: Mr. Olin’s role in the project […]

Thank God for Jane Jacobs the Highway Slayer

By Ben Fried |
Jane Jacobs’ legacy is so broad and complex I’m not going to attempt a big thinkpiece to mark her 100th birthday. In lieu of something long and wordy, I’ve got two short paragraphs and some images of the Robert Moses road monsters she slew in the 1960s. Car-centric planning was inimical to the things Jacobs valued most […]

What Should We Learn From Moses and Jacobs?

By Ryan Avent |
There is probably no more beloved figure in urbanism than Jane Jacobs, who fought to preserve some of New York City’s most treasured neighborhoods and who gave urbanists some of the field’s fundamental texts. As Ed Glaeser notes in the New Republic this week, Jacobs died in 2006 "a cherished, almost saintly figure," while her […]