October 14, 1961: "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" Is Published

October 14, 1961: The Death and Life of Great American Cities is published by Jane Jacobs. It changes the way people looked at American cities.

She was in the process of defeating New York City planning boss Robert Moses over his proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, between the Holland Tunnel and the Manhattan Bridge, which would have done to Greenwich Village, Tribeca, SoHo and the Lower East Side what his Cross Bronx Expressway did to The Bronx: Destroyed them.

Jane Isabel Butzner was born on May 4, 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her brother was a federal Judge. She and her sister moved to New York for work during the Great Depression. Getting a job as a stenographer, Jane also made some money as a freelance writer. She loved that Greenwich Village, where she lived, was laid out before New York's 1811 street grid plan, and thus not only didn't follow it, but deviated from it in interesting ways.

In 1943, she got an article published in a magazine, about how Scranton had declined economically. That led to her being hired by the U.S. Department of State, to write for the Office of War Information. That led to her meeting Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr., an architect who was designing warplanes for Grumman Aircraft. They married the next year, and had a daughter and 2 sons.

Henry Luce, boss of Time, Inc.,. hired her for his magazine Architectural Forum. She began to write about the poor response to urban blight after World War II. She was invited to speak at Harvard University, and that led to her being transferred to a higher-profile Luce magazine, Fortune. She spent three years conducting research and writing drafts on "urban renewal," citing "slum clearance" as being as big a problem as slums themselves. In 1961, Random House published the result, as The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

In 1962, she resigned her position with Luce to become a full-time author, and concentrate on raising her children. In 1968, in fear of their sons being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, which they had been participating in demonstrations against, the Jacobses moved to Canada, to The Annex, a neighborhood adjacent to the campus of the University of Toronto and home to many of its students and faculty. In 1971, she helped kill another potentially neighborhood-destroying highway, the Spadina Expressway. It came to be seen as a watershed moment in local activism in Toronto.

She opposed the separation of Quebec from Canada (successfully) and the "megacity" concepts for Toronto and Montreal (unsuccessfully), yet supported the separation of Toronto from Ontario, to form a separate Province (which did not happen). She died on April 25, 2006, in Toronto, at the age of 89, having done much to preserve the 2 largest cities in North America. (Or 2 of the 3 largest, if you count Mexico, and thus Mexico City, as part of "North America.")

*

October 14, 1961 was a Saturday. Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi was born.

Among the notable college football games played that day were these:

* Number 1 University of Mississippi, a.k.a. Ole Miss, beat the University of Houston, 47-7 at Hemingway Stadium (now Vaught-Hemingway Stadium) in Oxford, Mississippi.

* Number 2 Iowa beat Indiana, 27-8 at Iowa Stadium (now Kinnick Stadium) in Iowa City.

* Number 3 Alabama beat North Carolina State, 26-7 at Denny Stadium (now Bryant-Denny Stadium) in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

* Rivalry: Number 4 Texas beat Oklahoma, 28-7 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.

* Rivalry: Number 5 Michigan State beat Number 6 Michigan, 28-0 at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor.

* Number 7 Ohio State beat Illinois, 44-0 at Ohio Stadium in Columbus.

* Rivalry: Number 8 Notre Dame beat the University of Southern California (USC), 30-0 at Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend, Indiana.

* Number 9 Baylor were upset by Arkansas, 23-13 at Baylor Stadium (later Floyd Casey Stadium) in Waco, Texas.

* Number 10 Maryland were upset by North Carolina, 14-8 at Byrd Stadium (now SECU Stadium) in the Washington suburb of College Park, Maryland.

* Rivalry: West Virginia beat the University of Pittsburgh, 20-6 at Pitt Stadium in Pittsburgh.

* Rivalry: The University of Virginia beat Virginia Military Institute (VMI), 14-7 at Foreman Field in Norfolk.

* Rivalry: Wyoming beat Colorado State, 18-7 at War Memorial Stadium in Laramie, Wyoming.

* Rivalry: The University of Utah beat Brigham Young University (BYU), 21-20 at Ute Stadium (later Robert Rice Stadium) in Salt Lake City.

* Among the service academies, Army beat Penn State, 10-6 at Beaver Stadium in State College, Pennsylvania; Navy beat Cornell, 31-7 at Schoellkopf Field in Ithaca, New York; and Air Force beat the University of Cincinnati, 8-6 at Nippert Stadium in Cincinnati.

* Rutgers beat Bucknell, 21-6 at Memorial Stadium (now Christy Mathewson Memorial Stadium) in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. RU advanced to 3-0 on the season, and finished undefeated at 9-0.

* And, Rivalry: Princeton beat the University of Pennsylvania, 9-3 at Palmer Stadium in Princeton, New Jersey.

Baseball season ended 5 days earlier, when the New York Yankees beat the Cincinnati Reds in Game 5 to win the World Series. The NBA season started 5 days later. The NHL's entire "Original Six" were in action:

* The New York Rangers lost to the Montreal Canadiens, 3-1 at the Montreal Forum.

* The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Boston Bruins, 3-2 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.

* And the Chicago Black Hawks and the Detroit Red Wings played to a tie, 3-3 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit.

In New Jersey high school football, East Brunswick, then in only its 1st season of varsity football, later to be my Alma Mater, lost to Bridgewater-Raritan of Bridgewater, Somerset County, 14-0.

And in English soccer, North London team Arsenal went to Lancashire, and played Blackburn Rovers to a 0-0 draw at Ewood Park in Blackburn.