The saga of Elizabeth Street Garden, a sliver of greenery in Lower Manhattan’s Nolita neighborhood, a subject of preservation campaigns, celebrity testimonies, lawsuits, and civic angst, has taken yet another bureaucratic turn. Mayor Eric Adams, in his final month in office, has designated the garden as official city parkland. On paper, the move complicates Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s vow to revive plans for 123 units of senior affordable housing on the site.
In a November 3 letter, Louis Molina, commissioner of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, informed Parks Commissioner Iris Rodriguez-Rosa that the city “unequivocally and permanently dedicates this property to public use as parkland.” Meaning, any future development would now require legislative approval from Albany.
Randy Mastro, Adams’s first deputy mayor, framed the move as a promise fulfilled. “We are committed to ensuring Elizabeth Street Garden remains a beloved community park and cannot be alienated in the future,” he said.
For Mamdani, who ran partly on a pledge to restart the housing plan abandoned by Adams in June, the timing was less inspirational. “It is no surprise that Mayor Adams is using his final weeks to cement a legacy of dysfunction and inconsistency,” the incoming mayor said, reiterating that senior housing remains a priority.
Since 2016, the one-acre lot between Elizabeth and Mott Streets has been upheld as either a rare downtown sanctuary or a symbol of how resistant wealthy enclaves can be to new housing. The proposal, Haven Green, backed for years by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, would have replaced the garden with a new building by a team of nonprofit developers and included a landscaped public passageway. Supporters argued the plan preserved more than one-third of the existing green space. Opponents insisted that any loss of its sculptural installations, its lush, its idiosyncratic charm, was too much.
Since 2016, the one-acre lot between Elizabeth and Mott Streets has been upheld as either a rare downtown sanctuary or a symbol of how resistant wealthy enclaves can be to new housing. (Soleil Protos/AN)
The fight drew star power in the form of Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, and Patti Smith. It drew litigation in the form of multiple appeals that the garden’s advocates ultimately lost. It drew the kind of breathless coverage that makes the small park sound like the last wild grove of Manhattan.
And yet, the garden has persisted through every supposed doomsday deadline. Even after losing in court and being ordered to pay around $100,000 in back rent, its supporters found sympathetic ears at City Hall. By June, Adams had reversed course entirely, announcing an agreement with local Councilmember Christopher Marte to preserve the garden permanently while locating the 123 senior units two blocks away on the Bowery instead.
The developer, blindsided and frustrated, said in June that the City’s sudden cancellation undermined years of planning and leaves critically needed senior housing in limbo.
The “threat” to Elizabeth Street Garden always seemed to recede just in time. The parkland designation simply formalizes what the politics already favored.
To pro-housing groups, the move lands like a final repudiation of a long-promised project. “With this disgraceful final act, the Adams administration is once again prioritizing elite comfort over affordable homes for vulnerable elderly people,” Andrew Fine of Open New York said in a statement.
The park’s scale has been inversely proportional to its coverage. (Soleil Protos/AN)
Mamdani hasn’t said whether he’ll ask Albany to greenlight development on the newly designated parkland. For now, he is framing the fight more broadly, promising to pursue his affordability agenda wherever it’s achievable.
Elizabeth Street Garden is lovely. It’s leafy and serene, complete with stone urns and moss-covered sculptures. But its scale has been inversely proportional to its coverage. The garden became less a question of land use than a proxy for civic values. Do New Yorkers care about green space or housing? Neighborhood character or equity? Preservation or progress?
Beneath all the media buzz, my question is, was Elizabeth Street Garden ever on the brink? Every time the development seemed poised to move forward, political gravity pulled it back. And now, with the Adams administration’s parkland designation, it’s hard to imagine any bulldozers showing up.
Perhaps the real story isn’t a mayor blocking his successor. It’s that New York’s most over-analyzed patch of grass has once again managed to survive, in a city that loves declaring something “under threat.” Sometimes, the sky isn’t falling.
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