In a sense, Ann Nicholson Baker, who died on April 11 at age 93, lived to protect.
She protected children; she protected parks; she protected flowers; she protected people.
All along, she loved a battle for a righteous cause.
“She was one for good trouble,” said Rachel Edwards, a co-founder of the Genesee Land Trust. “She was a spokesperson for the Earth in a lot of ways.”
Ms. Baker served on the board of the Land Trust and volunteered for numerous other nonprofits. She went to rallies; she went to meetings; she gave speeches; she wrote letters; she planted flowers, always she planted flowers.
“She was a real example for being an advocate for what you believe in,” said her daughter, Rachel Baker, the former executive director of the Seneca Park Zoo Society.
Being an advocate had its downside, said Ms. Baker’s son, the novelist Nicholson Baker. There were wins, but losses as well.
One of her wins was the day care center on the campus of Asbury First United Methodist Church on East Avenue in Rochester. Ann Baker founded it the early 1970s, instituting a sliding scale for payment. Those who could afford it paid the full rate; those who couldn’t paid less.
“She wanted to make sure that kids from all different backgrounds had an opportunity,” Rachel Baker said.
At the daycare center, Ms. Baker applied lessons she had learned at home.
“She was a really great mother to me and my sister,” said Nicholson Baker. “And she was also fascinated by us. We were her original laboratory.”
Ann Baker underscored this point in a 1977 essay in the Democrat & Chronicle that ended: “In a world filled with boring things, kids – particularly one’s own – rank among the more interesting.”
A photo from two years earlier shows Ann Baker digging into the ground at Asbury, stirring the dirt for a garden there.
That was not the first garden that Ms. Baker created. Everywhere she settled in Rochester and elsewhere, started or maintained gardens.
Beyond that, she would make sure parks in Rochester, especially those designed by the legendary Frederick Law Olmsted, were preserved.
Ms. Baker was a member of several groups devoted to Olmsted’s parks, including the Highland Park Conservancy.
Mark Quinn, the longtime superintendent of horticulture for Monroe County who recently retired, knew Ms. Baker well because of their Highland Park connection.
“She was a tremendous volunteer,” he said. “She was a person who was very persistent and active.”
As a preservationist, Ann Baker was concerned about the commercialization of the annual Lilac Festival at Highland Park, her daughter said. “’There’s bands and cotton candy, and they are not looking at the lilacs,’” Rachel Baker recalled her mother saying.
The cotton candy won out, but Baker tended to stand her ground, even for donkeys.
Donkeys?
In a guest 1999 essay in the Democrat & Chronicle, she advocated for donkeys rather than elephants at the Seneca Park Zoo, the county-run facility in an Olmsted park.
“Donkeys are easy. Donkeys are fun,” Baker ended in a flourish. “Donkeys are fiscally prudent. Donkeys are the way to go.”
Fiscally prudent donkeys did not replace the elephants, but the essay was a good example of Baker’s lively writing style. “She could sling a sentence,” said her son, a solid sentence-slinger himself.
As a member of the Countywide Coalition for Parks, Ann Baker spoke against a county proposal in 2000 to expand the parking near the zoo, encroaching on some of the Olmsted park land.
“This isn’t in the Olmsted spirit,” she said at a hearing on the proposal.
Ms. Baker’s continued defense of the Olmsted footprint would seemingly put her at odds with the Zoo Society that her daughter began to run in 2001. So be it. “She was proud of me,” Rachel Baker explained. “She just loved the park.”
Ann Baker joined the board of the Land Trust in the 1990s. “She had good connections into Rochester,” said Gay Mills, who served as the group’s executive director for 25 years before retiring. “She was involved in so many different aspects of Rochester life.”
Among her other interests, Ann Baker loved the Genesee River. She was alarmed when the lower part of the river near the outlet into Lake Ontario was named an Area of Concern in 1987 because of a high level of pollutants.
“Ann was a dedicated environmentalist and a very dear person,” said Jennifer Leonard, the former executive director of the Rochester Area Community Foundation, who worked with Ms. Baker on water quality issues.
Ann Baker brought to all her efforts an artist’s eye for beauty and design. Born on Feb. 23, 1933, in Urbana, Illinois, she grew up in New Jersey and attended the Moore School of Art in Philadelphia and Brynn Mawr College. She went on to the Parsons School of Design in New York City, studying drawing and wallpaper design.
She and Douglas Ussher Baker met at Parsons and married. In 1959, they moved to Rochester.
Ann Baker soon fell in love with Rochester’s natural attractions, beginning with its trees, her son said.
In Rochester, Ann Baker taught art at the Memorial Art Gallery, and she received a master’s in early childhood education from at the University of Rochester.
Her marriage with Douglas Baker ended. However, his parents remained friends, Nicholson Baker said.
“She was increasingly fond of my dad,” he said. “They had a good ex-husband, ex-wife relationship.”
Ann Baker lived in several places in the city, including in a condominium on Gregory Park in the South Wedge that adjoins the small and tranquil Marie Daley Park.
In 2013, Ms. Baker moved to a retirement community in Pennsylvania. She was a member of a drawing club there and, as always, an advocate for native species.
She returned to Rochester in 2023 to be nearer family. Dementia took hold, and her last move was to the Jewish Home.
At her side at the home were some of the books that she had read to her children, just as they had been read to her as a child.
“Before she lost the ability to talk, my father would come in and read those books,” Nicholson Baker said. “And she would be able to finish the lines of some of the books.”
One of the books was “Ferdinand the Bull,” a story about a bull that preferred flowers over fighting. Ann Baker shared that love, though if there was a need to fight on behalf of the flowers, she would, most certainly, take it on.
In addition to her son and daughter, Ann Baker is survived by her former husband as well as several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. An informal celebration of Ann’s life will be held at Olmsted Lodge in Highland Park at 5 p.m. June 4, 2026.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Ann Nicholson Baker lived for good trouble and local causes
Reporting by Jim Memmott, Special to Rochester Democrat and Chronicle / Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
