Jane's Club
a love letter to Jane Jacobs, my friend Elena, and Portland's queer past
My coworker Elena and I lived together in a big farmhouse last summer. We shared a wall. Before we moved in together, I was in a bit of denial about how nervous I was about this living situation. I work remotely, and she works in the office, so I mostly knew her through Slack - would we scratch each other’s eyes out from so much time together? But within days of living in the same house, I got to see a whole new side of her - and within weeks of being there, she was like a new sister to me.
Elena is a fucking badass. She’s a Taurus-Gemini-Gemini. She is a goofball and a genius, and has lived all over the world; getting to know her feels like talking to someone with a time machine, to wrap your mind around all the lives she’s lead. She studied urban planning in her undergrad, and for her senior project, she observed a park to understand what pieces of public infrastructure most encourage strangers to talk to each other - the winner was receptacles for cigarettes.
Elena, 2022.
It’s through Elena that I learned who Jane Jacobs was. Her story is like, the archetypal community organizing femme. She wrote The Death and Life of American Citites, which Elena described as the Urban Planning Bible. She organized to keep a freeway from going through Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. I honestly don’t know a ton about Jane, as far as her biography goes. I just notice the energy that people take on when they talk about her, and I must admit - it’s infections. Meeting someone else in the Jane’s Club is like meeting someone with a shared beloved friend.
For example: recently I was traveling through Montreal and Toronto with my good friend Kyle. One day when we were in the latter town, we went to an exhibit that was in a factory-turned-office-and-art-space, and while Kyle went to the bathroom I explored some of the shops in the basement floor. I went into a few different bookstores, and in both of them I found displays dedicated to Jane Jacobs’ work. Curious, I thought. I went to ask my friend Kyle if he knew anything about it, and they hadn’t even heard of Jane before - but a complete stranger politely and enthusiastically approached us: “Are you talking about Jane?”
We ended up chatting with Westley for about thirty minutes about Jane’s relationship to Toronto - she moved from the States to the Canadian metropolis, and organized in that community as well. Westley volunteers for Toronto’s branch of Jane’s Walk: an annual celebration of neighborhoods, where community members lead their own walking tours around their town, highlighting their own stories of their communities. I made a mental note to check out the Jane’s walk in my town.
A few weeks go by and my friend Stacia shoots me a DM - you free this Saturday? They sent along the information for a walking tour about Queer Portland in the 80’s and 90’s, part of Portland’s Jane’s Walk celebration. We gathered across the street from a now-daycare center, the former meeting place of queer youth groups where our tour guide, Kelly, first connected with her queer community. Leading a group of forty some people with an iconic side ponytail, Kelly took us to the businesses and hotels where queer people used to gather, giving an outpouring of gratitude to the places where queer Maine stayed organized. We did the Time Warp outside of the Nickelodeon, and learned about HIV Activist and Ally Francis Perkins & the queer gift shop and quasi community center Drop Me a Line. Some people on the tour were there to learn, and others to reminisce. We gathered at the Equality Community Center after the walking tour to eat snacks and get to know each other better.
Over the course of a month or so, Jane Jacobs continued to rear her head in my life. Her legacy is uplifting - by giving cities the language to blossom into their best selves, she continues to give strangers the opportunity to talk to each other. Just like cigarette receptacles.