Henry J. Stern, who presided over New York City’s emerald empire for 15 years as commissioner of parks and recreation under two mayors, surpassing all but the Napoleonic Robert Moses in tenure and enhancements to the city’s greenswards and playgrounds, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.

Mr. Stern’s son Jared said the cause was complications of advanced Parkinson’s disease.

A brilliant, combative grandstander who clowned in costumes, kissed catfish and crawled through the seal house in Central Park to get publicity, Mr. Stern was the commissioner under Edward I. Koch from 1983 to 1990 and under Rudolph W. Giuliani from 1994 to 2002. He was also a councilman at large for Manhattan for eight years and held other municipal posts in a four-decade career.

Civic historians generally give Mr. Stern high marks for his stewardship, although his eccentricities sometimes overshadowed his accomplishments, and in his last year in office a lawsuit accused him of discriminating against thousands of black and Hispanic employees — a case that the city settled years later for $20 million and sweeping changes in the parks department’s salary and promotion practices.

As a liberal in Mr. Koch’s Democratic administration in the 1980s, Mr. Stern was a general in charge of an army of nearly 5,000 workers, commanding generous public spending for city parks. But as a centrist under the Republican Mayor Giuliani, he had to manage with 2,400 employees and struggled to meet the needs of a department increasingly reliant on private donors, volunteers and civic groups.