It's like a bad souvenir t-shirt come to life: "Boss" Tweed got a courthouse and all
 Andrew Haswell Green got was a lousy park bench.

Mike Miscione thinks that stinks, so this unflappable Manhattanite is on a mission
 to get something big named after Green, the master builder of the 19th century who
 currently resides in the dustbin of history despite a career that makes Robert
 Moses look like a strip mall developer.

"It is amazing how forgotten he is considering just how much he did for New York,"
 said Miscione, ticking off a laundry list of Green's accomplishments that includes:
 leadership of the state agency that created Central Park and, after that, developed
 upper Manhattan and The Bronx (and picked the site for the Bronx Zoo by determining
 where the fewest trees would have to be removed); securing new homes for the
 Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New-York Historical Society and the Museum of
 Natural History; serving as city comptroller -- and putting up his own money to pay
 city cops -- after Tweed had plundered the treasury; helping to create the New York
 Public Library; and, most important, leading the crusade to turn Manhattan,
 Brooklyn, lower Westchester, a few villages in Queens and the farmland on Staten
 Island into New York's five boroughs.

Yet Green has a lonely cement bench while Tweed has his renovated courthouse.
 Amazing! Where once the name "Tweed" evoked civic plunder, it now evokes grandeur.

On the eve of today's 106th anniversary of the state Assembly's final approval of
 the consolidation that Green championed, Miscione met me at the bench -- nine feet
 of unpolished white marble that comprise the city's only homage to this great man
 (although there is rumored to be a lab at Bronx Community College named after him,
 but Miscione has never been able to find it -- and he's looked).

Not only is the bench off the beaten path, but the path itself -- just west of the
 park drive near 104th Street -- is beaten up like a punch-drunk pug. Worse, the
 bench was relocated to this boring hillock in the 1980s to make room for, of all
 the humiliations!, a compost heap.

To make amends, Miscione has begun what he knows will be an endless campaign to
 rename the Washington Bridge -- not the GEORGE Washington Bridge, but that adjacent
 battleship gray viaduct over the Harlem River -- for Green, who got it built in the
 late 1880s.

"Boss Tweed was a scoundrel and a crook, yet HE has a monumental structure named
 after him," Miscione railed. "Meanwhile, Green, a virtuous, hard-working, committed
 public servant who helped bring down Tweed has nothing but this bench. I say, let's
 get him that bridge."

Historians and Green's only living New York descendant are on board.

"More people should know about everything he did for New York," said Wilder Green,
 his great-great nephew. Elizabeth Blackmar, a Columbia professor and Green expert
 added: "Green has certainly earned the honor of having something named for him."

Don't hold your breath. This is New York, after all, so Miscione's mission has about
 as much chance of success as Al Sharpton's presidential campaign.

"The neighborhood tends to rename things that are relevant to people living here
 now," said Walther Delgado, chairman of the local community board, mentioning a
 street renamed for the founder of the Dominican Republic and a school named for
 a police officer who died fighting drugs.

Delgado suggested that something more relevant, something governmental, be renamed
 for Green.

"Or better yet, we should rename the Tweed Courthouse after him," Delgado added.

Now that would be poetic justice.

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gersh.kuntzman@verizon.net