Bette Midler Wins Jane Jacobs Medal

Bette Midler Image by Getty Images

By Anne Cohen October 14, 2013

And the 2013 Jane Jacobs Medal for Lifetime Leadership goes to…

Bette Midler.

The award recognizes individuals “whose work creates new ways of seeing and understanding New York City.” The 67-year-old Grammy Award-winer founded the New York Restoration Project, which works to restore parks, community gardens and neighborhoods throughout the city, in 1995. According to a release from the Rockefeller Foundation, responsible for dishing out the medals, Midler plans to donate the $100,000 prize delivered in conjunction with the award to NYRP.

“The Rockefeller Foundation Jane Jacobs Medal recognizes New Yorkers who intervene in and use the urban environment to build a more equitable city for all of us,” Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin said in a statement. “It is completely appropriate for us to honor Ms. Midler’s work in light of her work to bring verdant recreational space to so many New Yorkers in so many different communities. It is also appropriate that we honor Mr. Marvy’s work with community youth in bringing fresh produce to what had been a food desert.”

Anne Cohen was the Forward’s deputy digital media editor. When she’s not looking for the secret Jewish history of Voodoo in New Orleans, or making lists about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she writes for The Assimilator. She graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism with an M.S. magazine concentration in 2012.

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