Celebrating Calvert Vaux: the Life and Work of a Hudson Valley Artist

The Ulster Garden Club and Friends of Historic Kingston are pleased to announce a lecture by Sara Cedar Miller to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Calvert Vaux. The lecture will be held on Thursday, September 26th at 2PM at City Hall. Calvert Vaux (1824 – 1895) was an architect and landscape designer, perhaps best known as the co-designer, with Frederic Law Olmsted, of Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. In addition to his many other remarkable achievements, Vaux’s work has had a lasting influence on the Hudson Valley. He designed Downing Park in Newburgh and worked with renowned Hudson River School painter, Frederic Church on the design of Church’s home “Olana”. Vaux was married to Mary McEntee, a Kingston resident and sister of Jervis McEntee, a Hudson River painter. He designed multiple buildings in Kingston and is buried at Montrepose Cemetery.

Sara Cedar Miller has been the historian emerita of the Central Park Conservancy since 2017. She was the Conservancy photographer from 1984 and also its historian from 1989 to 2017. Miller is the author of Central Park: an American Masterpiece (2003), Strawberry Fields, Central Park’s Memorial to John Lennon (2011), Seeing Central Park: The Official Guidebook (2021), and Before Central Park (2022).

The Ulster Garden Club has been active in the fields of horticulture, conservation and civic improvement since 1914. Their community projects include: maintaining the formal boxwood garden at the Senate House Historic Site, funding scholarships and an annual horticulture lecture series at SUNY Ulster, creation of the Memorial Tree Fund which is dedicated to planting and caring for public trees throughout Ulster County. For more information: www.ulstergardenclub.com