Saving Central Park: A History and A Memoir

To turn my vision of a rebuilt Central Park into a reality when the park was in a state of dire destruction from misuse and rampant vandalism in the 1970s I was fortunate to be able in the early 1980s to find four qualified landscape architects to form a management and restoration planning team under the aegis of the newly formed Central Park Conservancy. Their collaborative congeniality and holistic approach provided the groundwork – in the most literal sense – for the Conservancy’s team of trained landscape architects who are staff members today.

The impulse to capture history-in-the-making in images as well as with words is universal and timeless. Going beyond sketchbook artistry in terms of facile documentation, photography has been the prevalent medium of expression in this regard for the past century-and-a-half. As a subject for both professional and amateur photographers, the building of Central Park as a fusion of nature and art ranks high on the scale of place-focused photographic output during this time. To appreciate the fact that for the past forty-five years, the transformation from dereliction to renewed beauty of this world-famous landscape by the Central Park Conservancy has been systematically recorded by the civic organization’s own official photographer Sara Cedar Miller.