Not Just Any Place: A New Book on the Meaning of Place by Landscape Preservationist Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

    NEW YORK, NY, July 30, 2013 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, founding president of the Central Park Conservancy and the Foundation for Landscape Studies, has a problem with the relentless homogenization of the American landscape. But unlike many who deplore the vanishing of rural fields, small towns, and the varied cityscapes and suburbs of an earlier day, she does not fulminate. Rather, in her insightful new book Learning Las Vegas: Portrait of a Northern New Mexican Place (Museum of New Mexico Press and Foundation for Landscape Studies, clothbound, $39.95) she adopts a more focused perspective in order to examine the meaning of place in human life.

Las Vegas, New Mexico--"the other Las Vegas"--is seven hundred miles from the one in Nevada. They might as well be on different planets. Unlike its namesake, which lost the battle long ago, the small town in New Mexico has not surrendered its soul. Rogers, a noted landscape historian, historic landscape preservationist, and the recipient of numerous awards both for her books and for her work restoring Central Park, wants us to understand why place matters.

Using Las Vegas as her case study, she has published what she considers to be a "documentary between covers," a book that weaves a description and a history of the town--in reality two towns, one Hispanic in its origins, the other Anglo--with the impressions of its currents residents. Eschewing the term "interview," she accompanies the narrative of her conversations with sixty individuals with a photograph of each.

Learning Las Vegas contains many other illustrations besides these portraits. There are photographs of the town's streetscape, architecture, and public spaces, including the plaza, the venue for numerous events that Rogers attended over the five years she was working on her book. In addition to its one hundred images of people and place, the book boasts a stand-alone portfolio of Rogers's most compelling pictures.

Located at the juncture of the Great Plains and the Sangre de Cristos, the southernmost range of the Rocky Mountains, Las Vegas's situation at the entrance to the Glorietta Pass made it an important stop on the Santa Fe Trail. The book's text and illustrations therefore extend beyond the town to the expansive grasslands and mountain canyons that surround it.

Rogers, who has a master's degree in urban planning from Yale University, is the author of seven prior books. This is the first to combine cultural anthropology with landscape history. Her initial approach is to take the reader on an edifying tour of Las Vegas's impressive streetscape of landmark mansions and commercial edifices, varied in their vintages and states of repair. From this imaginary walk about town it becomes apparent that Las Vegas, with its 900 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, once enjoyed an era of great prosperity. Indeed, with its successful and civic-minded Jewish mercantile community, Las Vegas was for a time one of the most important and thriving cities of the American West.

After venturing beyond the boundaries of the town to describe its stunning regional environs, Rogers provides a brief narrative of its colorful history as a Hispanic settlement, territory of the United States, Wild West outlaw Mecca, major trading center, railroad hub, film location, and now picturesque relic of a vanished America. Thus she sets the stage for her kaleidoscope of conversations that constitute a portrait of Las Vegas today.

"My modus operandi was learning Las Vegas through the lens of my camera and by conversing with people I encountered on the street or met with in their homes or places of business," says Rogers. "Some of these people are fourth-generation Las Vegans. Unfortunately, today Las Vegas is losing population because it does not have sufficient private enterprise to sustain the next generation. The big challenge of the present is to preserve the past without turning Las Vegas's historic townscape into a theme park for tourists."

Rogers, who still subscribes to the Las Vegas Optic newspaper in order to keep up with the town's goings on, says that Las Vegas has become her place too and that she is grateful that writing Learning Las Vegas gave her the opportunity to get an inside look at a unique American place that is determined to retain its cultural identity.

Learning Las Vegas: Portrait of a Northern New Mexican Place
By Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
Clothbound, $39.95, ISBN 978-089013-578-5
284 pages, 150 color images, 9 x 10

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is the president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. A native of San Antonio, Texas, she earned a bachelor's degree in art history from Wellesley College and a master's degree in city planning from Yale University.

A resident of New York City since 1964, Rogers was the first person to hold the title of Central Park Administrator, a New York City Department of Parks & Recreation position created by Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1979. She was the founding president of the Central Park Conservancy, the public-private partnership created in1980 to bring citizen support to the restoration and renewed management of Central Park. She served in both positions until 1996.

A writer on the history of landscape design and the cultural meaning of place, Rogers is the author of 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), Rebuilding Central Park: A Management and Restoration Plan (The MIT Press, 1987), Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001), Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design (David R. Godine, Publisher, 2010), and Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries (David R. Godine, Publisher, 2011).

Subsequent to guiding Central Park's restoration and instituting a new management structure during the Conservancy's first fifteen years, Rogers resumed her career as teacher, lecturer, and writer on the subject of place. At the same time, she has maintained her commitment to the preservation of living landscapes through good design and sound management practices. As the owner with her husband, Theodore C. Rogers, of the C. L. Browning Ranch in the Texas Hill Country, she oversees the restoration of its natural beauty, cultural history, and ecological health.

Rogers is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of several awards for her work as a writer and 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. In 2010 she received the Green-Wood Historic Fund's Dewitt Clinton Award in Arts, Literature, Preservation and Historic Research. In addition, she is the winner of the Rockefeller Foundation's 2010 Jane Jacobs Medal for lifetime achievement and was named the 2012 Henry Hope Reed Award laureate by the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture.

For more information, please visit: http://www.elizabethbarlowrogers.com.

Media contact: Victor Gulotta
Gulotta Communications, Inc.
617-630-9286
http://www.booktours.com
victor(at)booktours(dot)com

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