The years-long feud over the fate of the Elizabeth Street Garden future has drawn to a close: on 23 June, the acre-wide green space was officially preserved after the administration of New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, struck a deal with a local city councilman.
The terms of the agreement require the city to abandon a plan to build an affordable housing complex called Haven Green with 123 units specifically for seniors that was originally introduced in 2012. According to the first deputy mayor, Randy Mastro, the Adams administration has pivoted to a deal with Democratic councilman Christopher Marte, who represents the area, that will involve rezoning multiple other sites in his district in order to build more than 620 affordable housing units.
“The best way to tackle our city’s housing crisis is to build as much affordable housing as we can,” Adams, who was previously a staunch supporter of developing the Elizabeth Street Garden site, said in a statement. “The agreement announced today will help us meet that mission by creating more than five times the affordable housing originally planned while preserving a beloved local public space and expanding access to it.”
The fate of Elizabeth Street Garden, a city-owned lot nestled between Elizabeth, Mott, Prince and Spring streets, has become a lightning rod issue for New Yorkers, attracting attention from celebrity defenders like Robert De Niro and Patti Smith, the latter of whom staged an impromptu concert in the garden in April. The space, which is lined with sculptures and stone seating, has been a neighbourhood mainstay for 20 years and welcomes around 200,000 visitors annually, including through a variety of community events and screenings. The campaign to keep Elizabeth Street Garden open has swept social media over the last year, heating up an already lengthy legal battle to safeguard it.
In an open letter published on 23 June, Joseph Reiver, the director of the garden’s non-profit and the son of Allan Reiver, the gallerist who created it as an extension of his business, wrote: “The value of community gardens goes far beyond what can be easily measured… It is my hope that our work sets a new precedent for how community gardens are valued and protected”.
The city’s new position on the garden constitutes a complete about-face from its previous efforts, and has drawn criticism from supporters of the Haven Green project. “Amidst a severe housing and affordability crisis, Mayor Adams, first Deputy Mayor Mastro and their administration have betrayed New Yorkers who are in desperate need of affordable homes,” Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker, said in a statement.
Haven Green’s developers, Pennrose, Habitat for Humanity and Riseboro, also released a joint statement, saying that they were “deeply saddened” by the “heartbreaking” agreement, further noting that they did not receive any advance notice of the mayor’s sudden shift in stance.
Built on an abandoned lot, Nolita’s Elizabeth Street Garden features salvaged pieces of art, including Neo-Classical sculptures, and attracts around 200,000 visitors a year Photo: Valeriyap
When Mastro became deputy mayor in March, he began discussions with councilman Marte, a long-time defender of the garden, setting the stage for the Adams administration’s deal this week. Marte had offered 156-166 Bowery, 100 Gold Street and 22 Suffolk Street in Lower Manhattan as alternatives for potential affordable housing projects.
Former deputy mayor Alicia Glen, who served in the role from 2015 to 2019, called the new agreement “ludicrous for a variety of reasons”, pointing out that the rezoning process was not, in fact, set in stone.
“The idea that at the 11th hour—after you’ve spent years getting financing lined up, going through litigation, dealing with politics, redesigning the project—you can pull the plug on that kind of deal, what kind of message does that send to people who want to build affordable housing in New York City.” Glen told The New York Times. “Who in their right mind would ever do a deal with these people again? They should be ashamed of themselves.”
Overgrown lot to beloved green space
The Elizabeth Street Garden’s story began in 1904, when it was a school playground and adjacent flower garden. The lot fell into disrepair in the second half of the 20th century and a city plan to build affordable housing stalled. In the 1990s, the city leased the space to Allan Reiver month-to-month to help store his garden statuary in a deal that required him to maintain the space according to park statutes. He eventually opened it up to the public when he moved his antique shop next-door in 2005.
The city transferred ownership of the garden to the New York City Housing Authority in 2012 without telling Reiver, leading to pushback from the local community in 2013 when the Haven Green project was first announced. The garden formed a nonprofit in 2016 then seemingly exhausted every available legal avenue to stall demolition. When Reiver died in 2021, the city terminated his lease and began eviction proceedings. The garden’s non-profit filed a federal lawsuit in February, arguing that Reiver had transformed the space into a unique work of art. As the case was pending, the garden lost its eviction appeal.
Supporters of urban parks and cultural spaces have long supported the garden’s preservation. Charles A. Birnbaum, the president and chief executive of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, called for further protection for the site. “Let’s enshrine the saving of the Elizabeth Street Garden, a treasured cultural resource, by having the site listed in the National Register of Historic Places, which TCLF has advocated for many years, along with the protection afforded through city and state designations that recognize its significance,” he wrote in a statement.
Mayor Adams sudden reversal in stance, just in time for his re-election campaign as an independent in November, does not illuminate the future of the garden’s management strategy beyond expanding its usual 8 am to 8 pm daily hours. Whether or not the city will expect to recoup on unpaid rent from 2021 or renew the original $4,000 monthly tab on the lot remains to be seen, Mastro told Gothamist.
Community Board 2, whose district includes the Elizabeth Street Garden, proposed that the space should be officially incorporated as a city park in 2014. But the garden’s future, as outlined in the mayoral press release, still depends on the affordable housing units promised in lieu of Haven Green. “The city reserves the right to build housing on the site in the future if the rezonings that create the agreed-upon hundreds of additional housing units across these three locations do not occur,” the release reads.
