Bluejake

I bought Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities three or four years ago, but I was intimidated by its length and never started it. The book has occupied various places in my apartment and storage locker since then, and the other day it turned up on my nightstand. Having just finished a pretty dry book about math, I figured what the hell-- it's not like it could be more difficult than that. Quite the contrary: turns out she's one of the most engaging writers I've encountered in the last few years. The book is all about what makes cities work, and not work, and she spends a lot of the time criticizing the terrible dullness of most urban places. I've been to a lot of the cities she mentions-- LA, Boston, Philly, New York, Chicago-- and I'm fascinated by her descriptions of various neighborhoods, which I've been comparing to my recollections of them, and then to her description of what they were like circa 1960, when the book was written. One city that definitely hasn't changed much: Los Angeles is still a nearly endless sprawl of strangely empty streets, unimaginable divides between rich and poor, and smoggy blue skies. You could take ten years, as I have, visiting LA to understand that stuff-- or you could sit for five minutes at the corner of La Brea and Melrose and watch the people at the bus stop. You'd reach the same conclusions, I think.