Greenwich Village
Neighborhood on the West Side of Lower Manhattan. In Bicycle Diaries Jane Jacobs’s Village block, with its “sidewalk ballet,” is David Byrne’s model of a street that works.
At a glance
| Source | Author | Role | In one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bicycle Diaries | David Byrne | subject | Jacobs’s “sidewalk ballet” on her Village block: mixed use as the key to a living street, against Moses’s highways. |
Sub-places
Bicycle Diaries — David Byrne (2009)
Source: Original · Readwise highlight
Jacobs famously called what happened daily on her block in Greenwich Village a “sidewalk ballet.”
- Role: subject
- In the book: Byrne quotes Jane Jacobs’s account of her morning block: she puts out the garbage can, men and women with briefcases emerge, and women in housedresses crisscross and stop to chat. From it he draws her insight that mixed use, with different people using a street at different times, keeps it alive, and recalls her fight against Robert Moses’s highway.
- Why it matters: The Village block is the book’s model of a good city street, set against the car-centered planning Byrne criticizes throughout.