Books

The eminent preservationist, author, and landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is also a committed New Yorker. Writing the City reveals the many facets of her passion as a citizen of the great metropolis and her lifelong efforts to protect and improve it. These include, most importantly, the creation of the Central Park Conservancy, the organization that transformed Central Park from one of the city’s most degraded amenities into its most valuable. Many of Rogers’s essays relate to this remarkable achievement and the insight and administrative acumen that propelled it.

The first section of Writing the City, “Below and Above the Ground,” explores New York’s physical makeup, especially its geology, as well as the origins of another of New York’s world-class landscapes, the New York Botanical Garden. “Along the Shoreline” features an insightful review of Phillip Lopate’s Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan and two other essays about the city’s edges, one of which focuses on Brooklyn Bridge Park.

In the last section of the collection, “In and About the Parks,” Rogers’s understanding of culture, architecture, urban planning history, and landscape architecture come together in five insightful essays. Subjects range from Green-Wood Cemetery and Prospect Park in Brooklyn to “Thirty-three New Ways You Can Help Central Park’s Renaissance,” published in New York Magazine in 1983. The concluding essay, “Jane and Me,” offers new perspectives on the urban theorist and activist Jane Jacobs, whose writings catalyzed Rogers’s own interest in urban planning in the 1960s.