In preparation for the inaugural smogr book club’s reading of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I found the original November 5, 1961 New York Times book review entitled: Neighbors Are Needed .
A passage:

Reading this volume, one almost gets the impression of a golden age before the Garden City and the High Rise enthusiasts appeared on the scene. For Mrs. Jacobs mainly blames their ideas, or bastardized versions of them for what is wrong with our cities. The irony is that most of the things she objects to are the effects of rising income and economies on parents hungry for more space for themselves and the kids. The reformers shared, perhaps even anticipated, this hunger: so that in effect, what the author really resents is their failure to buck the trend or to provide more sophisticated living styles.
…
Jane Jacobs’ book should help to swing reformist zeal in favor of urbanity and the big city. If so, it might well become the most influential work on cities since Lewis Mumford’s classic, “The Culture of Cities.” It has somewhat comparable virtues and defects. Not quite as long or comprehensive, it is wittier, more optimistic, less scholarly and even more pontifical. The style is crisp, pungent and engaging; and like its illustrious predecessor, the book is crammed with arresting insights as well as with loose, sprightly generalizations.
A great book, like a great man, “is a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of its greatness consists in being there.” For all its weaknesses, Jane Jacobs has written such a book. Readers will vehemently agree and disagree with the views; but few of them will go through the volume without looking at their streets and neighborhoods a little differently, a little more sensitively. After all, it is the widespread lack of such sensitivity, especially among those who matter, which is perhaps what is most wrong with our cities today.

Very true.
It isn’t too late to start reading and participating in the Great American Cities smogr book club. See the book club explanation and start reading!