“The Great Mistake” is a really interesting piece of historical fiction about the almost forgotten Andrew Haswell Green. The novel begins when Mr. Green, at the age of 83, is gunned down in front of his home on Park Avenue in 1903, in a case of mistaken identity. And no, this is not a spoiler; it is in fact (or at least most of it) the first line in the novel and also information that is readily available to anyone who might be curious enough to look up Mr. Green on Wikipedia!
But who was Andrew Haswell Green? The novel tells us that he was born in 1820 “into a respected Massachusetts family that fell, during his youth, into debt.” He was the seventh child of 11 children and was considered quiet, thoughtful and not particularly manly.
At age 15, his father sends him to New York to work as an apprentice in a small store. He sleeps in a damp basement and is given very little food. One day while at work, a man enters the store looking for extract of tomato pills. That man is Samuel Tilden, who had attended Yale and was in New York for law school. The two men become very close friends, despite the differences in their social status. However, when Tilden discovers that people are talking about the friendship, he chooses to distance himself from Green.
Green takes ill and returns to his father’s farm. After some time he learns that there is a need for men to serve as supervisors on a sugar estate in Trinidad. He is told that “by working in Trinidad for some brief months [he] could make a reasonable wage while…supporting the efforts of the Anti-Slavery Society in approving conditions of workers over there, who were newly free…”
Green goes to Trinidad where things are not exactly as described. Ultimately he returns to New York with some money and returns to his friendship with Tilden. He convinces Tilden to train him in the law and his career begins to take off. He becomes the president of the New York Board of Education and later the Comptroller of the City of New York (where he receives a bomb in the mail). Green is credited with the creation of Central Park, the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and many other New York City landmarks. He is also credited with chairing the committee that consolidated Manhattan with Brooklyn, western Queens County and Staten Island.
Ultimately Tilden is elected Governor of New York and makes a run for President. Tilden and Green remain friends until Tilden’s death.
The novel is also a sort of detective story. Inspector McCluskey is investigating Green’s murder and the murderer, Cornelius Williams. The investigation takes McCluskey into interesting parts of the city and we learn a bit about Williams and New York’s racial divide. Each chapter in the novel is the name of a gate in Central Park, where there is a park bench dedicated to Mr. Green. The novel is wonderful and paints an interesting picture of New York at a specific period in time. You can reserve the novel at the Cuyahoga County Public Library by clicking on: https://discover.cuyahogalibrary.org/Record/171145