Proposed by: Rochester Garden Club, Zone III

It’s impossible to overstate the contributions of Central Park Conservancy Historian Emerita Sara Cedar Miller to the restoration and preservation of Vaux and Olmsted’s masterwork. The nonprofit Central Park Conservancy was founded in 1980 to establish a framework for the park’s restoration and maintenance following decades of neglect. Hired in 1984 as a photographer, Cedar Miller’s images motivated donors to fund the park’s renewal by illustrating its decay, and her lens documented the park’s restoration. She was named to the GCA’s Gold Star Speakers List for her compelling tours and presentations.

“Over four decades, Sara's photographs of and research into the design and origins of Central Park have provided critical information, insight, and educational tools for one of the most remarkable historic preservation initiatives of our time. As the protégée of Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the preservationist and scholar who oversaw the restoration of then-derelict Central Park in the early 1980s, Sara played a key role in this stupendous transformation…. When you think about the worldwide role of Central Park in historic landscape preservation—as the first, and most successful, landscape restoration of the late twentieth-century—you begin to see that Sara's work as both photographer and historian have played a catalytic role in a much broader, global phenomenon,” writes Robin Karson, executive director of the Library of American Landscape History and 2022 recipient of the GCA’s Sarah Chapman Francis Medal.

Rogers, who was instrumental in the founding of the conservancy, cites Cedar Miller’s meticulous research in her four books on the park and its history and characterizes her as a “Central Park Savior” for her photographic and literary legacy.