In the waning days of the Mayor Adams administration, Hizzoner made further moves to protect Elizabeth Street Garden, the famous community sculpture garden in Little Italy, which has now been officially designated as a public park. But it remains unclear if the fight over the contested city-owned lot is truly over.
On Nov. 3, 2025, one day before the mayoral election, the Adams administration handed Elizabeth Street Garden, which sits on a city-owned one-acre lot with an estimated value of up to $40 million, over to the Department of Parks and Recreation.
“By this notice,” read a declaration from Louis Molina, the commissioner of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), “the City unequivocally and permanently dedicates this property to public use as parkland.”
This declaration was an extension of events from this past June, when Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro and Council Member Christopher Marte announced that they had secured three alternative sites to build five times as much housing—over 600 units—and would save the garden from destruction. Additionally, it was hinted that the garden might “become part of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation”—which is exactly what has occurred.
During the mayoral campaign, when the transfer of the land had not yet occurred, Zohran Mamdani vowed he’d bulldoze the garden and greenlight the affordable housing project.
Was he telling the truth? Who knows. As Straus News detailed in November 2024, the overwhelming majority of politicians and appointed officials, as well as judges, involved in Elizabeth Street Garden-related lawsuits, have sided with redevelopment.
The desire to build here goes back to when Mamdani was only a teenager, and transcends mayoralties and most political ideologies.
The Politics of Preservation and Protest
Among parks and politics watchers, Mayor Adams’s about-face on Elizabeth Street Garden is credited to two factors. One was Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, and the other was Adams’s longshot run for re-election as an independent. Recently freed of federal corruption charges, if Hizzoner had any chance at winning, the last thing he needed was TV crews and reporters watching cops arrest protesters chained to the fences, trees, and statuary of Elizabeth Street Garden while bulldozers idle nearby.
The same goes for Mayor-elect Mamdani. While Mamdani has strongly criticized the Adams administration’s move, the prospect of a mayor who’s been highly critical of cops sending NYPD officers—perhaps including those of the protest-trained Strategic Response Group—to arrest Elizabeth Street Garden protesters can’t be one he or his supporters look forward to.
Indeed, Mamdani has also admitted that his mother, the award-winning Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair, wants to preserve the garden. And would a loving son dare cross the mother of us all, Patti Smith?
For his part, Council Member Marte has played these competing realities adroitly, and his willingness to work with Mastro—who was often vilified by Council progressives—demonstrated the power of pragmatic politics over posturing ideology. Marte has also held his tongue on Mamdani’s renewed threats to the garden.
The politics behind this are complex and not yet fully known, but like other regular Democrats who have established differences with the Democratic Socialist Mamdani, it’s likely Marte sees no reason to fight over something that hasn’t yet happened.
Pulling the Old Switcheroo
Now that the land has been designated a public park, no one can build on it unless the development is approved by the state legislature through a lengthy process known as alienation. Most recently, for example, the state approved to alienate parkland in Queens beneath a parking lot at City Field and clear the way for New York Mets owner Steve Cohen and his partners to build a casino in Flushing.
During a press conference on Thursday, Nov. 13, Mamdani told reporters that it was “no surprise that Mayor Adams is using his final weeks and months to cement a legacy of dysfunction and inconsistency,” adding that, “the actions that the Adams administration has taken now make it nearly impossible to follow through with” building the affordable housing project at the Elizabeth Street Garden site.
Asked for a response, Mayor Adams told reporters the following day, “It’s not about a legacy of dysfunction,” he said. “It’s about protecting a legacy and the promises that I made.”
Don’t Hate the Players, Hate the Game
But while the mayor-elect appeared to have moved on from the garden matter to focus, as he said, on universal childcare and his affordability agenda, Andrew Fine, the chief of staff at the pro-housing group Open New York, told the New York Times in a statement on Wednesday that “Eric Adams’s time in City Hall may be over, but this fight is not.”
Matthew Dunbar, the chief strategy officer and EVP at Habitat for Humanity NYC and Westchester County, one of the three developers, told Straus News, “We are reviewing our options and will continue to seek the just outcome that balances the affordable housing and green-space needs of the community as Haven Green has always done.”
Joseph Reiver, the son of Allen Reiver, an art and antiques dealer who created the garden in the early 1990s, repeatedly described this choice between saving the garden and building affordable housing as a “false narrative.”
“No one was ever against housing,” Reiver told Straus News in July. “It was just about achieving affordable housing in the neighborhood without losing green space.”
Elizabeth Street Garden Today & Perhaps Evermore
When Straus News visited the garden on Saturday, Nov. 15, Reiver said he couldn’t comment yet on who and how the garden would be managed. Now that it is a public park, however, there were several options of collaborations his nonprofit could find with the Departments of Parks and Recreation.
The ultimate decision on who runs the garden lies with the NYC Parks commissioner, Iris Rodriguez-Rosa, who was appointed by Adams in June 2025.
It’s unclear if Mamdani will retain Rodriguez-Rosa, a vivacious career “Parkie,” or appoint someone else. Given his mother’s affection for the garden, his predecessor’s decision to designate it as parkland may resolve the problematic issue.
Jeannine Kiely, who is part of the group Friends of Elizabeth Street Garden, and who has fought for years to preserve the garden, told Straus New, “Designating Elizabeth Street Garden as NYC parkland is the gold standard for ensuring that this heavily used, unique green space is permanently preserved as a public park for all who live in, work in, and visit our great city.
“After a dozen years of advocacy, Garden supporters can turn our energy into championing the construction of more than 623 units of much-needed affordable housing in our community.”
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