2013 Jane Jacobs Walk: Exploring "Prayer Central"

At the encouragement of national Jane Jacobs Walk leaders (who have been enthusiastic supporters of Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of The Death and Life of Great American Cities), Glenna Lang has organized the popular local walk in Cambridge, MA, for the last five years. A version of the following article appeared in the Cambridge Chronicle.

Walkers on Norfolk Street

Cambridge Jane Jacobs Walk Explores “Prayer Central”

Cambridge’s fifth annual Jane Jacobs Walk proved more timely than its organizers had imagined when they planned the route several months ago. On Saturday morning May 4, more than sixty people, led by Charles Sullivan, executive director of the Cambridge Historical Commission, set out from Central Square to explore the layers of history and culture found just north of Massachusetts Avenue between Prospect and Norfolk Streets, Cambridge’s geographic and political center in the early 19th century.

Writer Michael Kenney suggested the theme of this year’s walk, inspired by his Boston Globe article on November 4, 2000, entitled “Prayer Central: Known for Its Curries and Live Music, One Cambridge Neighborhood Is Home To Nearly 60 Congregations.” The area’s diverse and continually changing population is reflected in its surprising number of places of worship.

Charles Sullivan, executive director of the Cambridge
Historical Commission, and Father Gabriel Troy, pastor of St. May
of the Annunciation, address Jane Jacobs Walkers

As the walk began, Kenney pointed out an unassuming storefront Pentecostal church among multi-family dwellings on Norfolk Street. Walkers then headed to St. Mary of the Annunciation, the city’s third and once most important Catholic church, dating from 1866. Over time, St. Mary’s grew to form a complex with two school buildings, a convent, rectory, and gymnasiums for boys and girls. Its programs included a boys’ high school and two-year college, all free to its mainly Irish parishioners. The current pastor, Father Gabriel Troy, invited walkers to view the gloriously refurbished church interior, now home to a largely Spanish-speaking congregation. Appointed to a parish in the Peruvian mountains by Cardinal Cushing, Father Troy – a native of Ireland – is fluent in Spanish and delivers services in both languages.

Around the corner from St. Mary’s, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church was originally built in 1861 as a Methodist church and now serves many families whose shared heritage is from the Caribbean islands. Minka vanBeuzekom, a Cambridge City Councilor on the walk with a copy of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities in hand, called attention to the solar panels on the church roof, which they obtained through a grant for nonprofits.

Cindy Carpenter, a walk participant, informed the crowd about the Temple Beth Shalom, also known as the Tremont Street Shul, which she attends. She described it as special because “it seeks to accommodate different Jewish practices, often offering two services at the same time (egalitarian and traditional), and is not formally affiliated with any of the three main branches of organized Judaism in this country."

Nichole Mossalam, secretary of the Islamic Society
of Boston in Cambridge, speaks with a participant
in Cambridge’s annual Jane Jacobs Walk.

Welcoming the walkers to the Islamic Society of Boston’s Cambridge mosque, Nichole Mossalam, its secretary, led the group through the site. The visitors peered into two prayer rooms with sparsely decorated walls and beautiful rugs covering the floors. Outside the painted tile-like front of the former Knights of Columbus building, erected in 1958, Mossalam described the mosque as unaffiliated with any particular kind of Muslim religion. Worshippers come from countries on at least four continents, and they value inclusiveness. Muslims in the U.S. are becoming part of American life, she said, and “they don’t want to be divisive” in their relations with non-Muslims.

As they headed back to Central Square, many walkers expressed delight in discovering the diverse houses of worship tucked within a few blocks and remarked on the warm reception they had received.

Jane Jacobs Walks honor the memory and spirit of author and urban activist Jane Jacobs.

Begun in Canada the year after Jacobs died in 2006, the walks take place on the weekend closest to her birthday on May 4. Any group or individual can organize a walk and list it on www.janejacobswalk.org. In its seven years, Jane Jacobs Walks have become an international movement with hundreds of walks occurring simultaneously all over the world.

Glenna Lang is a Cambridge, MA, resident and the author, along with Marjory Wunsch, of Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Genius of Common Sense is available on the Godine website in both hardcover and softcover formats.

Dorchester Speakers Forum on Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs’s work is alive and well in Dorchester, MA. On Veteran’s Day evening in the middle of a holiday weekend, a standing-room only crowd filled All Saints parish hall in Dorchester’s Ashmont neighborhood for a Dorchester Speakers Forum on urban heroine Jane Jacobs. Panelists included 1988 Democratic presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis; M. David Lee, past president of the Boston Society of Architects and a partner in the architecture and planning firm, Stull and Lee; and Godine author Glenna Lang (Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of “The Death & Life of Great American Cities”) Frank Keefe, Secretary for Administration and Finance under Dukakis and a Boston developer, served as the lively moderator.

The panelists facing an engaged crowd of 200+ (standing room only):
Glenna Lang, Gov. Dukakis, and architect David Lee. (Photo credit: Mike Ritter)

Glenna Lang set the stage with a portrait of Jane Jacobs and her many connections to Boston – even to Dorchester itself. She reported that Jane had called Codman Square Health Center founder Bill Walczak in the early 1990s to learn about this Dorchester neighborhood’s remarkable turnaround, and she told the story of how Jane’s papers came to reside at Boston College.

With pithy quotes from The Death & Life of Great American Cities, David Lee marveled at the relevance of Jane Jacobs to the design profession today. He selected passages of enduring wisdom in her book, some of which displayed her sympathy, understanding, and appreciation for African Americans and other minorities who lived in public housing projects or were confined to ghettos.

Along with wonderful stories and quips, the Governor vividly described Boston’s political atmosphere that led to the demolition of the West End and the massive highway scheme that would have laid waste to much of the city. He pointed out that the power of a Robert Moses in New York or William F. Callahan in Boston lay in influence gained through patronage and corruption. An engaged citizenry, he exhorted, must continue to fight for better cities to counter the Moses of the world.

The largely Dorchester crowd – lifelong residents, newer enthusiasts, political figures, and neighborhood activists – responded with a shower of questions, opinions, and tweets. Michael Patrick MacDonald, author of the renowned South Boston memoir All Souls, tweeted from the audience with delight, “At All Saints in #Dorchester for Jane Jacobs Speaker Forum. Gov Michael Dukakis gives MAJOR props to @occupywallst & @Occupy_Boston.”

After the forum – organized by political mover and shaker Joyce Linehan – panelists and many audience members repaired to the Tavolo restaurant for further conversations, lively stories, and political gossip. Tavolo is located on Dorchester Ave. in a recent six-story building right next to the MBTA’s Ashmont Red Line Station. Jim Keefe and Trinity Financial developed the site of a former bus parking lot with ground-floor retail and mixed-income housing above. Jane Jacobs would have approved wholeheartedly.

The after dinner at Tavolo restaurant, hosted by Jim Keefe:
Michael and Kitty Dukakis with Alex von Hoffman and Glenna Lang.
(Photo credit: Joyce Linehan)

The author of this post is Glenna Lang, co-author of Godine's Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of the Death & Life of Great American Cities along with Marjory Wunsch.

Jane Jacobs by Bicycle

by Glenna Lang

Janet Attard

Bicycle proponents around the world are taking notice of Jane Jacobs, urban writer – and cyclist. In Toronto, bicycle-artist and bicycle-activist, Janet Attard (aka “Janet Bike Girl”) has installed a visual display of Genius of Common Sense at the entrance to her studio at 401 Richmond Street West. Toronto bike activists admire Jane Jacobs not only for all she did to further sensible treatment of their city, but also for her steadfast preference for bicycles instead of cars.

For years, in all but the most inclement weather, Jane Jacobs rode her bicycle to work in New York City — from her West Village home to her office at Architectural Forum magazine in Rockefeller Center — through almost three miles of city traffic. In her books, articles, and speech, she railed against cities pandering to the automobile by widening streets and building highways. She never obtained a driver’s license or even learned to drive a car. When she moved to Toronto in 1968, she continued to bike around the city. After breaking her wrist in a fall at home, she reluctantly gave up bike-riding to avoid more broken bones. Jane said she envied the Dutch queens Juliana and Wilhelmina who rode their bikes until very old age.

Jane Jacobs on her bike.

Using only images having to do with bicycles, Janet Attard designs beautiful stenciled graphics on paper, cloth, and acetate, portraying individual bikes, generic and famous cyclists, bicycle-related words, or patterns of repeating bicycles. She also collects images of bicycles. In Genius of Common Sense, Janet was happy to find a photo of Jane riding her bike to work and an illustration of Jane and Bob Jacobs on their 1944 honeymoon bicycle-trip, thus learning of Jane’s love of bicycles — but she also found Jane to be an inspirational figure in many other ways. In time for Toronto’s Bike Month, Janet created a display with illustrations from and information about the book to convey her enthusiasm for Jane Jacobs and Genius to bike lovers and numerous sundry visitors to 401 Richmond from near and far.

Janet’s studio is part of a nineteenth-century industrial building rehabilitated by Jane Jacobs’s longtime friend, Margie Zeidler of Urbanspace Property Group. Providing a vibrant creative environment for over 140 artists and micro-entrepreneurs, 401Richmond houses a community reinforced by a newsletter, tenant get-togethers, and communal spaces. The re-tooled building itself embodies the ideas of Jane Jacobs with its mixed uses combining business and the arts along with a strong sense of community. On a brick wall in one of the stairwells hangs a large painting of Jane Jacobs.

Toronto’s cycling community can look forward to an article about Genius of Common Sense scheduled to appear in spring 2011 in Dandyhorse, the magazine for Toronto's urban cyclists.