Jacobs, Jane

Early Years

Born into a prosperous Scranton, Pennsylvania, household, Jacobs nevertheless observed the tenuous economic conditions faced by the miners in that anthracite coal region and the poor Appalachian farmers she encountered while accompanying her aunt on Presbyterian missionary work in North Carolina. These exposures—combined with the onset of the Great Depression as Jacobs was entering her teens—implanted in her a lifelong concern with the forces of community growth and decay. Her formal education in Scranton's public schools was unremarkable, and she recalled secretly reading books of her own choosing under her classroom desk. Her intellectual curiosity, however, led her to a long life of bucking academic authorities.

Although she never obtained a degree beyond a high school diploma, a six-month course in business stenography armed Jacobs by age 20 to follow her sister to New York City and obtain work as a secretary. At the same time, she began selling articles as a freelance writer on urban life to publications such as Vogue and the Sunday Herald Tribune.

Following two years of continuing education courses at Columbia University, Jacobs joined the New York branch of the Roosevelt administration's Office of War Information. She continued after 1945 in the State Department's Overseas Information Agency, essentially producing propaganda pieces about the United States for publication abroad. Her wartime writings included an appeal for federal action to aid rusting industrial centers like Scranton. In 1952, she left the State Department in the wake of a series of McCarthy-era interrogations about her labor activity in the United Public Workers of America.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Jacobs lived first in Brooklyn, then near Washington Square in Greenwich Village. She married architect Robert Hyde Jacobs, and in 1947, the couple purchased a converted candy store at 555 Hudson Street in the West Village neighborhood, where they had three children.

Writing about Cities

After leaving the State Department in 1952, Jacobs worked as an associate editor at Architectural Forum. Her work there brought her into contact with influential ideas and individuals during the high-water mark of government-funded urban renewal programs. She soon became skeptical about these large-scale redevelopment projects. An encounter with William Kirk of the Union Settlement in East Harlem alerted her to the social shortcomings of new high-rise public housing projects, which replaced the traditional street pattern with superblocks. Meeting renowned Philadelphia city planner Edmund Bacon, Jacobs was struck by his abstract, aesthetic preoccupation with modernization and his insensitivity to the vitality in older (even impoverished) neighborhoods.

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