CLT Practice Test 12

Modern Influential Thinkers/Issues

¹This passage is an original essay written for PrepBanq practice.

²In the decades after World War II, American cities set out to rebuild themselves on a grand scale. The planners of that era, confident that wide highways and tall towers set apart in open plazas would cure crowded neighborhoods, [1] was certain that the old street grid had outlived its usefulness. Few people outside the profession thought to question them, and fewer still were heard.

³[2] Jane Jacobs, who had never trained as a planner, learned about cities by watching them. From her home on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, she studied the rhythm of the sidewalk below. Shopkeepers swept their doorways in the morning, children walked to school in clusters, and neighbors stopped to trade news on the corner. In the evening the pattern changed, but it never stopped. To a planner’s eye, this bustle looked like disorder. [3] Therefore, Jacobs saw in it a complex and delicate kind of order.

⁴In 1961 she set out her case in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. A street is safest, she argued, when ordinary people keep watch over it as they go about their business. [4] Busy sidewalks lined with shops and homes, she wrote, place “eyes on the street” at every hour of the day. A neighborhood also needs a mix of uses, so that people come and go for different reasons at different times. Each of the districts she admired had [5] their own blend of apartments, workshops, stores, and taverns, and that blend kept the streets alive from morning until late at night.

⁵Jacobs did not stay at her window. In the late 1950s she joined neighbors who were fighting a plan to extend a roadway through Washington Square Park, and the threat to the park seemed [6] eminent. The plan’s chief champion was Robert Moses, who had shaped New York’s bridges, parks, and highways for decades. [7] Moses, the big boss of New York building, was totally not into hearing it from some lady with a notebook. The neighbors prevailed anyway, and the park was closed to traffic.

⁶A few years later, when the city revived plans for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, Jacobs [8] helped organize the opposition. [9] The expressway, which would have cut across SoHo and Little Italy, was in the end eventually abandoned and given up after years of protest and opposition. In 1968 Jacobs moved with her family to Toronto, where she joined a successful campaign against another highway, the Spadina Expressway, and she continued to write until her death in 2006.

⁷Today, the profession that once dismissed her treats her book as a classic, and her [10] admirer’s still gather each spring for neighborhood walks held in her name. The lesson they honor is a simple one: before remaking a city, look closely at how its people already live.