Annik LaFarge is a writer, photographer, editor, and lecturer. She’s the author of the much-praised On the High Line: Exploring America’s Most Original Urban Park, published by Thames & Hudson in 2012, fully revised in 2014, and winner of the IPPY award for Travel Guidebook. The third edition, fully updated, will be published by Fordham University Press / Empire State Editions in June 2024. She has been writing about the High Line and other innovative urban landscapes since 2009 on the blog LivinTheHighLine.com.
In 2019 Columbia University Libraries selected her blog for inclusion in the Avery Library Historic Preservation and Urban Planning web archive, to ensure its continuing availability to researchers.
LaFarge’s second book, Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries and a Half-Dozen Revolutions was published by Simon & Schuster in August 2020 and in paperback in August 2021. Since 2015 she has served on the board of trustees for the Waterfront Museum in Red Hook, Brooklyn, most recently as Chair. A former book publishing executive, she lives in New York City and Hudson. For a full professional bio see here.
Recent Articles
“5,000 Pipes and Endless Invention” an op-ed piece in the New York Times, published July 17, 2020. I gratefully acknowledge a correction sent by a reader, William H. Armstrong, author of Organs for America: The Life and Work of David Tannenberg, who pointed me to this early American organ builder. In my article I should have said there there were not many organ builders in this country in 1802 when the instrument at St. Paul’s Chapel was delivered to New York City. Mr. Armstrong also sent a link to a video about the restoration of Tannenberg’s organ in Winston-Salem, NC, which includes a helpful demonstration of the old bellows system that powered the first organs, and the “moonshot engineering” of these early instruments.
Chopin Polonaise, op. 40, no. 1 (“Polonaise Militaire”), performed by Arthur Rubinstein, for the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry, published September 2021
“Dances With Dogs: Chopin and Marquis,” in The Bark magazine, Spring 2020 issue, about Chopin’s special relationship with a small dog brought to him in Nohant by his lover, George Sand.
