Who Was Andrew Haswell Green?

"Mr. Green, an early urban planner who died just shy of 100 years ago...was largely responsible in a five-decade career for many of the jewels of the city, including Central Park, the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bronx Zoo and the Public Library, along with Riverside and Morningside Parks. In fact, he is responsible for the city itself -- the five boroughs -- that we know today because of his leadership of the campaign to consolidate the unwieldy mélange of independent cities and towns sprawling across the waterways..." However, " 'The Father of Greater New York' is so little known today [that] Michael Miscione...is mounting a quixotic one-man campaign to honor the man he calls the city's 'forgotten visionary,' thus far with little apparent effect" – despite the fact that Kenneth T. Jackson calls Green "arguably the most important leader in Gotham's long history, more important than Peter Stuyvesant, Alexander Hamilton, Frederick Law Olmsted, Robert Moses and Fiorello La Guardia."

Thanks to David Gest