With regard to Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers writes on her website: "The impetus for Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York was an exhibition that William Alex curated at the Whitney Museum in 1972, the sesquicentennial of Olmsted’s birth. Hard as it is believe today, Olmsted, the father of landscape architecture in America, was at the time I began to do research a nearly forgotten figure. Alex and I decided to collaborate, and the book contains a portfolio of images that he had gathered for the exhibition. For me it offered an opportunity to further my education about New York City parks by studying the great masterpieces of public landscape architecture that were not within the purview of the The Forests and Wetlands’ theme of the city’s pre-urban ecology and remnant landscapes."