Am not sure why I'm reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, her treatise on city planning and city saving from 1961. Exciting chapter titles include: "The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety" and "The Need for Aged Buildings." Maybe I'm reading it because I'm living in a bombed-out (figuratively, for the nonce) shithole and hope to mount a one-manchild "save our city" style campaign to make this place palatable, but I rather doubt it.
Regardless, Ms Jacobs's book is pretty great, a terse, witty rejoinder to the understandable assumption that a book that is basically about city planning has to be a snoozefest.
What brought me up short, however, was this line:
In 1956, the New York City Youth Board, fairly desperate because of gang
warfare, arranged through its gang youth workers a series of truces among
fighting gangs.
1956! See, between this and Radical Chic, I'm being reminded anew that we think our problems are always so fresh and modern, but they're simply not. I had the same feeling reading Calvin Tomkins's book about Marcel Duchamp, where there are anarchists blowing shit up all over the place, rioters, etc.
There's nothing new under the sun! Truly!
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