“J” is for Jane Jacobs

The year is 1969. Jane Jacobs and Big Bird walk into a bar.

They share a drink. Jacobs discusses the struggle for Greenwich Village while Big Bird talks about neighborhood happenings on Sesame Street. A shaggy, green monster named Oscar the Grouch has moved into a trashcan and watches passersby. While sometimes confused for a discarded shag carpet, he is the “eyes on the street” that Jacobs described in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Hours pass and the odd duo discuss gentrification, modernism, and the city’s encroaching highway development that is “ruffling some feathers.” I would like to imagine, if Big Bird wasn’t an anthropomorphic canary, that the pair would do some organizing together.

Jane Jacobs and Sesame Street

At the same time that Jacobs was working on her book The Economy of Cities, Joan Ganz Cooney and the other creators of Sesame Street were designing their own iconic block. Created to promote literacy in the inner city, Sesame Street quickly became a cultural phenomena, winning 11 Grammys and 189 Emmys. One study found that 95% of all American preschoolers watched the show by the time they were three years old.

“Can you tell me how to get…?” From a 1975 issue of Sesame Street magazine. Image source.

Our cultural attachment to Sesame Street (as evidenced by three generations of viewership) is not just to a select few characters, but also to the power of place—a significance denoted by the title, a physical and geographical marker. Modeled after a fictional block in the Upper West Side, Sesame Street embodies the criterions of Jacob’s city planning theory. An investigation of the show’s imaginative placemaking attests to the importance of Jacob’s principles and is an invitation to a more inclusive urbanist imagination.

At its core, Sesame Street is a short, mixed-use block that defies faulty orthodox urban renewal practices and fulfills Jacobs’ placemaking criterion: short blocks, varying building ages, and a dense concentration of citizenry. The physical set is limited to one insular block that is a mix between commercial and residential brownstone. Art director Victor DiNoapoli once described 123 Sesame Street, the focal brownstone of the children’s show, as a lone “survivor of gentrification.” Over the years, the three-story building has been home to the Robinson family, the Rodriguez family, Burt and Ernie, and Elmo, among others. Nearby, Oscar the Grouch’s trash can sits in front of a fence made of salvaged doors—years before it became farmhouse chic. A fix-it shop and Mr. Hooper’s store are the frequent settings for lessons on everything from autism to Zooey Deschanel’s favorite healthy snacks. Down the street, a purple vampire counts squirrels and sheep in a haunted mansion and Mr. Snuffleupagus lives with his mother in a cave (evidence of an urban park?).

Sidewalk Stories

Unlike the homogeneity and dullness embedded in the neighborhoods of many viewers, Sesame Street’s physical landscape, its mix of old and new structures (presumably compounded with rent control for puppets), facilitates a diversity which makes the block interesting and in view of Jacobs: “It builds up from lots and lots of different bits and details, lots of different bits of money, lots of different notions, all coming out of the concern, the affection, and the ideas of lots and lots of different people.” Like most neighborhoods, what binds the characters together on Sesame Street is shared space. Sesame Street is a collection of stories about street-level interactions between puppets and humans.

A recreation of the stoop at 123 Sesame Street, from the National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Image credit.

Jacobs’ imperative on effective sidewalks guides Sesame Street’s storyline. According to Jacobs, sidewalks must “have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers.”  Characters—from generational favorites like Cookie Monster, to new block additions like Karli (who lives with a foster family)—are connected by urban space; the sidewalk ballet of characters continuously moving to and from 123 Sesame Street, small businesses, and mixed-use spaces are the result of the short block and the diverse street-level use. This contact has built the storyline and provided safety, contact, and the assimilation of characters for generations (perhaps Super Grover’s real power is his ability to evade wrinkles and grey hair for the last fifty years).

“Most of it is ostensibly trivial,” says Jacobs of sidewalk contacts, “but the sum is not trivial at all.” Over the decades, toddlers and adults alike watched as monsters, men, and flocks of chickens overcame their differences on the sidewalks of Sesame Street. Effective sidewalks are the reason why lessons on tolerance and diversity (see “Whoopi’s Skin and Elmo’s Hair”) are not random. At a time when television was largely white-washed, Sesame Street was home to Maria, a Latina, Gordon, an African American, and Alan, an Asian American. Characters navigate social constructions and differences as they make frequent contact on the sidewalks of Sesame Street. Compounded together, this contact creates bonds that are an exemplar of social capital that would situate children’s learning for years to come.

Googly Eyes on the Street

Jane Jacobs in 1961. Jacobs said, “There must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street.” Image credit.

Animatronic eyes. Glued eyes. Googly eyes. Ping-pong eyes, as originally on Kermit the Frog. When Jacobs describes “eyes on the street” in her famous chapter on sidewalk safety, she was likely not envisioning those of Super Grover, Telly, or a shaggy wooly mammoth. Yet for decades, these eyes provided safety for the characters on Sesame Street. Jacobs writes, “There must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street.” Oscar the Grouch’s insults at passersby are not just for comedic effect, they are evidence that the characters are actively watching the physical environment and invested in the physical happenings of their street—something that we all long for, what our resident associations and community organizations have all been created to do. This “natural proprietorship” is why Maria from the Fix-It-Shop often broke up disputes between Elmo and Zoe, providing preschool audiences important lessons on norms like sharing and care for over forty seasons.

It is only because Sesame Street embodies Jacob’s criterion of short blocks, effective sidewalks, and diverse characters with eyes on the street that it is fun. Jacobs writes, “In short, will the city be any fun? The citizen can be the ultimate expert on this; what is needed is an observant eye, curiosity about people, and willingness to walk”. Could you imagine if Sesame Street was a major thoroughfare like Northern Boulevards in Queens? How about a New Jersey suburb? Perhaps this fun-ness embedded in place is why Andrea Boccelli visits Elmo to sing a lullaby. Or maybe it’s why Janelle Monae comes to collaborate with Burt on her cameo “The Power of Yet.” The list is endless—diverse personalities such as Elvis Presley, Michelle Obama, Ray Charles, Maya Angelou, One Direction, Adam Sandler, and Destiny’s Child have all spent time on the block.

“Inclusive Placemaking”

Nina Simone on Sesame Street in 1972, singing “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.”

It is not just the characters that we fell in love with on Sesame Street—it was the imaginative placemaking possibilities the show demonstrated as possible when the city really was for everybody. While scholars like Herbert Ganz would critique Jacob’s “physical determinism,” the propensity to overlook social and cultural factors that created place in space, Sesame Street would celebrate them. Unlike Jacobs’ beloved white-immigrant, working-class Greenwich Village (read: segregated), Sesame Street is the diverse embodiment of the “everybody” that Jacobs describes when famously writing, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

The values of inclusive placemaking extended beyond the set design. In contrast to the deficit-based and racialized depictions of urban neighborhoods during the Reagan’s War on Drugs, Sesame Street continued to highlight the rich beauty and agency of urban dwellers. During one of the commercial 90-second shorts that broke up the storyline on Sesame Street, the camera zooms in on a crowded New York City street in Harlem during the early nineties. Parents, dressed in Coogi sweaters and FUBU shirts, watch children while exchanging neighborhood gossip. Two old men look on while playing chess and listening to a boombox: social capital at its finest.

Unlike other New York neighborhoods, Sesame Street wouldn’t gentrify. Burt and Ernie wouldn’t be displaced and Hooper’s Store wouldn’t become a Starbucks. Sesame Street is not just an education on the alphabet, it is a lesson in effective placemaking. The opening song’s familiar refrain—“Can you tell me how to get / How to get to Sesame Street?”—is an invitation to Jacob’s principles everywhere. 

Top image via YouTube.

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About the Author

Lydia Kulina is a dedicated urban educator in North Philadelphia where she lives. She currently studies urban policy and education at Temple University where she has been focused on exploring the connection between neighborhood schools and community place-making. She regularly writes at https://medium.com/@lydiakulina

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