The man who made Manhattan: The Great Mistake, by Jonathan Lee, reviewed

What makes a city? The collective labour of millions packed into its history; the constant forgetting of incomers who arrive to create their own version of a place, their own versions of themselves; the desires of great men, whose improvements are partly intended to secure a better life for their less fortunate fellows, and partly a plea for their own immortality. This is a novel about all three, disguised as one about Andrew Haswell Green. According to one of the few memorials to him still standing, he was the ‘Directing Genius of Central Park in its Formative Period’ and ‘Father of Greater New York’. He was behind the consolidation of the five boroughs, as well as the establishment of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Natural History Museum, the New York Public Library and the Bronx Zoo.

Yet Green’s reputation is remarkably thin compared with his achievements. The marble lettering of that memorial is, notes Jonathan Lee, covered in bird shit — an injustice of history and also an opportunity for fiction.