Rebuilding Central Park

Between 1982 and 1985, under Elizabeth Barlow Rogers’s leadership, Central Park was studied in its entirety by a team of four landscape architects (Marianne Cramer, Judith L. Heintz, Bruce Kelly, and Phillip N. Winslow) working in conjunction with an urban sociologist (William Kornblum), an historic preservation architect (Jean Phifer), and consultants on soil science, hydrology, and wildlife. This parkwide inventory and analysis was the first such effort since the 1858 Greensward Plan, Olmsted and Vaux’s winning entry in the design competition at the time of the park’s creation. The plan that Rogers and her team developed was systemic, comprehensive, and integrated. It considered the park organically as a single, 843-acre landscape rather than as a patchwork of lawns, wooded areas, ponds, playgrounds, and ball fields. A user study provided a demography of the park’s multiple constituencies; a circulation study mapped the flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic; an inventory of the park’s 26,000 trees yielded useful data on species, age, size, and condition; and a ground-plane survey delineated the presence and absence of vegetation, indicating many areas of eroded, bare earth.