Tony Hiss

Tony, an independent author, lecturer and consultant about restoring America’s cities and landscapes, became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1963, and since 1994 has been a Visiting Scholar at New York University, first at the Taub Urban Research Center, and now at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. In 2002 he also became a Fellow of the CUNY Institute for Urban Systems (CIUS). He is the author of 13 books, most recently In Motion: The Experience of Travel (Knopf, 2010), H2O: Highlands to Ocean (Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, 2005) and The View from Alger’s Window: A Son’s Memoir (a New York Times Notable Book; Knopf, 1999). Other books include the award-winning The Experience of Place (Random House, 1991); All Aboard with E. M. Frimbo (Kodansha Amer, Inc., 1997), a classic American travel book republished; and A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area(Island Press, 1996), which received front-page coverage from The New York Times. Tony’s next book, From Place to Place, about making transportation as enjoyable as the rest of life, has received underwriting grants from four foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1994, and is now a Contributing Editor to Preservation magazine as well as a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Gourmet, The Atlantic and Travel & Leisure. A graduate of Harvard College, Tony is a director of The Village Alliance and is on the advisory board of Scenic America, Inc. and of the East Coast Greenway Alliance. He is listed in Who’s Who in America. Tony lives in New York City with his wife, the novelist Lois Metzger, and their son, Jacob.