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The Rockefeller Foundation Jane Jacobs Medal was created in 2007 in honor of the author and activist who died in April 2006 at the age of 89. The Medal is to be awarded annually to two individuals whose actions and accomplishments exemplify “Jacobsean” principles in New York City.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s relationship to Jane Jacobs dates back to the 1950s, when the institution launched an Urban Design Studies program that helped foster the emergence of the new discipline of urban design and theory. As part of this initiative, one of the Foundation’s first grants was to the then-obscure writer from Greenwich Village, for the research and writing of a book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Barry Benepe and Omar Freilla will be awarded the 2007 Rockefeller Foundation Jane Jacobs Medals on September 24, 2007, in coordination with the opening of Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York. In addition to the Medals, Benepe and Freilla will each receive a cash prize of $100,000. The inaugural winners were chosen by a selection jury that was co-chaired by George Campbell Jr. and Agnes Gund, and the program was administered by the Municipal Art Society.
Barry Benepe
Barry Benepe is proud to be a born-and-bred New Yorker. The son of a linen importer, he grew up on Gramercy Park, walking daily under the Third Avenue El to attend Friends Seminary on Stuyvesant Square.
After graduating from Williams College with a B.A. in Fine Arts in 1950, he returned to New York, studying at Cooper Union for two years. He later attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a Bachelor of Architecture degree. read more...
Omar Freilla
Photo by Rob Bennett
Even though only 34, Omar Freilla has already brought fresh hope and new ideas to the South Bronx, an area that was a national icon of urban decay in the 1970s and 1980s. Ironically, the reason for this blighted image can be traced back to many of the issues that Jane Jacobs fought against: the construction of highway projects that tore through neighborhoods, cold and imposing housing projects, and slum clearance. Omar and his parents, Zoraida Martez and Jose Freilla, who settled in the Bronx after emigrating from the Dominican Republic in 1960s, were firsthand witnesses to this deterioration and the burning of the Bronx. read more...
