Free Working the Dead Beat by Sandra Martin Page A

activist.
    About this time, opposition to the Vietnam War was coming to a boil on many American campuses. Jacobs joined a protest march on the Pentagon in 1967 and found herself smack up against a row of soldiers in gas masks. “They looked like some big horrible insect, the whole bunch of them together, not human beings at all. And I was also not only appalled at how they looked, but I was outraged that they should be marching on me, an American,” she said in an interview with the Boston Globe , explaining her decision to move to Toronto with her family in 1968.
    Her husband, a hospital architect, found work with architect Eb Zeidler, a friend and colleague. The Jacobs family moved into a flat on Spadina Avenue — in the path of the proposed expressway — and then into a house on Albany Avenue, in the nearby Annex area. She was still unpacking when she found new foes to combat with the radical activism she had learned on the streets of New York City: developers who wanted to tear down historic properties to erect high-rises, and politicians who wanted to build expressways to bring cars from the suburbs into the downtown core.
    She made a profound impression on reformist city politicians such as Mayor David Crombie and alderman John Sewell, who were opposed to the expressway. They had known her reputation as an activist and her writing before they met her in the flesh. In addition to giving them a living, breathing, pragmatic model of an ethical thinker, she gave them and other activists who cared about the city in which they lived the confidence that their ideas mattered and that it was essential to act upon them.
    She was not above civil disobedience. Besides her Spadina antics — lobbying, writing, marching — she helped save a historic inner-city neighbourhood. In 1973, developers had erected hoardings around a row of Victorian houses at the corner of Sherbourne and Dundas Streets and were about to demolish them. During a protest, Jacobs told Alderman Sewell to rip down the hoardings, because she knew that it was against the law to demolish a building unless there was a hoarding surrounding it. He said, “I can’t.” She said, “You must.” And it was done. That act of vandalism led to the city’s first non-profit housing project.
    After Bob Jacobs died of lung cancer in 1996 — in a hospital he had helped design — she remained in their Annex house, continuing to write books and to respond to calls to engage in neighbourhood and city protests, including an unsuccessful struggle against the amalgamation of the City of Toronto with its outlying boroughs in 1998.
    Her adopted city of Toronto honoured her in 1997 by sponsoring a conference titled “Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter,” bringing together a wide range of diverse thinkers who shared a proclivity for thinking outside the box. The conference spawned a book by the same name and the Jane Jacobs Prize , which offers a $5,000 annual stipend for three years to an “unsung hero” engaged in “activities that contribute to the city’s vitality.”
    No matter how frail Jacobs became — she had a hip replacement in 2000 — many people thought of her as indestructible and remembered that her mother had lived past a hundred. But her mother had never smoked, a habit that Jacobs had enjoyed with furious intensity for decades before she finally butted out her cigarettes. Smoking she could give up; working was something else. Even in her late eighties she was under contract to write a short history of the human race and an anthology of her thoughts about economics.
    Inevitably old age caught up with her and “her body wore out,” according to her son Ned Jacobs. In announcing her death at Toronto General Hospital on April 25, 2006, at age eighty-nine, her family said in a statement: “What’s important is not that she died but that she lived, and that her life’s work has