Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers (born 1936) is an American environmentalist, landscape preservationist, author of numerous books and essays, and a former park administrator. Her most notable achievement was her role in the revitalization of New York City's Central Park in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1980, Rogers helped found the Central Park Conservancy, a not-for-profit corporation formed to organize private sector support for the restoration and renewed management of the park. She served as the Conservancy's first president from its founding until 1995.

Early life and education Elizabeth "Betsy" Browning was born in San Antonio, Texas to Caleb Leonidas Browning (1902–1970), a general contractor and cattle rancher, and his wife, Elizabeth (Ewing) Browning (1904–1992). She grew up in Alamo Heights and prepared for college at Saint Mary's Hall. In 1952, she enrolled at Wellesley College, where she majored in art history (BA 1957), and in the summer following her graduation married Edward L. Barlow, a graduate of Lawrenceville and Yale (BA 1956). They lived in Washington DC, where he was a naval officer stationed at the Pentagon, but in 1960 returned to Yale where he studied law (LLB 1964) and she studied urban planning (MA 1964).

Rogers recruited friends and volunteers to assist her in reclaiming discrete sections of the park. One of these colleagues was Lynden Miller. In 1982, Rogers asked Miller to tackle Central Park's Conservatory Garden.

Cityscape Institute In 1995, Rogers founded the Cityscape Institute with a mission to improve the design of the entourage of New York City's sidewalks: the benches, telephone booths, trash cans, street lights, traffic signs, and stop lights. The institute was unable to accomplish its goals, however, for unlike Central Park, where Rogers had managerial authority and widespread public support, the city's streetscape was the subject of, in Rogers's words, "general indifference to the visual blight that has grown with the progressive coarsening of the environment as it has been allowed to become dominated by highway engineers and commercial interests." According to one newspaper reporter, who interviewed Rogers in 2001, Cityscape has made only fitful progress in achieving its goal, as Ms. Rogers concedes. The institute and its founder have become mired in dozens of messy battles with city bureaucrats over designs for light poles, plans to reroute traffic and other issues.