NYC Parks Names Cornell Professor Thomas J. Campanella Historian-in-Residence

Thomas J. Campanella has been appointed Historian-in-Residence of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation by Commissioner Mitchell J. Silver. In this volunteer capacity he will conduct independent research on the development of the city's parks and public educational content as well as assist Jonathan Kuhn, Director of Art and Antiquities, with strategic research projects related to parklands history. Campanella serves as professor of city planning and director of the undergraduate Urban and Regional Studies Program at Cornell University.

"From the epoch-defining establishment of Central Park to our current focus on equity and accessibility, the history of NYC Parks is the history of the city itself," said Commissioner Silver. "Thomas's decades of interdisciplinary study of New York history, urban spaces, horticulture, and design make him uniquely qualified to open a new window into Parks' past - which will ultimately help illuminate our future."

In addition to his independent research at Parks, Campanella will also help lead a major effort to research, write or update brief narratives on the design history and cultural significance of several hundred parks, playgrounds and natural areas. These will be used for both on-site historical markers as well as the Parks website. In preparation for his duties at Parks, Dr. Campanella is currently assembling a team of graduate and undergraduate students at Cornell to assist with archival research and drafting the narratives.

A Brooklyn native who divides his time between Ithaca and the Marine Park neighborhood where he grew up, Campanella holds a master's degree in landscape architecture from Cornell and a PhD in the history of landscape and urbanism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has taught at MIT, the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in 2010. A recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright and Rome Prize fellowships, Campanella is the author of several books, including Republic of Shade, an award-winning study of the American elm and the origins of "Elm Street" that was a Boston Globe top-ten non-fiction book of 2003. He has also written extensively for the popular and scholarly press, including an article on the design history of Marine Park for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and essays on the Unisphere and how the London plane became Gotham's iconic tree for the Wall Street Journal. Campanella is currently working on a book about the evolution of his native borough-Brooklyn: A Secret History-as well a study of the influential New York landscape architects Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano, designers of many of the parks and parkways of the Moses era.

To learn more about NYC Parks history, visit www.nyc.gov/parks.