i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

El Barrio / 107tion was shifting, and she began to move artistically from the community ofSpanish Harlem to the New York art network.In 1962, Neel moved to a more middle-class neighborhood on West 107thStreet and Broadway near Columbia University. Her view out the window nowpermitted a wider vista, and her cityscapes began to include the street life thatshe had until then treated as a separate subject. In the Death and Life of theGreat American Cities (1961), the sociologist Jane Jacobs observed that at thistime the neighborhood around Neel’s apartment on the Upper West Side wasa prime example of the kind of diversity of architectural functions and populationsshe argued were essential to civic health.People’s love of watching activity and other people is constantly evident in citieseverywhere. This trait reaches an almost ludicrous extreme on upper Broadway inNew York, where the street is divided by a narrow central mall, right in the middleof trafƒc . . . [O]n any day when the weather is even barely tolerable these benchesare ƒlled with people for block after block . . . Eventually Broadway reachesColumbia University and Barnard College . . . Here all is obvious order and quiet.No more stores, no more activity generated by the stores, almost no more pedestrianscrossing—and no more watchers. 41For Jacobs, it was the “watchers,” both on the streets and in their apartments,who through their informal monitoring discouraged crime and encouraged asense of community and neighborhood.The publication of Jacobs’s book coincided with Neel’s move to the WestSide. Although she may not have been aware of Jacobs’s argument that thesafety of the sidewalks—secured not by the law but by the inhabitants—is onekey to a habitable city, nonetheless, in the 1960s her cityscapes do broaden outfrom the constricted lives of the poor to include the interaction of various economiclevels and occupations. In an interview from 1980, Neel described herselfas a watcher, although what catches her eye remains the life of the disadvantaged:I really live out my front room windows, which face up Broadway from 107thStreet. It’s like having a street in your living room . . . Since I’ve always been claustrophobic,it is a great escape for me not to feel shut up in a room. From my West EndAvenue window I can see Strauss Park, shaped like a violin with a fountain, andgingko trees. There is one man, a bum, who is there every morning . . . Then hegoes and sits on a stone bench on the Broadway center strip and nurses [his beer]the way the rest of us nurse our breakfast coffee . . . The center strip is like his livingroom. 42