Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space and Cultural Diversity

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments T he authors would like to thank the National Park Service (NPS) and especially Doris Fanelli and Martha Aikens at Independence National Historical Park, Richard Wells at Ellis Island, William Garrett at Jacob Riis Park, the late Muriel Crespi, Ph.D., past director of the NPS Applied Anthropology Program located in Washington, D.C., and Rebecca Joseph, Ph.D., and Chuck Smyth e, Ph.D., the East Coast regional directors of the ethnography program, for their support of this project. We would also like to thank the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and the managers of Pelham Bay, Van Cortlandt and Prospect Parks—Linda Dockery, Mary Ann Anderson, and Tupper Thomas—for funding of the research reported for New York City. Setha Low would also like to thank the staff at the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) at the Getty Center in Los Angeles—Sheri Saperstein, Valerie Greathouse , David Myers, Kris Kelly, and Eric Bruehl—for making the writing of this book possible. A guest scholar fellowship at the GCI from January through March of 2003 enabled her to complete the first draft of this manuscript. We would also like to thank the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and particularly the Center for Human Environments and its director, Susan Saegert, for their support and assistance. Without Susan’s encouragement and her staff’s help, these research projects would have been much more difficult. Some of the material in this book draws upon material published in the following articles: Low, Setha. 2004. Social Sustainability: People, History, Values. In Managing Change: Sustainable Approaches to the Conservation of the Built Environment , ed. J. Teutonico. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Low, Setha. 2002. Anthropological-Ethnographic Methods for the Assessment of Cultural Values in Heritage Conservation. In Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage, ed. Marta de la Torre, 31–50. Los Angeles: the Getty Conservation Institute. Low, Setha M., Dana Taplin, Suzanne Scheld, and Tracy Fisher. 2001. Recapturing Erased Histories: Ethnicity, Design, and Cultural Representation: A Case Study of Independence National Historical Park. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 18 (2): 131–148. Taplin, Dana H., Suzanne Scheld, and Setha Low. 2002. Rapid Ethnographic Assessment in Urban Parks: A Case Study of Independence National Historical Park. Human Organization 61 (1): 80–93. Taplin, Dana H. 2003. Sustainability in Urban Parks—Narrow and Broad. Proceedings: Urban Ecology: Cities in Transition. New York: Pace University Institute for Environmental and Regional Studies, 65–76. Writing a book always requires aid from colleagues and friends as well. A long list of graduate students at the CUNY Graduate Center collected the data for these projects, including Charles Price-Reavis, Bea Vidacs, Marilyn DiggsThompson , Ana Aparicio, Raymond Codrington, Carlotta Pasquali, Carmen Vidal, and Nancy Schwartz. Kate Brower, the director of the Van Cortlandt Park project, decided not to participate in the writing of this book, but we are indebted to her for her insights and guidance. Larissa Honey and Tracy Fisher also worked on these research projects before moving on, but their work was important to our completing the projects. Comments from Matthew Cooper, the late Robert Hanna, and the seminar members at the Getty Conservation Institute—especially Randy Mason and Marta de la Torre—were particularly helpful. We would also like to thank Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Benita Howell , William Kornblum, Galen Cranz, and Randy Hester for their many publications and research in this important area, and for their helpful comments. We want to acknowledge Muriel Crespi, Ph.D., director of the NPS Applied Anthropology Program, for supporting this important work and Robert Hanna, a landscape architect who loved these parks. Both Miki and Bob died during the writing of this book, so they were never able to see the final results of their encouragement. We hope that this book will keep alive their vision of culturally vibrant and protected parks. We are grateful that we had such excellent assistance from UT Press, especially from Editor-in-Chief Theresa May, manuscript editor Lynne Chapman, and designer Lisa Tremaine. On the CUNY side, we are grateful to Jared Becker of C.H.E. And finally, we would like to dedicate this book to our respective partners— Joel Lefkowitz, Michele Greenberg, and Isma Diaw—in gratitude for their love and support throughout the research and writing process. It has been a long journey, and they have been incredibly helpful—from lending cars and taking photographs to cooking dinners—so that this book could be...