A Forum for Diary Entries, Essays, Observations, Poetry, News, and Reviews
October 16th, 2022
As the owner of a 979-acre ranch that I have loved ever since my father purchased it in 1942 as a weekend and holiday home in the Texas Hill Country, on all of my trips there over the more that fifty years that I have called myself a New Yorker I have carried back home with me a bucket filled with re-lived childhood memories as well as present happiness. For the past twenty of these years my visits to the ranch have offered me, in addition to a stage for the playback of scenes from my nature-loving youth, an opportunity to focus on land stewardship protocols to further the biodiversity and scenic beauty that the ranch is currently demonstrating as a role model for a new generation of Texas Hill Country ranch owners. The days I have just spent there from October 5-October 11 in the company of my daughter Lisa and son David, who will jointly inherit the ranch some day, have been centered on furthering these heirs’ knowledge of, and ongoing commitment to, the principles practiced and routine projects undertaken by our ranch manager Scott Gardener, who is an environmental scientist as well as a conscientious caretaker. READ MORE >
October 7th, 2022
Back in 1976, when the vision of a restored and well-managed Central Park was still a pipe dream, its chief workforce consisted of a few random volunteers and a group of summer interns assigned duties to help improve its horticultural welfare. One of them, Garth Fergusson, became a lifelong friend of mine as well as my daughter Lisa’s and son David’s. You might call Garth a born poet, which is how I think of him. Recently he sent me his most recent series of poems, which are thematically centered on the Covid pandemic. They are copied here in this draft journal posting, which is prefaced with the following brief biography that I asked him to write. READ MORE >
September 30th, 2022
When I look back on the summer of 1976 my sentiments are ones of great happiness when I recollect the group of high school students who had been selected by a member of the administration of the high school they attended to sign up for a summer-jobs-for-youth program offered by Central Park Task Force. Their chief duty was to perform useful menial chores such as weeding shrub beds, painting benches, and shoveling silt from the park’s muddy water bodies.
Unusual, but especially memorable for me was the fact that on their work breaks their supervisor conducted a poetry workshop that encouraged them to express in free verse their observations about what they were discovering in their immediate surroundings. READ MORE >
September 23rd, 2022
For the past thirty-eight years in the first week in May the Central Park Conservancy’s Women’s Committee has hosted the Frederick Law Olmsted Award Luncheon in the park’s Conservatory Garden. In the same venue in September 2021 a special anniversary party was held to celebrate the Conservancy’s birth in 1980, which was for me an event filled with pride and nostalgia. READ MORE >
September 16th, 2022
My latest book Writing the City: A Collection of Essays on New York, was launched on June 3, 2022 at the New-York Historical Society and further publicized in the following talk I gave on September 8 at the New York Society Library. My remarks about the book and its publisher, the Library of American Landscape History, can be read here or heard in a live video recording. READ MORE >
September 9th, 2022
To have lived through a catastrophic event of dire danger inevitably produces personal recollections of a time and place in history in which one was either a firsthand or secondhand spectator, if not a victim, of an immediate transformative disaster, the anniversary dates of which prompt recollection. In the case of the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, New York City itself remains emblematic of a nation imperiled by an ideology given expression through terrorism. Having watched at a lofty distance and then taken stock among the scattered coteries of shocked citizens who, like me, were finding solace in the balm of nature within its green heart, I was prompted this year to write a narrative of what I experienced on that terrible day. READ MORE >
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