Saving Central Park: A History and a Memoir

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. (May)