The Woman on Hudson Street
In the early 1950s, Greenwich Village was a tangle of irregular streets, mom-and-pop shops, and rickety brownstones. Children played stoop ball and grocers chatted with customers who had lived above their stores for decades. One of those customers was Jane Jacobs, a freelance writer living at 555 Hudson Street with her husband and three children. She was not yet a public figure, let alone a city-saving legend. She was a curious observer, notebooks in hand. Her curiosity would change the fate of the Village—and the future of urban planning.
The Sidewalk Ballet
Jacobs was no academic. She had no urban planning degree and had never worked for City Hall. Her credentials were lived experience and a sharp, unsparing mind. Living in the Village gave her the ideal laboratory for her ideas. Unlike the gridded streets of Midtown, the Village was messy and idiosyncratic. But in that mess, Jacobs saw a different kind of order—a choreography she would later call the “sidewalk ballet.”
The Village’s seemingly chaotic vitality—corner shops, stoop-sitters, street performers, and lunchtime crowds—was not a flaw to be fixed. It made the neighborhood work. In her landmark 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs argued that cities thrive when they cultivate diversity of use, short blocks, and active streets—not when they are flattened into superblocks and stripped of street life.
The book was revolutionary for its defiance. Jacobs directly attacked the prevailing orthodoxy of her time—an orthodoxy led by a man whose vision could not have been more different from her own.
The Enemy: Robert Moses
If Jacobs was the patron saint of bottom-up urbanism, Robert Moses was its opposite. He was the unelected master builder of mid-century New York, famous for ramming highways through neighborhoods, erecting massive housing projects, and treating maps as blank canvases.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Moses proposed a plan that would slice an expressway—the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX)—through the heart of the Village and SoHo. The ten-lane highway would have razed blocks of homes and displaced thousands of people, replacing narrow, walkable streets with a concrete river designed for speed.
A Grassroots Insurgency
Jacobs opposed Moses’s expressway on philosophical grounds and organized against it. Alongside neighbors, activists, and local shopkeepers, she built a coalition that crossed class and racial lines. They held community meetings, filed lawsuits, and staged public protests. They flooded city hearings with testimonies and wrote letters.
In 1962, Jacobs was arrested for inciting a crowd at a public hearing on LOMEX, grabbing headlines and galvanizing support. Her trial only intensified public scrutiny of the expressway. The Village—once considered expendable—became a symbol of resistance to top-down planning. And in 1969, after years of pressure and mounting opposition, the expressway plan was finally destroyed.
It was a watershed moment: a grassroots movement had stopped the most powerful urban planner in America.
The Power of Staying Put
Jacobs’s defense of the Village was a matter of principle, not nostalgia. She wasn’t trying to preserve a quaint bohemian enclave for sentimental reasons. She believed that cities derived their strength from the daily interactions of ordinary people living and working side by side.
She called this the “organized complexity” of cities—a system too nuanced to be controlled by technocrats. Her critique was not anti-modernist; it was anti-authoritarian. Where others saw blight, she saw potential. Where others saw disorder, she saw a living, breathing city.
And the Village gave her the evidence. Her own block on Hudson Street was a case study in how life unfolds when planners get out of the way.
The Long Legacy
Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1968, disillusioned by the Vietnam War and fearing for her sons’ futures. But her ideas eventually took root around the world. Today, the principles she championed—mixed-use development, community input, historic preservation, walkability—are foundational in discussions about urban design.
In the Village, her legacy is still present. The neighborhoods she fought for were not frozen in time, but they retained their scale and spirit. More broadly, Jacobs’s influence reshaped how cities think about themselves. She legitimized the idea that the people who live in neighborhoods know what’s best for them. She helped shift planning from the drawing board to the street corner.
A Village Still Growing
While Greenwich Village has changed significantly since Jane Jacobs’s time—becoming more affluent and less economically diverse—many of the qualities she fought to preserve remain intact. Her successful resistance to top-down planning helped save the Village’s human-scale architecture, walkable streets, and vibrant public life. Today, even as the Village evolves, it still reflects Jacobs’s belief that cities thrive when built around the everyday lives of their residents.
