What's Out There Weekend New York City October 6-7, Free Tours of Great Parks, Gardens & Open Spaces in All Five Boroughs – Part of Archtober 2012

Media Contact: Nord Wennerstrom | T: 202.255.7076 | E: nord@tclf.org

Free, Expert-Led Tours of More Than Two-Dozen Publicly Accessible Sites throughout New York City

Washington, DC (September 5, 2012) – On October 6 & 7, 2012 in New York City, The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) will host What’s Out There Weekend NYC, providing residents and visitors an opportunity to discover and explore more than two dozen publicly accessible sites in the five boroughs through free tours led by landscape architects, designers and other professionals. The tours will feature insights and anecdotes about city shaping, landscape architecture and the design history of places people often pass every day but don’t necessarily know about. Some are places we see daily, while others are “hidden in plain sight.” The goal of What’s Out There Weekend NYC is to make these places, the stories behind them, and the people responsible for them visible. The Weekend is organized in cooperation with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, the New York chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Archtober 2012, the Central Park Conservancy, the Municipal Art Society, the New York Restoration Project, New Yorkers for Parks and Open House New York.

TCLF in partnership with the Central Park Conservancy will also host a symposium on Friday, October 5, 2012 (the day before the tours), focused on the design and complexity of the Central Park Woodlands, part of a broader theme: Bridging the Nature/Culture Divide (complete details at the conference Web site).

The conference will be preceded the night before by a reception at the El Museo del Barrio New York hosted by Presenting Sponsor the Central Park Conservancy. The reception on the theme of Landscape and Patronage will honor a major Central Park patron and feature the unveiling Landslide 2012, highlighting at-risk landscapes and the patrons/organizations who created them (the reception is a separately ticketed event – details at the registration page).

The weekend is an extension of the What’s Out There database of America’s designed landscapes. The free, online, searchable, Wiki-format, and vetted database hosts illustrated entries about more than 1,300 parks, gardens and open spaces throughout the US.

All What’s Out There Weekend NYC tours are free, but space is limited and registration is required:

What’s Out There Database
What’s Out There Weekend dovetails with the Web-based What’s Out There database (WOT), launched in October 2009, the most comprehensive, searchable database of the nation’s designed landscapes. The database spans more than two centuries of American landscape design and is searchable by landscape name, locale, designer, type, and style. It’s profusely illustrated and includes a glossary of 27 types, 49 sub-types, and 14 styles, more than 1000 designer profiles and site entries, descriptions of some of our country’s most important cultural landscapes, and relevant links. The goal of the WOT database is to raise public awareness of the rich diversity and interconnectedness of our shared designed landscape heritage.

What is a cultural landscape?
A cultural landscape is a geographic area that includes cultural and natural resources associated with an historic event, activity, person, or group of people. Cultural landscapes can range from thousands of acres of parkland to small homesteads. There is a broad range of landscape types, including waterfronts, campuses, cemeteries, commemorative landscapes, and scenic highways. They exist in direct relationship to their ecological contexts. They are works of art, narratives of cultures, and expressions of regional identity.

What’s Out There Weekend NYC is made possible by national partners Bartlett Tree Experts and Le Pain Quotidien; and New York Partners The New York Office of William Joseph Quinlan, Nievera Williams Design, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, Leaf Magazine with addition support from Janice parker Landscape Design, Hollander Design, Landscapeforms, Andrews LeFevre Studios, M. Paul Friedberg and Partners, Robin Key Landscape Architecture, SiteWorks Landscape Architecture, Van Alen Institute, Dirtworks Landscape Architecture, PC, Mathews Nielsen, Mark K Morrisn Landscape Architecture, Deborah Nevins and Associates, Nancy Owens Studio LLC, Quennell Rothschild & Partners, LLP, Stantec, Michael van Valkenburgh Associates, HM White, and WORKSHOP: Ken Smith Landscape Architect.

About The Cultural Landscape Foundation
The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) provides people with the tools to see, understand and value landscape architecture and its practitioners, in the way many people have learned to do with buildings and their designers. Through its Web site, lectures, outreach and publishing, TCLF broadens the support and understanding for cultural landscapes nationwide to help safeguard our priceless heritage for future generations. TCLF makes a special effort to heighten the awareness of those who impact cultural landscapes, assist groups and organizations working to increase the appreciation and recognition of cultural landscapes, and develop educational tools for young people to better connect them to their cultural landscape environs.