I worked in New York’s SoHo several times over the years. To get to my office from my apartment in Hoboken, I usually got off the Christopher Street PATH station and walked my favorite New York walk through my favorite part of Manhattan: the West Village. Hudson Street to Barrow Street, then the tiny, twee stretch of Cherry Lane to Bedford Street, and down Barrow Street, near old speakeasys and Edna St. Vincent Mallay’s house.
Thank you, Jane Jacobs, for fighting so that I could see it.
i had a few drinks at chumleys last week. great neighborhood…
And I have her to thank for helping stop the Spadina Expressway that would have literally been a highway next to my apt. building. She loved my neighbourhood, the Annex – it was indeed a magical place. I sense they’ll still be reading her books centuries from now.
I fear that the days of intellectual giants like her are no longer with us – how many “writer, intellectual, analyst, ethicist and moral thinker, activist, self-made economist, and a fearless critic of inflexible authority” type are there anymore? Scary, isn’t it?