June 4th, 2025
Beyond Architecture: The New New York
I like to call myself an ardently adopted New Yorker. Yes, I subscribe to the mantra, “I love New York!” and when people say to me, “You’re from Texas, aren’t you? “Why did you come to live here?” I reply, “New York is the most culturally rich and architecturally interesting city on earth. “But how do you live in the middle of all that bricks and mortar, steel and cement? – don’t you miss having a green lawn just outside your front door and a big old tree with birds singing in the branches growing over the side of your roof?” And, of course, cities, like people, have personalities, and choosing a city as one’s principal permanent home means appropriating a particular cityscape as shaped by topography (Think “hilly” San Francisco and “Mississippi-mouthed New Orleans) or characterized by the savor of a local cuisine specialty (Think “baked beans” Boston and, in the case of my hometown, “Tex-Mex” San Antonio), but mainly because for various pragmatic reasons, such as ease of entry for emigrants, employment opportunities, proximity of family relatives, and good schools for children – more often than not, it happens to be the home of 8.25878 million people including me.”
Take a birds-eye view of New York and you will see a “green metropolis” of 30,000 acres of parkland making up 14% of its land mass and inland waters, plus community gardens, tree-lined streets, and more than 5,000 individual properties.
My emigration saga takes me from a happy girlhood in San Antonio and my parents’ ranch in the Texas Hill Country to Wellesley College where I majored in art history and fulfilled my required science quotient by taking a single geology course, the results of which I have found to be lastingly interesting, especially when I am looking at the eye-catching, glacially polished rock outcrops of Manhattan schist in Central Park.
“A ring by spring,” was de riguer in 1957, and, following my graduation in June of that year, I married my Yale-educated boyfriend Edward Barlow. In that day, young men were conscripted into one or another of the branches of the military for a mandatory three-year stint, and our first home was in Washington, D.C., where Ed was posted to a Naval intelligence job in the Pentagon.
I have happy memories of the three years when we were in residence in the partially gentrified neighborhood of Foggy Bottom and, after birth of our daughter Lisa, pushing her in her baby carriage over to Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown where I window-shopped and took detours down the alphabetically named streets from “M” to “R,” where there were rows of beautifully renovated Federal-style townhouses to admire and covet. Turning on to R Street we could take the entrance path to Dumbarton Oaks, which I would would later discover to be the masterpiece of landscape designer Beatrix Farrand had achieved on the estate of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss. With Baby Lisa in my arms, I was able to sit on the beautiful front lawn and then discover the beauty of this wooded site with mature oaks and other native trees and a series of floral parterres on terraced slopes descending to the valley threaded by Rock Creek.
Thus began my attraction to historic architecture and historic landscape design and consequently my career motive toward preservation-oriented urban planning and restoration and stewardship of designed landscapes of great beauty.
In 1961, following his stint in the Navy and a year of work in my father’s construction business in San Antonio, Ed and I were both ready to seek our own joint path in life, which resulted in his matriculation through three years at the Yale Law School and me studying for a master’s degree in the Yale School of Urban Studies according to a curriculum that was much the same then as it is to its online description today as “an interdisciplinary field grounded in the physical and social spaces of the city and the larger built environment.” Of significant importance to me was the fact that “The Urban Studies program was then, as it still is now, situated within Yale’s liberal arts framework and drew on the broader academic context and expertise of the Yale School of Architecture, including the areas of urban design and development, urban and architectural history, urban theory and representation, globalization and infrastructure, transportation and mobility, heritage and preservation, and community-based planning.” Not surprisingly, “heritage and preservation, and community-based planning” would become my primary focus, and I spent a good deal of time during my graduate-student years admiring the historic Italian neighborhood of Wooster Square, east of downtown New Haven.
Because of his outstanding grades, after graduating from the Law School in 1964, Ed had job opportunities in several cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City, with the third being his natural choice since his parents still lived in the borough of Queens where he had grown up in the atmospherically bucolic planned community of Forest Hills designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.
Ed became an associate lawyer at Cravath Swaine & Moore, and during the hours when Lisa was in class at the Brearley School, I worked as a volunteer with the Parks Association, my first experience within the not-for-profit job sector. Here was my baptism in fundraising, organizational newsletter writing, and appearance at public hearings regarding the control of garbage dumping by the Department of Sanitation in the marshy wetlands in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, Fresh Kills on Staten Island, and elsewhere in the other watery borderlands of New York City. I also found myself engaged in forest preservation on Staten Island and Inwood Hill Park at the northern tip of Manhattan.
To put things in a more global and literary perspective, urban planning is my métier, and the preservation of nature and provision of outdoor recreational opportunities is my avocation. Not surprisingly, my bookcase contains The City of Man (1953) by my Yale urban history professor Christopher Tunnard; The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) by Jane Jacobs; The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (1961) by Lewis Mumford; Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (1988) by Peter Hall; The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1975) by Robert A. Caro; The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (1984) by Anne Whiston Spirn.
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Occupying the same bookshelf in my library as of this week is Beyond Architecture: The New New York (2024), written and edited by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, a primary proponent in the passage of the New York City Landmarks Law in April, 1965. The subject of this important new addition to the story of the “then-and-now” physical structure of New York City is sparked by the circumstance that in 1961 Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. organized a preservation committee and the following year created the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The LPC’s power was greatly strengthened after the Landmarks Law was passed in April 1965, one-and-a-half years after the destruction of architecturally renowned Pennsylvania Station for the debatable purpose of increasing the size of contiguous Madison Square Garden.
As an unofficial member of New York’s family of civic organizations concerned with alterations to the city’s built environment and preservation of iconic urban elements of the past, I have known Barbaralee as a friend for most of the time that both she and I have belonged to a special breed of adopted, now-lifelong, New Yorkers with childhood roots in the American South. (More specifically, mine are in the Southwest 150 miles north of the Mexican border and hers are in the Deep South, where she grew up in the Lehigh Valley, then in Charlottesville, and later in proximity to Colonial Williamsburg within the Tidewater region of eastern Virginia).
A historian, as well as a landmark preservationist, Barbaralee has created in Beyond Architecture: The New New York an editorial masterpiece of literary verve and intellectual acumen through her selection of eleven writers of note, who are either architectural critics by profession or writers who are knowledgeable regarding the building technology and politics involving architectural restoration projects and the sociological aspects of historic districts, to contribute thematic essays. Such editorial choices on her part give each of the book’s individual chapters a depth of appreciation for the human impulse to save both buildings and neighborhoods that are notable for their historic architecture or the cultural ambiance that makes them subjects of a general passion born of familiarity with street and path patterns, restaurants, bars, specialty stores, and other commercial enterprises as well as the ethnic identities of both owners and local customers associated with them. In addition, many parts of the city have served as emigrant settlements of an urban nature for several generations of compatriots, which characterizes the ambiences of certain communities such as Little Italy and Chinatown, both of which have been spliced onto Lower Manhattan.
Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic of The New York Times, has written as one of the chapters in Beyond Architecture: The New New York an essay titled “The Next Frontier: Intangible Heritage,” in which he maintains that “What New Yorkers today worry about losing and want to safeguard is not (necessarily) old architecture but what can feel like it in an increasingly fragile, complex ecosystem of daily life. The threat isn’t just to monuments like the old Penn Station but to neighborhood tent poles like viewsheds, tenement housing, playgrounds, community gardens, and the local Y.” Of course, in some cases proponents of the preservation of neighborhoods in their entirety may be overly chauvinistic, Kimmelman’s example being “the wide swath of New Yorkers who see the Upper West Side as local heritage worth protecting and maintain that a legacy business such as Barney Greengrass, the smoked-fish restaurant, should be on a cultural map of their district since “many of them might consider it more urgent to safeguard Sturgeon King than to, say, another great Emory Roth-designed apartment building.”
Turning to another “might-have-been” historic landmark, Kimmelman poses the question of what would be the result of asking African American residents of Upper Manhattan which building spoke more to their pride of place and identity, the Romanesque revival mansion called the Bailey House from the 1880s – which was built for the famous circus impresario and designated as a landmark in 1974 – or a derelict, stumpy little house at 857 Riverside Drive, defaced by faux-stone siding.” He goes on to aver, “I suspect many would vote for 857 Riverside, because historians have now linked its one-time ownership to an abolitionist who may well have made the house a stop on the Underground Railroad. Explaining why it was not designated a landmark, he concludes, “Its designation has been thwarted for years by the building’s architectural despoliation and lack of documentation about the Underground Railroad, notwithstanding the fact that the railroad’s very existence depended on stealth and a lack of documentation.” By way of contrast, Kimmelman remarks, “In 2022 the Bowne House in Queens was recognized by the United States Parks Service as a member of the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program.”
Mention of the Bowne House, the oldest surviving house in Queens, drew my attention to the first essay in Beyond Architecture, which is titled “One House, One Family, Three Centuries of New York History” by Rosemary Vietor, a fifteenth-generation Bowne family member, who is vice-president of the Bowne House Historical Society and a trustee of the New York State Archives Partnership Trust in Albany.
The Bowne House, which has been owned and operated at a museum by the Bowne Historical Society since 1947, is the oldest family domicile in the borough of Queens and is associated with religious freedom in America because of its function as an important stop-over place on the Underground Railroad and.
For me, whose professional life and career as a writer and landscape preservationist has been centered to a large degree around Central Park, it is necessary to digress here from my overall review of Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel’s book in order to connect the story of the land surrounding the Bowne house with the subject of Central Park’s creation, which begins with the fact that Samuel Parsons (b. 1774) joined the Bowne family of Flushing when he married Mary Bowne in 1806 and became a nurseryman and cultivator of native trees and shrubs as well as certain species of exotic plants imported from British nurseries. Parsons’s son, Samuel Parsons Jr., learned all he knew about horticulture while growing up in the nursery and went on to become a landscape architect and the third member, alongside Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, of the landscape-design triumvirate responsible for the re-grading and planting of the 830 acres that became Central Park. As a result, he can be credited with the creation of Rhododendron Mile, the embankment along the section of the Park’s East Drive on the side of the Reservoir between 86th and 94th Streets.)
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Putting Central Park aside for now, I will return to Rosemary Vietor’s essay in Beyond Architecture for a short précis:
Today the Bowne House occupies a tiny fragment of what had been several hundred acres of family property located in what is now bustling downtown Flushing. Its extensive history goes back to the days of Dutch colonial ownership of New York and contains the fact that Vietor’s forebear John Bowne was instrumental in defying Governor Peter Stuyvesant’s ban on any other than worship in the Dutch Reformed Church and, relying on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing the rights of assembly, welcomed Quakers into his house in 1662.
Vietor’s narrative goes on to explain that “In addition to being the home of several nurseries, Flushing was rumored to be a hotbed of abolitionist activity, a safe haven for the Underground Railroad, with a number of “safe houses”–‑and one of these reported locations was the Bowne House. . . . Both Samuel and Mary Parsons were ardent abolitionists, as was their son Robert. Samuel traveled the world in search of rare and unusual plant material, and his property eventually included several hundred acres in and around downtown Flushing, with additional lands in Florida… The Flushing location, with its dense plantings and proliferation of outbuildings, likely provided excellent cover for the family’s recently confirmed Underground Railroad activities.” The reader will concur with Vietor in giving thanks for “those early instincts of preservation that have permitted us to continue to explore this rich and exciting story.”
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Beyond Architecture provides an exceptionally educational essay titled “Engineering Landmarks” by, Guy Nordenson and Nat Oppenheimer, two engineers who write in a single voice as they take readers behind building fabrics of bricks and morter, glass and steel, and provide them with insight (literally) into how “hidden landmarks of remarkable structural inventiveness are scattered throughout New York.” Read their prefatory statement as an example: “The stacks of the New York Public Library support both books and building. This system – the work of Angus Snead Macdonald – is pervasive in New York, including in the recently expanded Frick Collection. . . . As we move forward into the next sixty years of preserving landmark architecture, this structural work is likely to play a larger and larger role as technology moves forward and these systems change.”
The authors then make this revealing remark: “The drawn-out drama of rebuilding the World Trade Center site, as well as the curious effort to make Hudson Yards another Rockefeller Center, point to the difficulty citizens and leaders have in deciding what to hold on to and what to cast away. Over time, New York’s grid alone endures, freeing the city to constantly transform.” They then point out that “following World War II and the modern movement, hybrid systems providing multiple functions were replaced by more segmented systems of structure, curtain walls, and lightweight interior partitions. A measure of the shift is the decreasing density of the buildings from approximately 30 pounds per cubic foot for the Empire State Building to a third of that for the World Trade Center Twin Towers. In some cases, the shift away from masonry infill left structures too flexible to shift to a commodity economy of buildings that are less likely to be valued as landmarks, as was the case with the Twin Towers. . . . The history of New York structures is for the most part that of an ecology of emergent technologies that rise and wane and are replaced in each new cycle. That vernacular is not so well known except by those charged with the restoration and expansion of those individual buildings that are valued enough to remain through all the change. But these hidden constructions represent another kind of landmark in the city.”
Both authors of this essay have served as structural engineers for the expansion and transformation of museums and performing arts centers, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Opera. For readers who, like me, have patronized these great cultural institutions over the years and watched from the outside during their times of closure for the purpose of reconstruction, the authors’ reduction of language from what might have sounded like “engineerese” to a narrative of metaphorical clarity that can convey the artistry of their computer-program-generated designs to receptive readers turns former distaste of the inconvenience and cultural deprivation we endured during months, and sometimes years, of closure to amazement at the ingenuity inherent in their profession.
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For a philosophical outlook, Paul Goldberger, who is a master of insightful, even-handed architectural criticism, puts the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s sixtieth anniversary this year into perspective by analyzing problems and assessing pitfalls that beset landmark preservationists today. In his essay titled “The State of Play: Landmarks at Sixty” Goldberger gives examples centered around the theme that “As the city council members who shared the real estate industry’s belief that building, not preserving, was the DNA of New York and demanded that the original powers accorded to the Landmark Commission should be reduced in order allow for various kinds of public debate with developers of certain kinds of desirable real estate were often on the winning side. In addition, the exemption of the interiors of certain buildings from landmark designation diminished the aesthetics of their architectural design and notable features of their décor. As a salve to this sort of bureaucracy, he points out that “A new preservation establishment has arose. It consisted not only of organizations like the Municipal Art Society and the Landmarks Conservancy, but also of many members of the real estate bar, who realized that preservation law was increasingly becoming an area of legal practice in itself, and of wealthy donors to preservation causes, who were recognizing that historic preservation was not merely a matter of saving a handful of quaint buildings.
Goldberger strikes home with this particular reader with the sentence, “Because city parks could not be designated, neither could the commission have a say in how the Metropolitan Museum of Art extended its footprint more deeply into Central Park when it planned its major expansion during the commission’s early years.” It was thus illuminating for me to read the online description of the master plan by the esteemed architect Kevin Roche, which outlines in positive prose the enlargement the existing museum:
The master plan responds to the need for large galleries by adding the Sackler Wing for the Temple of Dendur to the north, and the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, with the Andre Meyer Galleries above, to the south. The adjacent corners are completed by the respective additions of the new American Wing and the Wallace Galleries for Twentieth Century Art. The first phase was the redesign of the space in front of the museum, to create an urban plaza with appropriately-scaled and terraced steps up to the entry into the restored Great Hall. This entry axis is reinforced by the addition of the Lehman Pavilion on the west side, with its skylighted court as a terminus.
The areas between these wings and the existing museum are left as skylighted courts, or relief spaces – the American Wing Garden Court with the restored 1822 Assay Office Building facade on the north, and on the south an interior street for European Garden Sculpture that preserves the existing 1888 facade. These relief spaces afford the visitor a chance to rest from the intensity of gallery viewing.
The new additions maintain the high ceilings characteristic of the Metropolitan, while the proportions of the galleries vary according to the works displayed, often with natural light from extensive skylights.
Today, the only remnant of the original south-facing entrance to the museum when it was sited in its entirety within the park is the reconstruction of its facade, which now forms the western wall of Petrie Court: a wide, skylight-lit space where the museum’s astonishingly fine collection of Renaissance sculptures are on permanent display.
I once thought that the wall terminating this part of the Roche master plan or, alternatively, the west-facing wall of glass on the ground floor of the American Wing, should contain a direct entrance to the Museum from Central Park. Naturally, today this more intimate embrace of the outdoors like the one designed by Calvert Vaux at the museum’s inception would have necessitated more staff for the entry-monitoring of visitors for security purposes. Therefore, when in my former official capacity as Central Park administrator and the Parks Department’s representative at the museum’s board meetings I broached this subject, the board chairman and president of the museum vociferously opposed my suggestion. As a Metropolitan Museum patron myself, I now realize that a ground-floor direct connection with the Park will never happen and that the only consolations are the Park’s designation as both a National Historic Landmark in 1965 and a Scenic Landmark of the City of New York in 1974 and the fact that the sculpture garden on the roof of the fourth floor of the Museum has unparalleled overhead views of the Park.
Returning now to Goldberger’s essay “The State of Play: Landmarks at Sixty,” one realizes that “the law New York passed in 1965 was not quite as intrepid as it seemed. New York, after all, has always been a city defined largely by the values of commerce, particularly by the values of real estate, and the real estate industry saw the Landmarks Laws as a threat to its hegemony: to save any old building, however, worthy, was to deny the opportunity to build new one. As the particulars of the law were debated in the city council, several council members who shared the real estate industry’s belief that building, not preserving, was the DNA of New York demanded that the powers accorded the Landmarks Commission in the original draft of the legislation be reduced. The final version of the law gave the commission only eighteen months to designate official landmarks; after that period, the commission’s work would go on a hiatus of three years, during which it would, for practical purposes, have no powers at all.
After a three-year moratorium, the law specified another designation period of six months followed by a hiatus of three years, a pattern that would repeat indefinitely, thus assuring that the commission would stay on the sidelines most of the time. Developers, of course, operated under no such limits, and the moratorium gave the real estate industry six times as much time to demolish and develop new buildings as the commission had to protect old ones. This would hardly bring New York city into the promised land of preservation.
This dire prediction, fortunately, as Andrew Dolkart makes clear in the final chapter of Beyond Architecture: The New York when he tells the reader: “In its six decades of active responsibility for the preservation of New York’s architecturally, historically, and culturally significant sites, the commission has, as of 2024, designated almost 38,000 properties, including 1,464 individual landmarks, buildings in large and small historic districts, 157 large and small interior landmarks, buildings in 157 large and small historic districts, 123 interior landmarks and 12 scenic landmarks. Combined, these designations make up about four percent of the city’s building lots.”
For Dolkart, “after sixty years of so many designations, one might conclude that the Landmarks preservation Commission has nothing left to designate, a statement that he counters with mention of the diverse communities whose residents are advocating for historic district designation and the many individual buildings that still lack protection. Here, I wish to mention the Landmarks Conservancy, a civic organization that over the half century since its 1973 founding has provided more than $60 million in grants and loans for a variety of preservations, and I am proud to add that is current director, Peg Breen, the current director of the Landmarks Conservancy, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving, revitalizing, and reusing historic structures in New York state, is a personal friend of mine.
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For me, a particularly pertinent essay in Beyond Architecture: The New New York is “Living Landmarks: Toward an Ecological Worldview” by Lisa Switkin, partner of the landscape architectural firm of Field Operations who, according to her bio, “has a background in urban planning and landscape architecture and has been involved in numerous multidisciplinary projects, including New York City’s High Line, Domino Park in Brooklyn, and the master plan for Freshkills Park, which it now moving forward in the estimated thirty-year-implementation of the transformation of the largest of the Department of Sanitation’s dumping grounds for New Yorkers’ refuse into its original natural wetland state and promise as an ecologically oriented park. Her essay, in fact, is written as a promotion of the concept of multiple resiliency projects and waterfront parks being developed along New York City’s coastline as one integral coastal protection system and as a public amenity deserving of protection. Several resiliency projects are in various stages of design and construction, with the aim of adapting the city to the challenges of climate change, providing waterfront access, and protecting out most vulnerable communities. Examples of these include. . . . Battery Park City Resilience Project . . . the earthen berm and increased topography at Brooklyn Bridge Park, the tidal wetlands at Hunter’s Point South in Queens, and the development of varied resilient edges, including tidal pools, ledges, and a salt marsh at Gansvoort Peninsula in Hudson River Park in Queens, and the development of varied and resilient edges, including tidal pools, ledges – all of which contribute to reducing flood risk due to coastal storms and sea level rise. This purports that “because in addition, they create community amenities and reduce risk, it is crucial to consider the gaps between them and to safeguard them as one unified and linked system.”
Naturally, Switkin’s brief lingers as music to my ears as I look at the bookshelf that contains The Forests and Wetlands of New York, (Published by Little Brown, 1971), my first book, which, as I can proudly boast, was nominated for a National Book Award. Also on my lap as I write these words is Green Metropolis (Published by Alfred A.Knopf 2010) , my redux version of The Forests and Wetlands of New York City, written after I had revisited all of the nature-rich New York City parks that I had visited so many times beginning in 1965 when I was first coming to consider myself an ardently adopted new NewYorker,
I am now puffed up with pride when I read the foreword titled “Legacy” by Tony Hiss who claims, “Betsy Barlow Rogers, who a generation ago organized Central Park’s rescue when it was at the point of collapse, is an urban trailblazer – a pusher of the envelope, a seer into the beyond – who compiles compelling, meticulously and joyfully observed Won’t you join me? updates from a landscape whose very existence she helped reveal: the deep countryside still spread out across all five boroughs of densely settled New York City. In describing the contents of Green Metropolis. Tony mentions my “sloshing in waters in Jamaica Bay, the great estuary that’s perhaps twenty-four times the size of Central Park, she has to make way for shore bound horseshoe crabs, whose ancestors began crawling onto sandy beaches in springtime hundreds of millions of years ago, that are gently but insistently bumping against her legs.”
I wish Tony could had been with me back in the late 1060s, when I was making day trips into forests and wetlands of Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx where I would hang out with the “regulars,” a group of retired German emigrant men who took the subway almost every day from the Upper East Side neighborhood of Yorkville to Pelham Bay Park, which has an immense tidal wetland segmented by creeks. Here is what I wrote about this salt-marsh landscape and its habitués: “For the Bartow Creek regulars like Billy Seely, who live in city apartments, growing things in the earth fills a basic and important need. Hidden in the phragmites reeds and in the secluded upland bordering the marsh are patches of cleared land – little flower beds and World War II “victory” gardens lovingly tended by Billy and his friends.”
In addition to gardening, the Bartow Creek regulars spend a good deal of time fishing in the protected waters of the tidal inlet. Their catches include flounder, eel, tomcod, and occasionally striped bass. The inlet was also a popular fishing ground with the Indians three hundred years ago. Masses of oyster shells, wood ashes and other fragments were discovered by park archaeologists indicating that the shore in front of the Bartow Mansion was an important fishing camp. The Indian shell heaps and other archaeological evidence were destroyed when dredged materials were heaped upon them.”
I fear that I am sinking this review of Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel’s excellent book into a pile of quotations from my own earlier career as a writer. The relevance of this, however, is to confirm my likely love not only of Central Park but of all of New York City’s green open spaces and to concur with Lisa Switkin’s conclusion “to take a landscape approach to the City by designating as landmarks a series of connected open spaces as a unified network, linking existing parks with intentionally designated green corridors with the addition of a new layer to the preservation powers of the Landmarks Law that focuses on resiliency, biodiversity, and connectivity” by designating sites that “underscore the importance of ‘soft’ nature-based solutions to create a more resilient New York, moving from the sole use of seawalls, dikes, and bulkheads to wetlands, marshes, and dunes or a combination of both hard (gray) and soft (green) techniques in urban sites with limited space. . . . If landmark designation is considered as a value statement of what we wish to preserve, then New York City landmarks need to be expanded to include the protection and care of our environment. . . . We should expand our criteria for designation, to be rooted in the city’s diverse culture and with a renewed focus on the public realm and the environment. This expansion would involve a new classification, suggested here as “living landmarks, a term meant to capture the essential role of public spaces in our daily lives and the living natural world.” This new designation would encompass an expanded public realm, including public streets, active neighborhood parks, cultural landscapes, as well as connective corridors, ecological landscapes, and comprehensive resiliency as exemplified by inevitable recoveries from dramatic changes in the weather, including winter snow storms and summer heat waves.
In conclusion, I maintain that Central Park is, without any further designation, a living landmark already and also an ecological landscape that enjoys comprehensive resiliency. To confirm its ineffable bond with Nature, visit the forested-by-design Ramble between the Lake and Turtle Pond in the center of the Park and the naturalistically forested North End through which the Loch, a steadily flowing steam that runs into the waters of the Harlem Meer, both of which, as I write these words on a sunny Saturday in the month of May, are filled with numerous birdwatchers identifying an abundance of Spring-migrating species, which are distinguished by their varieties of multi-colored markings. Every year you will find them in these parts of the Park making distinctive chirping noises and hopping from limb to limb in the crotches of trees that constitute their avian hotel in the heart of New York City where they are making one of their seasonal overnight stopovers on the Atlantic flyway, which takes its route (and hence its name) from the oceanic coastal borderlands between Greenland and the tropical areas of Central and South America.
If you are an incipient New York City birder, don’t think that you can only see migratory birds in Central Park. Just read the words above that I have quoted from Switkin’s essay – “neighborhood parks, cultural landscapes, connective corridors, ecological landscapes” – and you can then join me in believing that the already-landmarked Central Park is a hub for a chain of interconnected natural areas that are also at this very moment enjoying an abundance of migrating birds.
To pursue this suggestion a bit further, think of what I consider to be a mobile landmark, the New York City subway system, and get on the A-train and go to Inwood Hill Park at Broadway and 207th Street in the northern tip of Manhattan, and, if you wish to see in-situ waterfowl after having had your fill of migrating warblers, get on the A train going south to Rockaway Park Beach and get off at the Broad Channel stop in the middle of Jamaica Bay where you will be within a five-minute walking distance to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Of course, you can’t do all of this in one day, but don’t worry, the birds will still be flying into all of “the series of connected open spaces as a unified network, linking the existing parks with the intentionally designated green corridors” that Switkin has in mind.
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Reading Beyond Architecture: The New New York will, of course, provide you with a plethora of descriptions of landmarked buildings and neighborhoods that you will wish to meander through if you aren’t already familiar with each particular one. To this suggestion, I will add as my recommendation for a true-blue New Yorker’s reading list: Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (2024) by Phillip Lopate, a brilliant film critic and essayist with whom you can walk through many historic neighborhoods whether or not they are landmarked, and which, according to the novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, “can be appreciated from the perspectives of history, mythology, and socio-architectural rumination.” Lopate’s Waterfront is also praised by novelist E. L. Doctorow, who declares it to be “a book the anyone who finds Manhattan fascinating would do well to read as a beautiful ramble into its heart and soul.” Although its publication was in 2004, for readers like me who seek to discover “the meaning of place” in life as well as literature, it is as worth recommending today as is the book of the essays compiled by Diamondstein Spielvogel reviewed above. Indeed, it is such a fine book that I may decide for my next journal posting to give a review that is categorically out-of-date but will be written with sincere appreciation for my admiration of it during the times I have picked it up and randomly re-read various parts since its publication twenty years ago.
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