Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs Read Online Free Page A

according to a 1936 memoir, the locals “set the tempo of their lives to the tireless plodding hoof beats of the mules.” Boys in town looked with envy at those their own age driving the mules or else lolling on the decks of passing boats.
    Espy, tucked away in mountainous ridge country that on topographic maps looks crumpled and crinkled, declined as the nineteenth century wore on. But it still carried some traffic in 1893 when Jane’s grandmother, Jennie Breece Robison, and her husband, James Boyd Robison, bought a house on the north side of the main road running beside the canal.Both were central Pennsylvania natives of familiar Scots, Northern Irish, and English stock. They had four sons (another died when young) andfour daughters. One of them was Bess Mary, or Bessie, born in 1879. She would become the mother of Jane Jacobs and live for 101 years.
    Bess’s father, Boyd, Jane’s grandfather, was the son of a local merchant. Born in the adjacent, more substantial town of Bloomsburg, he attended Lafayette College and later fit in some legal studies. After the attack on Fort Sumter that launched the Civil War, he enlisted almost immediately, and was wounded in the hand at the Second Battle of Bull Run. “For purpose of labor,” he wrote home, “my finger is just as useless as if it were cut off.” In a second stint of service, in 1864, now an officer, Boyd was captured by Confederate guerillas and held in Libby Prison, a brick tobacco warehouse in Richmond into which Union officers, a thousand of them at a time, were infamously crowded. After the war, he returned to Bloomsburg, set up a law practice, and married Jennie Breece, a schoolteacher. For a few years he moved his young family to a place in the country, Esther Furnace Farm, a few miles outside of town. Then it was back to Bloomsburg, involvement in local politics, and, finally, the fine house in Espy. In the years Bessie was growing up, Captain J. Boyd Robison—lawyer, landowner, war veteran, member of the Presbyterian church, former candidate for Congress on the Greenback ticket, Knight Templar of the Masons—was a notable public figure.
    In 1895, Bessie, sixteen, enrolled in the teacher’s college in Bloomsburg, about two miles up the road from the family home in Espy, perhaps close enough, in those years before the trolley went in, for her to walk to school; there were dorms on campus, but she didn’t live in one. Bloomsburg, population seven thousand, was where her father had grown up and where he maintained his legal practice. Its town center of two- and three-story brick commercial buildings along Main Street, plus a sprinkling of late Victorian Romanesque civic structures, together lent it an air of gentility and solidity evident even today.
    At the head of Main Street stood the teacher’s college, formally known as the Bloomsburg Literary Institute and State Normal School, a clutch of new brick buildings perched on a bluff along the Espy side of town that granted a view the school touted in its publications: “The river, like a ribbon, edges the plain on the south, and disappears through a bold gorge three miles to the southwest.” Normal schools like Bloomsburg’s represented the earnest efforts of high-minded nineteenth-century educators to raise standards in primary schools by making better teachers. A five-year burst of money and energy in the early 1890s had left the schoolwith a new four-story dormitory, another dorm set aside for servants, an acoustically “perfect” thousand-seat auditorium, and that new boon, electricity. By Bessie’s time, it included a model school, where in their second year she and her classmates could put in the twenty-one weeks of student teaching required by state law. Also required of students were algebra and geometry, English literature, Latin, American history, rhetoric, music, and geography. It’s hard to be cynical about Bloomsburg’s normal school. It seems to have taken its mission seriously and