Saving Central Park

February 15, 2018

To the casual visitor, New York's Central Park may appear to be a remnant of old rural Manhattan. However, as Rogers (Green Metropolis) explains, the park was carefully planned and constructed as landscape art for the city during the mid-19th century. By the 1970s, the "scenic recreation" legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux was being lost to neglect, vandalism, and crime, compounded by the city's fiscal problems. Rogers, an urban planner, from 1980 to 1996, led the Central Park Conservancy in a public-private partnership supporting restoration and management of the park. Her book sketches the history of the park and outlines her biography, focusing on key roles of fundraising and developing a workforce to enable proper maintenance and rebuilding. There were challenges, including conflicts with parks commissioners, local tennis players, and the Audubon Society. The narrative concludes with the conservancy's hosting of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's celebrated Gates land art project in 2005. VERDICT This measured memoir will appeal to New Yorkers who appreciate their central green space, as well as landscape architects and cultural administrators.--David R. Conn, formerly with Surrey Libs., BC

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 12, 2018
Rogers (The Central Park Book), a landscape designer and Central Park Conservancy cofounder, blends a history of Central Park with her own persistent efforts to preserve the park in this elegant memoir. She opens with a description of the park’s deteriorating state in the mid-1960s and early ’70s, when it was heavily vandalized and strewn with litter. From there, she chronicles the park’s resurgence to its current status as a tourist mecca, drawing on her original proposal to restore the park, journal entries, and photos documenting the project’s progress. She interweaves her own efforts with the actions of activists before her, including socialites such as Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, who served as president of the Parks Association; hippies who organized demonstrations there ; and public officials, such as Robert Moses, who had a tremendous impact on the design and use of the park, to offer a multifaceted portrait of the park’s renaissance. The book tracks key points in the park’s history, such as how Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux bested 32 other contestants in a competition to design the park in 1857 and the huge success of the 2005 installation of Christo’s The Gates. Rogers’s sense of commitment to urban renewal is evident throughout, and her book reads as a heartfelt plea for people to fulfill their responsibilities to maintain green spaces in the cement jungle. Color photos.

April 1, 2018
How a public-private partnership revitalized Manhattan's famed park.In 1980, Rogers (Green Metropolis: The Extraordinary Landscapes of New York City as Nature, History, and Design, 2016, etc.), as the first Central Park administrator, founded the Central Park Conservancy, a nonprofit corporation whose mission was to rescue the park from a "dire condition" of deterioration and return it to a state of scenic beauty and clean, safe recreation. Decades of neglect, coupled with the use of the park for "mass events and bizarre happenings," had resulted in crumbling buildings, eroded slopes, graffiti-emblazoned walls and sculptures, and trampled vegetation. Tourists were told to avoid the park, which had a reputation for being "dangerous and scary." Rogers looked back to the park's picturesque past, embracing the aesthetic of 19th-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who transformed "a ragged 843-acre wasteland" into "a masterpiece of landscape design and paragon of social beneficence" in a mere 15 years. Her task was daunting: She had "no authority over park workers, no city funds to hire new ones, and no way to reform existing union rules linked to narrowly defined civil service job titles." Private support was essential, and Rogers identifies with gratitude three early benefactors, the "Great Park Ladies" Brooke Astor, Iphigene Sulzberger, and Lucy Moses. By the time Rogers left her position in 1995, the Conservancy had donated more than $100 million of private money to restoring the park, and the organization became a model for other public-private partnerships. Besides offering a historical overview, Rogers documents the challenges she faced from city administrators and private individuals. Bird-watchers, for example, once mounted a vicious campaign when the Conservancy planned to thin out some trees, and a proposed memorial to John Lennon was saved only because of the flexibility and generosity of Yoko Ono. Rogers learned that effective leadership required the three Ps--patience, passion, and persistence--as well as power, politics, and "the purse."An inspiring story of a defiant woman and the landscape she loved.

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April 15, 2018
Rogers, who founded the Central Park Conservancy in 1980, joins Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux as a significant figure in the famed Manhattan park's history. Here Rogers explains how she spearheaded the park's celebrated restoration. Part history, part memoir, part manifesto on landscape design, her chronicle charts the conservancy's rise and Rogers' own, from scrappy outsider to power-playing insider. She woos well-heeled donors and tangles with bird-watchers; she transforms from Texas transplant to New York operator and a woman leading a powerful reform group in a male-dominated field. Critics have complained of the conservancy's high-society snobbishness, and this book may not mollify them: Rogers' interest lies in the park's aesthetics, less than in its egalitarian social promise. Yet she also argues that Central Park must adapt to the needs of its time, the basis of an eye-opening discussion of the legacy of Robert Moses. The book's true protagonist is the park itself, whose artistic allure Rogers captures with impressive attention to detail. Sure to be cherished by nature lovers, city lovers, and civic improvers alike.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)