The Elizabeth Street Garden saga continues.
A group of three developers, who sued the Adams administration over designating the city-owned lot that houses the popular community and sculpture garden Elizabeth Street Garden as parkland, have temporarily paused their request for a preliminary injunction.
Pennrose, RiseBoro Community Partnership and Habitat for Humanity New York City and Westchester on Nov. 22 filed a stipulation with Manhattan Supreme Court, pausing their lawsuit until January while “the parties are working to reach an amicable resolution of this matter,” the agreement stated.
As Straus News reported, the developers behind the Haven Green project, a long-planned housing complex offering 123 affordable units for seniors, new headquarters for Habitat for Humanity, and spaces for luxury retail stores that would cross-finance the affordability, filed a lawsuit against City Hall on Nov. 19. The developers accused the Adams administration of “illegally” blocking their estimated $88 million project by assigning the Elizabeth Street Garden site which sits on city owned land over to the Department of Parks & Recreation.
Shortly before the mayoral election, the Adams administration designated the 20,000-square-foot city-owned lot “unequivocally and permanently” as parkland, a step that effectively halts construction, since any new development on parkland must first be approved by the state legislature through a lengthy process known as alienation.
The move was widely seen as a last-minute effort to protect Elizabeth Street Garden from now Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who vowed to evict the garden once in office.
But in a new plot twist in the decade-long battle over the garden, the developers abruptly withdrew their request for a temporary restraining order against the parkland designation.
According to sources cited in a recent report by Crain’s New York Business, the developers are negotiating with City Hall over building their affordable-housing complex on a nearby city-owned lot at 22 Suffolk Street.
Councilman Christopher Marte, who has been a fierce proponent of Elizabeth Street Garden, has pledged his support to rezone the Suffolk Street site, which could house a 200-unit, all-affordable and permanently-affordable building.
First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, who led the administration’s reversal on the garden project, said in a statement: “As we have said for months, our plan to preserve the Elizabeth Street Garden is a ‘win-win’ solution that allows the city to protect cherished community green space while building five times the affordable housing than was originally contemplated at the garden site alone.’
“In that spirit,” Mastro’s statement continued, “we are pleased to have reached an agreement with the development team that brought this lawsuit that puts the litigation on pause until after the new year and withdraws the application for a temporary restraining order regarding the garden’s status. We look forward to reaching a resolution to this dispute that ensures Elizabeth Street Garden’s future as a city park.”
Last week, Mastro had expressed disappointment that the developers had filed what he described as a “frivolous” lawsuit while they were already engaged in negotiations about building on the alternate site.
“We thought we were engaging in good-faith negotiations with developers on the Suffolk Street designation until being blindsided by this lawsuit.” Mastro wrote in a statement to Straus News last week.
Mastro dismissed the developer’s accusation that the city had illegally transferred the land without engaging in a public review process, insisting that such transfers from one agency to another are not unusual, and that unless a property is being sold or privatized, there was no requirement to go through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP).
“We would only need to go through ULURP when we are selling city property and moving it to be private property, not when transferring city property from one agency to another, which happens all the time,” Mastro said in his statement.
City Hall insists it’s not abandoning its pledge to build more affordable housing. On the contrary, the agreement between Councilmember Christopher Marte and Mastro, made last June, that reversed the city’s original plan to bulldoze Elizabeth Street Garden, seeks to build five times as many affordable housing units than the 123 units Haven Green had previously planned. There are ongoing talks with Kinsmen Property Group on a rezoning at 156–166 Bowery that would create 320 units, and separately a development at 100 Gold St.
The developers had criticized these plans, saying the alternate sites lacked zoning, financing, or any of the backing the Haven Green plan had secured when the city signed off on it in 2019. It appears the developers are now at least considering relocating their project to one of the alternate sites.
Per the Nov. 22 stipulation city lawyers are due to respond to the lawsuit by Jan. 7—after Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani takes office— to the developers’ push for a preliminary injunction that would freeze the sudden parkland designation while the fight plays out.
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