CITIES AND SONGS.(The Talk of the Town)(Jane Jacobs )(Interview)(Biography)

Jane Jacobs, the matchless analyst of all things urban, returned to New York the other day and looked around her. In the forty-plus years since her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" appeared, her views, which then seemed wildly eccentric--basically, that New York's future depended less on tall buildings and big projects than on the preservation of small, old blocks and catch-as-catch-can retailing--have been vindicated so many times, and in so many ways, that by now one can hardly think about this city without thinking about her, and like her. Resident in Toronto since 1968 ("I needed to escape my civic duties here to write and think"), Jacobs, who is eighty-eight years old, was in town for the publication of her latest book, the intimidatingly titled "Dark Age Ahead." One afternoon last week, she spent a few minutes talking about old haunts, feuds, and hopes.

"I love New York so much still," she said. "But the traffic is the worst I've ever known it to be." (In a chapter in her new book, she explains briskly why one-way streets, designed to streamline traffic, only complicate it.) "New York still has so much pizzazz, because people make it new every day. Like all cities, it's self-organizing. People looking for a date on Third Avenue make it into a place full of hope and expectation, and this has nothing to do with architecture. Those are the emotions that draw us to cities, and they depend on things being a bit messy. The most perfectly designed place can't compete. Everything is provided, which is the worst thing we can provide. There's a joke that the father of an old friend used to tell, about a preacher who warns children, 'In Hell there will be wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth.' 'What if you don't have teeth?' one of the children asks. 'Then teeth will be provided,' he says sternly. That's it--the spirit of the designed city: Teeth Will Be Provided for You."

The preservation of some of New York's communities, so threatened in Jacobs's day, pleases her, but their gentrification worries her. "Whenever I'm here," she said, "I go back to look at our house, ...