Past Media Coverage

Every year since 2003 on or around Mr. Green's death date (November 13) Michael Miscione, the Manhattan Borough Historian, has held a tribute ceremony at the Green Memorial Bench. The event has often been covered by the media. Here are just a few of the stories that have appeared.



NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Dad’s Day at Last for ‘Father of Greater N.Y.’ All he has is a bench.

By Jill Weiner
November 26, 2007
http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/41290/

Andrew Haswell Green, who led the effort to consolidate the five boroughs, headed the commission that created Central Park, and helped establish the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Natural History, was shot to death on Park Avenue in a case of mistaken identity 104 years ago this month. Manhattan-borough historian Michael Miscione gathered 70 other local-history buffs to honor Green November 18 at his only city monument: a stone bench hidden away in Central Park. “We want to do something,” said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, who biked to the event in black spandex. “Our best idea is to name the waterfront path along the Hudson the Andrew Haswell Green Way.” Other ideas, like renaming a small park, are under consideration, but these plans have been a long time coming. “Even the commission that approved the bench in Central Park said they hoped Green would get a better monument somewhere down the line,” says Miscione. That was almost 80 years ago



NEW YORK TIMES: Memorializing Andrew Haswell Green

“Only in New York” audio podcast
By Sam Roberts, metro reporter
November 23, 2006
http://podcasts.nytimes.com/podcasts/2006/11/22/23onlyinnewyork.mp3

TRANSCRIPT:

A modest ceremony was held in Central Park last Sunday for the forgotten “Father of Greater New York,” Andrew Haswell Green.

New York has a lousy record of honoring most of the legendary figures who’ve made a difference in municipal government. Sure, there’s LaGuardia Airport, named for the mayor who was instrumental in bringing commercial aviation to the city after he bought a ticket that said New York but which delivered him to Newark, the closest commercial airport. Real municipal heroes may be few and far between, but even they have had to settle for a school building or an obscure street corner marked by signage that rarely offers a clue to what they contributed or why. And all that Andrew Green got was a bench.

Who was Andrew Green? Professor Ken Jackson of Columbia who edited the Encyclopedia of New York City dubbed him, “arguably the most important leader in Gotham’s long history.” He championed plans for Central Park. As the appointed city comptroller, he helped the New York Times shake loose the Tweed Ring’s implacable grip on the city treasury. As the executor of Samuel J. Tilden’s estate, he helped found the New York Public Library — also the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bronx Zoo, the American Museum of Natural History. He saved City Hall from demolition.

But Green’s greatest contribution was to tirelessly lobby for three decades for the consolidation of competing counties and municipalities into a single city: New York. That consolidation in 1898 spurred the construction of the subway and the almost uninterrupted growth of the five boroughs into a city that remains America’s largest and now boasts a population of over 8.2 million.

It’s uncertain what happened to all the ambitious plans to memorialize Green after he died a century ago. The most grandiose was a monumental gateway to Central Park at 110th Street, including a fountain, 40 foot-high columns topped with eagles and a bronze statue. That proposal generated some disgust on aesthetic grounds. It was less an entrance than an archway within the park, just the sort of encroachment Green himself would have rejected. I guess you could have called it a “limitation of statues.”

So all Green got besides a portrait that’s off limits to the public in City Hall was the bench and a couple of trees. Two decades after he died, five 55 foot-high elms were hauled down from Westchester and planted in his honor to symbolize the city’s five boroughs. But they were unmarked; also, they later died of Dutch elm disease. In 1929 the granite bench was added, designed by an architecture professor at Columbia. It was installed at around 105th Street, east of the East Drive, right near McGown’s Pass, where George Washington passed on his triumphal return to the city. The site was named Green Hill, but the symbolism was short-lived. The bench was subsequently evicted from its hilltop vista to accommodate a compost heap.

In 1948 a statue of Green was finally commissioned for the city’s Golden Jubilee, but it vanished. Michael Miscione, the Manhattan Borough Historian, recently discovered two copies in a garage in Maine belonging to the sculptor’s daughter. It wasn’t the first time history had been misplaced. A statue of Christopher Columbus, presented to Green himself in 1876, also disappeared. It was later rediscovered, coincidentally, in the basement of McGown’s Pass Tavern, right near where Green’s bench would eventually go.

So far Michael Miscione, the borough historian, has led a lonely crusade to get Green more appropriate recognition. Last Sunday a few dozen people showed up for the ceremony in Central Park, including Green’s great, great nephew. And the city has apparently promised that some other park — somewhere — will be named for Green — someday.

Green, by the way, died in 1903 at the age of 83. He was shot and killed as he entered his brownstone on Park Avenue. You could say that even then, after devoting his lifetime to the city, he was unrecognized. It was a case of mistaken identity.

I’m Sam Roberts.



NEW YORK METRO: Who was Andrew Green?

By Amy Zimmer
November 20, 2006
http://ny.metro.us/metro/local/article/Who_was_Andrew_Green/5788.html

CENTRAL PARK — He helped create some of the city’s icons: Central Park, the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bronx Zoo and the New York Public Library. He was the mastermind behind the 1898 consolidation of the five boroughs. That’s why he’s known as “The Father of Greater New York.”

Yet city planner and former Parks Commissioner Andrew Haswell Green is no longer a household name. Manhattan Borough historian Michael Miscione tried to change that yesterday by hosting a tribute to honor the 103rd anniversary of Green’s death.

There’s no roadway or bridge bearing Green’s name, though there is a memorial bench on a hill in Central Park near East 102nd Street. A handful of history buffs toasted Green there with sparkling apple cider and gingerbread cookies shaped like the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Green made a whole bunch of enemies,” Miscione said, including Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted, who thought Green was “stingy” and “stubborn.”

Green made more foes when he cracked down on City Hall corruption after becoming comptroller in 1871. He was also vilified by Brooklynites who opposed consolidation.

“He was very persistent about certain things — not for glory for himself, but for the greater good,” Miscione said. “Green came to the idea of consolidation three decades before it happened. As the movement evolved, it became political and cultural — like Brooklyn’s need for civic identity — but for Andrew Green, it was always about city planning. Consolidation expanded New York from 60 square miles to over 300 square miles, and Andrew Green’s role in that has largely been forgotten.”

Many of Green’s papers have been lost to history and his enemies, like Olmsted, have shaped perception of him since.

“We’re facing some of the same issues he did with [ownership of] public space and parks,” said City Councilwoman Gale Brewer, whose Upper West Side district was designed by Green. “Like Yankee Stadium and Van Cortlandt Park, the encroachment of Hudson River Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park. These issues don’t go away.”

Green’s great-great-nephew Thomas Green, 77, of Brooklyn, didn’t know much about his forebear, except “he was referred to often enough to know he was a real somebody.”

Yesterday was his first trip to the bench. “My father would refer to it as ‘a bench somewhere in Central Park,’ but he had no idea where it was. What impresses me is there’s no graffiti on [it]. Maybe that’s one of the benefits of being in a remote place.”