Free Working the Dead Beat by Sandra Martin

she sold to Vogue — her first real literary sale.
    Her parents wanted her to go to university, so she went to the School of General Studies at Columbia; however, she was bored by the courses required for completing a degree. “I went for a couple of years to university because I wanted to learn, not because I wanted to sit in custodial care or wanted credentials,” she said later about her decision to quit university to embark on her own curriculum of reading, observing, wondering, thinking, and trying to assemble her thoughts into a coherent piece of writing.
    To support herself, she worked in magazines and as a feature writer for the Office of War Information. She met her husband, Robert Hyde Jacobs (who was working at the same defence plant as her sister), when her sister invited him to a party in the apartment the two young women shared. “I walked in the door,” Bob Jacobs said later, “and there she was, in a beautiful, green woollen evening dress, and I fell in love. It took me a little longer to convince her.” Four months after they met in March 1944, they were married.
    After peace came, she found a job at Architectural Forum , a journal that she read frequently because her husband was a subscriber. It never occurred to her to stay home and be a full-time wife and mother after her children, James Kedzie (April 1948), Edward (Ned) Drecker (June 1952), and Mary (Burgin) Hyde (January 1955), were born. Her female forebears had always worked in their communities, so “I grew up with the idea I could do anything,” she said later.
    At the magazine she was assigned stories on urban life and structures and was stunned to discover that “city planning had nothing to do with how cities worked successfully in real life.” One of her readers was William H. Whyte, editor of Fortune magazine and author of The Organization Man, who hired her to write an article on cities. She concluded in her essay that “Designing a dream city is easy. Rebuilding a living one takes imagination.”
    The Fortune article caught the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, which asked her if she had any other ideas about cities. She did, envisaging “writing a series of articles, which might be a book, of about ten chapters, mostly about city streets, and that it would take me a year.” The foundation offered her a grant in 1958 and she set to work on the manual Remington typewriter that she used for the rest of her life.
    It took more than two more years and as many grants to complete The Death and Life of Great American Cities , a book that has never been out of print since it was first published in 1961. She was challenging not simply the mistakes she saw around her but the very idea that an urban utopia could be designed. Her argument was that cities begin at the pavement level and grow organically in a self-organizing mix of commerce and domesticity. Zoning by function — a prime example being the razing of neighbourhoods to build isolated public housing projects — deprived whole areas of the interactive human oxygen they needed to survive as dynamic entities.
    Many urban planners and architectural writers were aghast, but the book found a receptive audience. Partly it was the writing, which was clear, concise, and jargon-free; partly it was the argument, which moved from the concrete — a city sidewalk — to the abstract; partly it was the fact that her book connected with a generation of young adults who were trying to make sense of the postwar world.
    She was barely back at work from her book leave when the City of New York decided to appropriate her own neighbourhood for urban renewal — a case study of the “intellectual idiocies and ignorance of city workings that I had been writing about.” She protested along with her neighbours and was made chairman of the Committee to Save the West Village. The journalist and critic had been transformed into an