May 7th, 2025
The Saviors of Central Park: Part Five: Original Design Team Members
I sometimes think of myself as a landscape architect manqué, the “missed” profession that I feel to be the one that I was temperamentally meant to follow. Logically, therefore, the vision that I had nourished in the 1970’s under the banner of the Central Park Taskforce was carried forward in the 1980s with my participation in the founding and fifteen years of leadership of the Central Park Conservancy following my appointment to the thereupon-inaugurated post of Central Park Administrator by New York City Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis. Not surprisingly, my credentials for the job were more intellectual than experiential, consisting primarily of my previously cultivated historical knowledge of the original design and building of the Park. Logically, my métier became one of assembling and overseeing an office of four trained landscape architects to work under my direction to create and oversee the creation of the plan that was nothing less than a multi-year guide for the complete rebuilding of the Park in a manner that was attuned to the picturesque romanticism of its original Greensward Plan by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. It was imperative, moreover, that there should be a basic, but not absolute, fidelity in giving homage to the two “fathers” of Central Park through a general rather than a meticulous, replicative reconstruction of every acre as built during the Board of Commissioners’ year-by-year building campaign between 1858 and 1872, with the exception of the years when Boss Tweed turned the park into a ready resource for patronage politics. At the same time, I had to acknowledge the popularity of active recreation facilities, including playgrounds and ball fields that had been imposed upon the Park’s pastoral landscape by Power Broker Robert Moses when he was Parks Commissioner during the mid-1930s.
To extend the life of a restored Central Park in perpetuity it would be necessary to go beyond merely renovating its landscape zone by zone, and I realized that sound ongoing landscape management was an essential component of success that had to be factored into the Park’s restoration plan from the beginning and carried forward routinely by Conservancy field crews and zone gardeners, as fortunately is the case today.
To hire trained landscape architects with a talent for honoring historic properties as such but without the kind of slavish fidelity that would interfere with their contemporary usage was a challenge I had to face forthrightly. Fortunately, one of the founders of the Historic Preservation Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, James Marston Fitch understood the importance of landscape as a field of historic preservation design, and among his top students was Bruce Kelly, who was capping his education at the University of Georgia’s School of Landscape Architecture with a degree from Professor Fitch’s program at Columbia. Luckily, Bruce was already a member of the Central Park Task Force and readily became a member of the Conservancy’s office of design and construction along with landscape architect Philip Winslow. Both men were engaged in the creation of some of the Conservancy’s most important restoration projects before their untimely deaths during the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s.
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It is important to periodically reiterate the fact that the Central Park Conservancy is a public-private partnership. I was fortunate to have architect Bronson Binger already under contract with the City to work with the Park Department’s Design and Construction Office on projects in Central Park. His familiarity with the staff members in the office’s headquarters in Flushing Meadow Park resulted in his introducing me to two young women who were talented landscape architects – Marianne Cramer and Judith Heintz – as candidates for reassignment to the Conservancy’s ongoing park-restoration design campaign. Thus, with no additional fundraising required on my part, these two salaried Parks Department professionals became staff members of the Conservancy. When Judith, who now enjoys a successful private practice, was visiting New York recently, I topped off our breakfast conversation of reminiscences with the request that she provide the following mini-memoir of recollection so that I might add her, Marianne, Phil, and Bruce to my journal’s pantheon of Saviors of Central Park.
Central Park as an Outdoor Graduate School by Judith Heintz
I often tell people that I got my Masters in Landscape Architecture the traditional way. By going to graduate school. But I got my PhD in Central Park.
In 1982 I talked my way into the most educationally satisfying job ever when I managed to become an in-house landscape architect cum planner for the rebuilding of a world-famous public park! When Marianne Cramer and I left the NYC Parks & Recreation capital projects division in Flushing Meadow Park in Queens, the two of us set up office on the ground floor of a brownstone on East 72nd Street where we shared space with the Central Park Conservancy’s fundraising staff, and immediately immersed ourselves in developing a planning process for Phase I.
Our holistic work was likely the first since the Park had been studied in its entirety during its conception in the mid 19th century. Over the years subsequent to the implementation of the original design, changes had been made piecemeal without reference to how these might affect the larger context. We aimed to alter that approach by creating a comprehensive restoration and management plan that would be flexible enough to accommodate new social, cultural and natural changes over time while remaining coherent within an overall vision.
The planning process was broken down into three phases – Inventory, Analysis, and Planning – which in itself was nothing new. The revered Scottish landscape-architect and author Ian McHarg had led the way with his groundbreaking work developing plans for natural landscapes documented in his book Design with Nature. What was different about our work was that it included, in addition to an analysis of the Park’s physical and natural characteristics, references to its cultural and social conditions in the form of transparent graphic overlays on blueprints.
The inventory and analysis was comprised of over ten separate studies that looked at park-wide systems. But what was truly the most amazing part occurred when the actual planning began. There were altogether four of us who, after assembling all of the information we had gathered from our on-site studies, would integrate it as the basis for a contemporary restoration and management plan for the Park. Our Central Park Conservancy professional landscape-design “firm” consisted of Marianne Cramer and I as the in-house team along with our outside consultants Philip Winslow and Bruce Kelly. We spent the next two years sitting together at a table making grand gestures, arguing, shouting “ah hah!”, and generally messing around with scores of different ideas until we settled on the most appropriate solutions.
Bruce and Phil brought with them their experience and knowledge of doing previous work in the Park, including a plan for the Ramble. Marianne and I were relatively new to the Park, but, as residents of Manhattan, we were no less devoted to it. We constituted a team of equals in spite of, or perhaps because of, our different experiences and our individual strengths and weaknesses. I would like to add that we had a lot of fun in the process.
I count my years in the Park as my formative period in terms of my career. In spite of six years of studying landscape architecture in school and a few years of other work experience, it has had a greater affect on my career than anything else I have done. I don’t mean that I continued to make romantic landscapes. Far from it. But the opportunity to study in depth a singular landscape and to reinforce how it all fit together and ensure its longevity as an enduring, adaptable, useable, beautiful place has been the one great educational experience of my professional life.
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