With all the shouting going on about monuments, I want to say a word about my favorite: the Whisper Bench in Central Park’s Shakespeare Garden. I’d been visiting this quiet spot for years before I even noticed that it was dedicated to Charles Stover. Under his name a simple inscription proclaims him “Founder of Outdoor Playgrounds.” When I read that for the first time, I laughed. How could one person be the founder of playgrounds? And shouldn’t he get more than a bench?

Even more absurd was what I found when I looked him up. His Wikipedia page was barely two paragraphs long and made no mention of playgrounds at all. The article mainly concerned the day in 1913 that Stover, after three years as New York City’s parks commissioner, went out to lunch … and didn’t come back. For 39 days.

Naturally, this made me more than a little curious about the man. I’ve been looking for him ever since.

The first thing I discovered was that almost nobody — not my parents, not my high-school teachers — knew who Stover was. This seemed strange to me because he was an enormously important figure. In 1886 he was a co-founder of the University Settlement House — the first settlement house in the United States — from which he spearheaded the growing reform movement in New York City. Stover was also involved in efforts to preserve Central Park and develop more parks and playgrounds in poor neighborhoods. In 1898 he founded, together with Lillian Wald, the Outdoor Recreation League, which sponsored the construction of playgrounds as a substitute for unsupervised street play. As parks commissioner, Stover created the Bureau of Recreation, which built dozens of playgrounds in its first three years, including DeWitt Clinton Park, Seward Park and Jacob Riis Park.