Tupper Thomas, president of the Prospect Park Alliance, is set to announce her retirement int he next day or so. Today the New York Times ran an article saluting her magnificent efforts on behalf of the park we love. Here’s an excerpt from the Times’ article.

Drugs were sold at the carousel. Muggers used the cover provided by the park’s shrubs and foliage. One year, near the skating rink, a man was found shot to death, and another year, the acting supervisor of the zoo was arrested and charged with shooting animals.

Three decades later, Ms. Thomas, who plans to announce her retirement on Tuesday, has become a Brooklyn institution and is widely seen as the park’s indefatigable savior.

In the 1970s, Prospect Park in Brooklyn looked more like a crime scene than the pastoral refuge imagined a century earlier by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.

As if to advertise the woeful state of the park, in 1976 Columbia, the figure driving atop the arch at Grand Army Plaza, fell over in her chariot, a victim of disrepair.

Four years later, perhaps not fully aware of the mess the park had become, a 35-year-old former city bureaucrat and urban planner named Tupper Thomas answered a newspaper ad for a job as the park’s administrator. She was from Minnesota, knew nothing about parks and even spelled Mr. Olmsted’s name wrong on her application.

“This apple-cheeked young woman came into my office,” said Gordon J. Davis, the former parks commissioner who hired Ms. Thomas. “She looked nothing like a New Yorker, and sounded nothing like someone from Brooklyn. She giggled the whole time. Tupper seemed to have come from the moon.”