Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers (born 1936) is a landscape designer, landscape preservationist and writer, whose lasting memorial is the revitalization of Central Park, New York, under her guidance as the first Central Park Administrator, and through the Central Park Conservancy, a private not-for-profit corporation that was founded, largely through Rogers' efforts, in 1980 to bring citizen support to the restoration and renewed management of Central Park.

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is the president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. A graduate of Wellesley College, where she majored in art history, and of Yale, she was born in San Antonio, Texas, and moved permanently to New York in 1964. She founded a program in Garden History and Landscape Studies at the Bard Graduate Center, New York, in 2001, and directed it until 2005. In that year the American Society of Landscape Architects presented her with its LaGasse Medal for her achievements.

A discreet bronze plaque on a boulder on the slope above the Diana Ross Playground honors her service to Central Park.

She is the author of a number of books:

  • The Forests and Wetlands of New York City (New York:Little, Brown) 1971. Recipient of the John Burroughs Medal.
  • Frederick Law Olmsted's New York (New York:Whitney Museum/Praeger), 1972.
  • The Central Park Book (Central Park Task Force, 1977)
  • Rebuilding Central Park: A Management and Restoration Plan (MIT Press, 1987).
  • Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History (New York: Abrams) 2001).

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