Andrew Haswell Green

Green is considered "the Father of Greater New York" for his last project to consolidate the city with neighboring towns, chairing the 1897 committee that drew up the plan of amalgamation.

[citation needed] One of his brothers was Samuel Fisk Green, a medical missionary of the American Ceylon Mission in Sri Lanka.

Green started work in the mercantile trade and befriended a local merchant, who subsequently hired him to manage his sugar refining plantation in Trinidad.

The Republican-led New York State Legislature began to institute measures to control the municipal affairs of the largely Democratic metropolitan region; one such act created the Central Park Commission.

In April 1858, Olmsted and Vaux's Greensward Plan for Central Park was chosen by the CPC, thanks largely to Green's influence.

With Green's coaxing, the legislature began to expand the CPC's authority, transforming it into the city's first comprehensive planning body.

In 1886, his legal mentor Samuel Tilden died, leaving a fortune to create a public library for New York City, but his will was contested by relatives.

[3] In the 1890s public sentiment built in the business community for municipal consolidation of the metropolitan region to protect the mismanaged port.

New York state Republican Party boss Thomas C. Platt embraced Green's consolidation plan.

As a result, in 1896, the state legislature passed a law creating a commission to prepare a charter for the City of Greater New York.

[5] The society created parks and fought to rescue endangered sites throughout New York City and State; it became defunct in the 1970s.

On November 13, 1903, Green was returning to his home at Park Avenue and 40th Street to have lunch with his family when he was shot five times by a man who had been hiding in wait outside his house.