Saving Central Park
A History and a Memoir
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- 3,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
The story of how one woman's long love affair with New York's Central Park led her to organize its rescue from a state of serious decline, returning it to the beautiful place of recreational opportunity and spiritual sustenance that it is today.
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers opens with a quick survey of her early life--a middle-class upbringing in Texas; college at Wellesley, marriage, a master's degree in city planning at Yale. And then her move to New York, where she starts a family and, when she finds being a mother and a housewife is not enough, pours herself into the protection and enhancement of the city's green spaces. Interwoven into her own story is a comprehensive history of Central Park: its design and construction as a scenic masterpiece; the alterations of each succeeding era; the addition of numerous facilities for sports and play; and finally, the "anything goes" phase of the 1960s and 70s, which was often fun but nearly destroyed the park. The two narratives continue to entwine as she finds a job in the administration of Central Park, founds the Central Park Conservancy, and transforms both the park and herself--a transformation that has led to the writing of her many books, to travels that have taken her to parks and gardens around the world, and to solidifying the prestige of one of New York's most conspicuous landmarks.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
