Source: www.manythings.org/voa/people

Jacob Riis: A Reporter Who Fought for the Poor in Old New York

I'm Shirley Griffith. And I'm Ray Freeman with the VOA Special English program, PEOPLE IN AMERICA.

Every week at this time, the Voice of America tells about someone important in the history of the United States. This week we tell about Jacob Riis. He was a writer who used all his energy to make the world a better place for poor people.

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In the spring of eighteen seventy, a young man traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to New York City. The young man came from Denmark. His name was Jacob Riis. He was just twenty-one years old.

His first years in the United States were difficult, like those of most immigrants at that time. It was difficult to get a job. Jacob Riis went from place to place seeking work. He did any kind of work he could find. Farming, coal mining, brick-making. He even tried to earn money as a peddler. He went from house to house selling things. Many times he slept wherever he could.

Soon he was beginning to lose hope. He decided to leave New York. He started to walk north. After a time, he arrived in the Bronx, the northern part of New York City. His feet burned with pain. And he was hungry.

"I had not eaten a thing since the day before. I had no breakfast, and decided to have a swim in the Bronx River, instead. But that did not help. I was just as hungry when I came out of the water.

"Then I walked slowly to Fordham College, which was not far from where I was. The doors to Fordham College were open, and I walked in, for no reason. I was just tired and had nothing else to do.

"Fordham is a Catholic college. And an old monk came to me and asked in a kind voice if I was hungry. I still remember in my dreams at night the beautiful face of that old monk. I was terribly hungry, and said I was, although I did not mean to do so. I had never seen a real live monk before. My own religious education as a Lutheran did not teach me to like Catholic monks.

"I ate the food that was brought to me. But I was troubled. I was afraid that after giving me food, the churchman would ask me to change my religious beliefs. I said to myself: 'I am not going to do it. ' But when I had eaten, I was not asked to do anything. I was given more food when I left, and continued on my way. I was angry with myself for having such bad thoughts about the Catholic churchmen at Fordham College. For the first time, I learned something about how to live with people of different religious beliefs."

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Later, Jacob Riis learned more about liking people, even if they are different. This time, it happened while he was working on a railroad with men who did rough work and looked rough.

"I had never done that sort of work, and it was not the right job for me. I did my best to work like the other men. But my chest felt heavy, and my heart pounded in my body as if it were going to explode. There were nineteen Irishmen in the group. They were big, rough fellows. They had chosen me as the only 'Dutchman' -- as they called me -- to make them laugh. They were going to use me as part of their jokes.

"But then they saw that the job was just too hard for me. This made them feel different about me. It showed another side to these fun-loving, big-hearted people. They thought of many ways to get me away from the very rough work. One was to get me to bring water for them. They liked stronger things to drink than water. But now they suddenly wanted water all the time. I had to walk a long way for the water. But it stopped me from doing the work that was too hard for me. These people were very rough in their ways. But behind the roughness they were good men. "

At last, Jacob Riis got a job writing for a newspaper in New York City. This was his chance. He finally had found a profession that would lead to his life work -- making the world a better place for poor people.

The newspaper sent him to police headquarters for stories. There he saw life at its worst, especially in a very poor part of New York which was known as Mulberry Bend.

"It was no place for men and women. And surely no place for little children. It was a terrible slum -- as such places are called -- where too many are crowded together, where the houses and streets are dirty and full of rats. The place began to trouble me as the truth about it became clear. Others were not troubled. They had no way of finding out how terrible the lives of people were in Mulberry Bend. But as a newspaper reporter, I could find the truth. So I went through the dark dirty streets and houses, and saw how the people suffered in this area. And I wrote many stories about the life there.

"I did good work as a police reporter, but wanted a change. My editor said, 'no'. He asked me to go back to Mulberry Bend and stay there. He said I was finding something there that needed me."

The words of Jacob Riis' editor proved to be very true. Riis started a personal war against slum houses, the sort he saw in Mulberry Bend. He learned to use a camera to show the public clearly what the Mulberry Bend slum was like. The camera in the eighteen eighties was nothing like it is today. But Riis got his pictures.

"I made good use of them quickly. Words could get no action to change things. But the pictures did. What the camera showed was so powerful that the city's health officials started to do something. At last I had a strong partner in the fight against Mulberry Bend -- my camera. "

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Jacob Riis continued the fight to clean up the slums for many years. There were not many people to help him. It was a lonely fight. But his camera and fighting words helped to get a law passed which would destroy the Mulberry Bend slum. Finally, the great day came. The slum housing was gone. The area had become a park.

"When they had fixed the ground so the grass could grow, I saw children dancing there in the sunlight. They were going to have a better life, thank God. We had given them their lost chance. I looked at these dancing children and saw how happy they were. This place that had been full of crime and murder became the most orderly in the city.

"The murders and crimes disappeared when they let sunlight come into the Bend. The sunlight that shone upon children who had, at last, the right to play. That was what the Mulberry Bend Park meant. So the Bend went. And I was very happy that I had helped to make it go. "

That was not Riis' last battle to make life cleaner and better for many people. He had great energy. And his love for people was as great as his energy.

He started a campaign to get clean water for the state of New York. He showed that water for the state was not healthy for people. State officials were forced to take actions that would clean the water.

He also worked to get laws against child labor, and made sure that these laws were obeyed. In those days, when Riis was a fighting newspaper reporter, laws against child labor were something new. People did not object to making young children work long hours, in places that had bad air and bad light. But in the United States today, child labor is not legal. It was because of men like Jacob Riis that this is so.

He was also successful in getting playgrounds for children. And he helped establish centers for education and fun for older people.

His book, "How the Other Half Lives," was published in eighteen ninety. He became famous. That book and his newspaper reports influenced many people. Theodore Roosevelt, who later became president of the United States, called Riis the most useful citizen in New York City.

Riis continued to write about conditions that were in need of major reform. His twelve books including "Children of the Poor" helped improve conditions in the city. The books also made him popular as a speaker in other cities. Jacob Riis's concern for the poor kept him so busy writing and speaking around the country that he ruined his health. He died in nineteen fourteen.

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This Special English program was written by Herbert Sutcliffe and produced by Lawan Davis. I'm Ray Freeman. And I'm Shirley Griffith. Listen again next week for another PEOPLE IN AMERICA program on the Voice of America.

Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006: Her Activism Helped Shape the Look and Feel of Cities

Source: Voice of America Special English

www.manythings.org/voa/people 

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I'm Steve Ember. And I'm Barbara Klein with PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English.

Today we tell about Jane Jacobs. She was an activist for improving cities.

Jane Jacobs was an activist, writer, moral thinker and economist. She believed cities should be densely populated and full of different kinds of people and activities. She believed in the value of natural growth and big open spaces.

She opposed the kind of city planning that involves big development and urban renewal projects that tear down old communities. She was also a critic of public planning officials who were unwilling to compromise.

Jacobs helped lead fights to save neighborhoods and local communities within cities. She helped stop major highways from being built, first in New York City and later in Toronto, Canada.

Developers and city planners often criticized her ideas. Yet, many urban planning experts agree that her work helped shape modern thinking about cities.

Jane Butzner was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1916. Her father was a doctor. Her mother was a former teacher and nurse. After graduating from high school, Jane took an unpaid position at the Scranton Tribune newspaper. A year later she left Scranton for New York City.

During her first several years in the city she held many kinds of jobs. One job was to write about workers in the city. She said these experiences gave her a better idea about what working in the city was like.

As a young woman, Jacobs had many interests, including economics, law, science and politics. Her higher education was brief, however. She studied for just two years at Columbia University in New York. Jacobs did not complete her college education, but she did become an excellent writer and editor. While working as a writer for the Office of War Information she met a building designer named Robert Jacobs.

In 1944, they married. They later had three children. Her husband's work led to her interest in the monthly magazine, Architectural Forum. Jacobs became a top editor for the publication.

Experts have described Jacobs as a writer who wrote well, but not often. She is best known for her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." The book was published in 1961. It is still widely read today by both city planning professionals and the general public.

Experts say "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" is the most influential book written about city planning in the twentieth century.

In the book, Jacobs criticized the urban renewal projects of the 1950s. She believed these policies destroyed existing inner-city communities and their economies.

She also thought that modern planning policies separated communities and created unnatural city areas. Jacobs described the nature of cities – their streets and parks, the different cultures represented by citizens and the safety of a well-planned city. Safety was an important issue in big cities that had high rates of crime.

Jacobs wrote that peace on the streets of cities is not kept mainly by the police even though police are necessary. It is kept by a system of controls among the people themselves. She believed the problem of insecurity cannot be solved by spreading people out more thinly.

Jacobs argued that a well-used city street is safer than an empty street. Safety, she argued, is guaranteed by people who watch the streets every day because they use the streets every day.

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" became a guide for neighborhood organizers and the people who Jacobs called "foot people." These are citizens who perform their everyday jobs on foot. They walk to stores and to work. They walk to eating places, theaters, parks, gardens and sports stadiums. They are not who Jacobs called "car people" – those who drive their cars everywhere.

Jane Jacobs also believed that buildings of different sizes, kinds and condition should exist together. She pointed to several communities as models of excellence. These include Georgetown in Washington, D.C.; the North End in Boston, Massachusetts; Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, California.

She also supported mixed-use buildings as a way to increase social interaction. Such buildings have stores and offices on the ground floor. People live on the upper floors. Mixed-use buildings are a lot more common in American cities than in the suburban areas around them.

Jane Jacobs also noted New York City's Greenwich Village as an example of an exciting city community. This is one of the communities that was saved, in part at least, because of her writings and activism. In 1962, Jacobs headed a committee to stop the development of a highway through Lower Manhattan in New York City. The expressway would have cut right through Greenwich Village and the popular SoHo area.

Influential New York City developer Robert Moses proposed the plan. But huge public protests in 1964 led the city government to reject it. Jacobs' book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" helped influence public opinion against the expressway.

In 1969, Jacobs moved to the Canadian city of Toronto where she lived for the rest of her life. Part of her reason for leaving the United States was because she opposed the United States involvement in the war in Vietnam. At that time, she had two sons almost old enough to be called for duty. Jacobs continued to be a community activist in Toronto.

She was involved in a campaign to stop the Spadina Expressway through Toronto. This highway would have permitted people living in suburban areas outside Toronto to travel into and out of the city easily.

Jacobs organized citizens against the Spadina Expressway and the politicians who supported it. One of her most important issues was this question: "Are we building cities for people or for cars?"

Today, experts say Toronto is one of only a few major cities in North America to have successfully kept a large number of neighborhoods in its downtown area. Many experts believe this is because of the anti-Spadina movement led by Jane Jacobs.

Jane Jacobs spent her life studying cities. She wrote seven books on urban planning, the economy of cities, and issues of commerce and politics. Her last book, published in 2004, was "Dark Age Ahead." In it, Jacobs described several major values that she believed were threatened in the United States and Canada. These included community and family, higher education, science and technology and a government responsive to citizens' needs.

In "Dark Age Ahead," Jacobs argued that Western society could be threatened if changes were not made immediately. She said that people were losing important values that helped families succeed.

In "Dark Age Ahead," Jacobs also criticized how political decision-making is influenced by economics. Governments, she said, have become more interested in wealthy interest groups than the needs of the citizens. Jacobs also warned against a culture that prevents people from preventing the destruction of resources upon which all citizens depend.

Jane Jacobs had her critics.   Many of them argued that her ideas failed to represent the reality of city politics, which land developers and politicians often control. Others argued that Jacobs had little sympathy for people who want a lifestyle different from the one she proposed.

Still, many urban planning experts say her ideas shaped modern thinking about cities. She has had a major influenced on those who design buildings and towns that aim to increase social interaction among citizens.

Jane Jacobs died in 2006 in Toronto at the age of 89. Her family released a statement on her death. It said: "What's important is not that she died but that she lived, and that her life's work has greatly influenced the way we think. Please remember her by reading her books and implementing her ideas."