How Two Alums Transformed the Landscape in NYC and Beyond

Stories You May Like

Alum Leads Urban Design Collective that Preserves Black Community

In NYC’s Central Park, AAP Alum Leads a Stunning Transformation

Better Living Through Landscape Architecture

As a prof’s book recalls, the early 20th-century grads designed Bryant Park, the Bronx River Parkway, two World’s Fairs, and more

By Joe Wilensky

Gilmore Clarke 1913 and Michael Rapuano 1927 are the “unsung giants” of American landscape architecture, says Thomas Campanella, MLA ’91. His newest book, Designing the American Century, is a lavishly illustrated 400-page exploration of the pair’s legacy and professional partnership.

A professor of urban studies and city planning in AAP, Campanella is also the historian-in-residence for NYC’s parks department and spends about half his time in the Big Apple.

“Nowhere is the legacy of Clarke and Rapuano more deeply inscribed,” he writes. “Throw a stone anywhere in this great metropolis and it will likely strike one of their works.”

The duo’s careers spanned a hugely consequential half-century, transforming public landscapes and modernizing cities through the creation of dozens of parks, highways, parkways, and housing projects.

“If influence be measured simply by the number of human lives touched by one’s work,” Campanella observes, “then that of Clarke and Rapuano is unparalleled in the 20th century.”

If influence be measured simply by the number of human lives touched by one’s work, then that of Clarke and Rapuano is unparalleled in the 20th century.

Their NYC portfolio alone includes a slew of historic and enduring urban spaces: Bryant, Riverside, Battery, and Cadman Plaza parks; the Brooklyn Heights Promenade; the Henry Hudson Parkway; and the United Nations campus.

They were also responsible for the site plans for the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, Jones Beach, and the Central Park Zoo—and even sketched out the design for the ubiquitous park bench that can still be found throughout NYC today.

Outside the NYC metro area, they designed parkways in Philadelphia and Washington, DC, the site plan for the Pentagon and its surroundings, and urban renewal plans for several other U.S. cities.

(Clarke also served as AAP’s first professor of city planning and later the college’s dean, commuting from NYC twice a week.)

Their NYC portfolio alone includes a slew of historic and enduring urban spaces: Bryant, Riverside, Battery, and Cadman Plaza parks; the Brooklyn Heights Promenade; the Henry Hudson Parkway; and the U.N. Headquarters.

Many of Clarke and Rapuano’s NYC projects were carried out while they were working for Robert Moses, the now-infamous urban planner and first commissioner of the city’s unified park system.

Campanella grapples with that complicated legacy in the book, along with what he describes as “the unintended consequences of the motor vehicle age.”

Subtitled The Public Landscapes of Clarke and Rapuano, 1915–1965, the volume began 35 years ago—as Campanella’s thesis.

As he recalls, after completing his 2019 book Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, he thought to himself: “Maybe it’s time to get back to my buddies and finish this thing.”

As he describes, Clarke and Rapuano created the nation’s very first parkway—originally envisioned as a way for early motorists to enjoy traveling through lush natural landscapes—along the Bronx River in Westchester County in the 1920s.

Stories You May Like

Alum Leads Urban Design Collective that Preserves Black Community

In NYC’s Central Park, AAP Alum Leads a Stunning Transformation

It was soon followed by the Saw Mill and Hutchinson river parkways, making the suburbs more easily reachable, and therefore more desirable, at the dawn of the automobile age.

Those first parkways “were loved, and were very sensitively designed to be good neighbors and to integrate well with the communities and neighborhoods they passed through,” says Campanella, who penned an op-ed for the New York Times marking the Bronx River Parkway’s centennial.

Clarke and Rapuano created the nation’s very first parkway—originally envisioned as a way for early motorists to enjoy traveling through lush natural landscapes—along the Bronx River in Westchester County in the 1920s.

“They were linear parks that included amenities for the non-driving public. People wanted to live near these things, because they were delightful.”

And their effects were largely positive, Campanella notes—pointing out that NYC’s Belt Parkway had the longest separated bikeway in North America when it was built, and that the Henry Hudson Parkway, which runs along Manhattan’s West Side, offers a spectacular entryway into the city.

“But this was a fleeting moment,” he says. “The cars were small, and not that many people had them. The culture was different.”

The number of automobiles—and with them, the desire for highways and expressways—exploded in the post-World War II era, Campanella notes, with many of the biggest urban road projects “being punched through some of the densest neighborhoods on the Eastern Seaboard.”

And those roads didn’t go through affluent neighborhoods, he says; they almost always transected immigrant, minority, and poor areas, forever altering or even demolishing them and displacing their residents.

“This is where the story gets complicated,” he says.

“And Clarke and Rapuano were part of that, too—because even with all the wonderful work they did in the prewar period, it’s overshadowed by the urban renewal projects, the public housing projects.”

Even with all the wonderful work they did in the prewar period, it’s overshadowed by the urban renewal projects, the public housing projects.

One of the pair’s biggest endeavors—the Brooklyn Civic Center, which included the renowned Cadman Plaza Park—demolished most of Downtown Brooklyn.

Similarly, their creation of the widely beloved Brooklyn Heights Promenade—“still among the city’s most breathtaking public spaces,” he writes—necessitated the removal of several immigrant neighborhoods.

But even considering this fraught legacy, Campanella calls Clarke and Rapuano “among the foremost shapers of the postwar metropolitan landscape,” whose influence should be remembered.

“Landscape architects, site planners, urban designers, and civil engineers—they were vernal weavers of the modern motorway,” he writes, “master craftsmen of public parks and parkways for nearly 50 years.”

Top: The Bronx River Parkway in the 1920s. (Hand-colored photo courtesy of the Westchester County Archives; Campanella portrait provided; all other images courtesy of Princeton University Press.)

Published March 30, 2026

---

Other stories You may like

• 

  • Alumni

  Trees of Life: Book by PhD Alum Takes a Deep Dive into Evergreens

• 

  • Ask the Expert

  Marketing Wisdom, From the Alum Who Helped Turn Domino’s Around

• 

  • Glorious to View

  The Stark Winter Beauty of East Hill’s Garden Spots