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· Lecture Series · Leadership Forums · Symposiums · Design Roundtables · Resident Fellowship |
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
Wednesday, April 5, 2006
Gladys Feld Helzberg Auditorium
Kansas City Public Library
Kansas City is widely publicized for having more miles of boulevards than Paris, and more fountains than Rome. Kansas City's parks and boulevards are heralded as a masterwork of American landscape design, and are the centerpiece of the city's claim to fame as a well-planned and livable city.
But could such a well-conceived legacy of tree-lined streets, neighborhood parks and gathering places be irretrievably lost?
In the absence of concerted public and private stewardship, the answer is an emphatic yes, according to Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies and founder of the Central Park Conservancy.
Rogers, who will speak in Kansas City next month, is known for her tenacity and knack for fundraising, traits that enabled her to rescue New York City's Central Park from decades of neglect and deterioration.
Once the nation's most impressive designed landscape, by the 1980s, Central Park was widely dismissed as a place to avoid, a hotbed of petty and violent crime, drug abuse, and prostitution. The park's signature landscape elements were marred by graffiti, flower beds were unplanted and unkempt, and the lawns bereft of grass.
As the first administrator of Central Park and founding president of the Conservancy, Rogers oversaw the restoration of Frederick Law Olmsted’s design legacy to America’s premier urban park. Rogers assembled private funding, hired a consultant to prepare a management plan, and identified key design legacies within the park -- including monuments, bridges, and designed landscapes such as the Belvedere Castle and Sheep Meadow -- that had deteriorated and were in danger of being irretrievably lost.
In its 25 years of existence, the Central Park Conservancy has raised and spent $300 million and underwrites nearly 80 percent of the park's $20 million annual operating budget. It also provides 90% of the park's 300 employees.
Her success led New York City Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern to refer to her as "the woman who saved Central Park in the 20th century."
Rogers will be in Kansas City as part of the Kansas City Design Center's annual lecture series, Transformations: Leadership for the Public Realm. The series focuses on the importance of public leadership in maintaining a city's design legacies, as well as building an accountable public design process as part of a city's routine decision making.
Kessler's Legacy at Stake
According to Daniel Serda, the Design Center's executive director, the series is part of a much larger effort to focus public attention on the potential for leveraging public investments to create a better city. "Our speakers to date have emphasized that every expenditure of public dollars is an opportunity to create good design," he said. "But this requires a robust public dialogue about our ambitions as a community, informed by the state of the art in urban design thinking."
During her Kansas City visit, Ms. Rogers will address a forum of area leaders concerned about preserving and restoring landscape architect George Kessler's design legacy to the parks and boulevards system. "We seldom perceive threats to the historic integrity of the system," Serda said, "but are often dismayed to learn that it is no longer held in the highest esteem nationally, or even by local residents."
Serda pointed to the recent controversy over the installation of traffic signals on Ward Parkway, as well as City Auditor Mark Funkhauser's study that showed Kansas City ranks 13th out of 14 cities in regard to resident satisfaction with local parks.
According to Serda, both reveal that the source of the problem -- as well as its solution -- lies in recognizing the impact of incremental decisions that overlook the importance of good stewardship for a well-designed and beautiful public realm. In an environment of scarce public resources, even routine decisions need to be evaluated on the basis of whether they will improve or diminish the design, accessibility, or beauty of the parks and boulevards.
In the case of the traffic signal controversy, Serda says, this means that safety cannot be seen as incompatible with good aesthetics. "Our parkways and boulevards are too precious a resource to squander by overlooking their intrinsic value -- they help to define quality of life in our neighborhoods, and the vitality of public space in our city," he said.
The lecture and forum are made possible by the generous financial support of the Francis Family Foundation, Bank Midwest, the Benjamin Regnier Charitable Foundation, and the William T. Kemper Foundation, Commerce Bank Trustee.
About Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is the president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. A resident of New York City since 1964, she was the first person to hold the title of Central Park Administrator, a New York City Parks Department position created by Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1979. She was also the first president of the Central Park Conservancy, founded in 1980 to bring citizen support to the restoration and renewed management of Central Park. She served in both positions until 1996.
Rogers is the author of Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History (Abrams, 2001). Earlier works include The Forests and Wetlands of New York City (Little, Brown and Company, 1971), Frederick Law Olmsted's New York (Whitney Museum/Praeger, 1972), The Central Park Book (Central Park Task Force, 1977), and Rebuilding Central Park: A Management and Restoration Plan (MIT Press, 1987).
In 1996, Rogers formed the Cityscape Institute, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to assisting citizens and public officials in the improvement of public places. Cityscape currently operates as the public outreach program of the Central Park Conservancy. She was the founding director of Garden History and Landscape Studies at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City between 2001 and 2005.
Rogers is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of several awards both for her work as a writer and as a landscape preservationist. These include the John Burroughs Medal for The Forests and Wetlands of New York City, which was also nominated for a National Book Award; the Wellesley College Distinguished Alumna Award; an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts from Miami University; the American Academy of Arts and Letters' 2001 Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts; and the American Society of Landscape Architects' 2005 LaGasse Medal.
A native of San Antonio, Rogers earned a bachelor of arts degree in Art History from Wellesley College and a master's degree in City Planning from Yale University.