The fate of the Elizabeth Street Garden, a community and sculpture garden in Little Italy, remains uncertain once again.
The original developers behind the long-planned Haven Green affordable-housing complex, filed a lawsuit against City Hall on Nov. 19, accusing the Adams administration of illegally blocking construction by declaring the Elizabeth Street Garden site as parkland.
“The Court’s intervention is urgently needed,” attorneys for the three developers—Pennrose, Habitat for Humanity, and RiseBoro Community Partnership—wrote in their lawsuit, calling the recent move by the Adams administration an “extraordinary act of executive overreach.”
As Straus News reported, one day before the mayoral election, on Nov. 3, the Adams administration designated the 20,000-square-foot city-owned lot with an estimated value of up to $40 million “unequivocally and permanently” as parkland by signing it over to the Department of Parks and Recreation, a step that effectively halts construction. Any new development on parkland must first be approved by the state legislature through a lengthy process known as alienation.
The Adams move came in response to Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s declaration that he would go forward with the Haven Green development and disregard an agreement made in June between First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, Council Member Christopher Marte and Joseph Reiver, whose nonprofit currently runs the garden.
Under the June agreement, the sculpture garden would remain open, and affordable housing would be built on three alternative sites in Downtown Manhattan, which would offer 620 new homes instead of the 123 units planned by Haven Green.
Regardless of the additional units, Mamdani assured his supporters during a live podcast with Hell Gate on Oct. 25 that he would evict the garden in his first year in office and green-light the Haven Green development, which would also house the new headquarters for Habitat for Humanity.
The developers were upset about the June agreement as they had already beaten multiple lawsuits from the garden and its supporters, who wanted the artistic site preserved as-is. (Over 1 million letters had been written in support of the garden, including by New York icons Robert De Niro, Patti Smith, and Martin Scorsese.)
In their Manhattan Supreme Court filing, developers described the Adams administration move to designate the land as parkland as “a lawless act,” arguing that the move sets a “dangerous precedent” by allowing City Hall to upend projects approved through the public review process.
The lawsuit claims the proclamation was issued “without authority, without process, without public input,” and was meant to accomplish what garden supporters “failed to achieve through law.”
The developers say they are suing to “restore the integrity of the land-use process” and stop an outgoing administration from derailing “an urgently needed” affordable-housing project.
In a statement, Matthew Dunbar, the chief strategy officer and executive vice president at Habitat for Humanity NYC and Westchester County, told Straus News that the lawsuit “seeks a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) to halt implementation of the designation and preserve the incoming administration’s ability to make decisions about the property’s future.”
Dunbar added that the “attempted [parkland] designation was taken without authority, without public notice, without going through the ULURP process,” but Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, a defendant in the suit, dismissed the accusation as “meritless,” defending the parkland designation as completely legal. He denied sidestepping any necessary public review process.
“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 a statement.
In fact, the garden has been transferred from one city agency to another three times over in the last 14 years, according to court documents.
In October 2011, it went from the New York City School Construction Authority (SCA) to the Department of Education (DOE). One year later, in 2012, DOE transferred it to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS). And then in 2018 DCAS designated it to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
The city, Mastro added, is committed to preserving Elizabeth Street Garden as a public park. He described the lawsuit as “frivolous” and intended to gain leverage in negotiations.
Mastro’s statement also revealed that the developers had been in communication with Council Member Marte to build on one of the alternative sites he had found, an empty lot on Suffolk Street in the Lower East Side.
“We thought we were engaging in good-faith negotiations with developers on the Suffolk Street designation until being blindsided by this lawsuit,” Mastro wrote.
“They would have had the chance to build nearly twice the amount of affordable housing at Suffolk Street than originally contemplated at the garden site, and they are compromising this agreement that we made with CM Marte,” he added, writing that the administration was disappointed by “this obvious gamesmanship.”
But as of Jan. 1, Mastro will leave his position as first deputy mayor and a new administration led by Mamdani will take over City Hall. Straus News reached out to the city’s law department and asked if the new mayor could potentially force the city’s attorneys to disengage from the lawsuit by accepting the accusation.
“The city has no further comment,” Nicholas Paolucci from Public Affairs at the city’s law department answered.
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