Rebuilding Central Park: A Management and Restoration Plan

Travel journals are, for some people such as me, a treasured literary form. For many years, I have never gone on self-planned vacations without a six-by-eight-inch, hardcover accountant’s ledger book with at least fifty lined, blank pages suitable for handwriting. My aim is to share with literary intent an appreciation of various landscapes and the memorable personal experiences that I have had in visiting them. Italy has always been a prime vacation setting for me and my husband, Ted Rogers, and we have happily set our feet in many places, especially the area stretching from the Alps, where they divide Italy and France, to Sicily, the island at the toe of Italy’s cartographic boot. In addition to rural Tuscany and the cities of Venice, Milan, Florence, Siena, and Rome, we greatly appreciate Italy’s southernmost major city, Naples.

Join me in reading my travel diary that opens on June 26, 2003, and you will see that “this was the wettest June in one-hundred years, and Central Park is lush and sodden as it prepares to host three-hundred people from twelve countries to celebrate the park’s one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary. My administrative duties on this occasion are over, and yesterday I found myself high-and-dry as I flew into wet Oaxaca where the much appreciated rainy season has begun. From the air I could see the cultivated fields: long, narrow strips of brown earth with a new green effloresce, almost luminous in its vigorous vegetal resurgence.