Marshall Rose, a real estate developer who was instrumental in reviving the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and transforming the adjacent Bryant Park from a mecca for drug dealers into a verdant Midtown oasis, died on Feb. 15 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.

A chairman of the library’s board of trustees from 1990 to 1995, Mr. Rose, along with his predecessor, Andrew Heiskell, and Vartan Gregorian, the library’s longtime president, engineered the resurgence of the Beaux-Arts landmark on Fifth Avenue and the derelict greensward just to its west.

“He was an unstoppable force of nature when it came to protecting and building what the public needed from its library,” said Anthony Marx, who in 2011 succeeded Paul LeClerc as the library’s president.