A Cherished Lower Manhattan Garden is Saved by a New Affordable Housing Deal
A decade-long battle over bulldozing the Elizabeth Street Garden – a verdant, picturesque, public lot homegrown and tended by volunteers, dense with old trees, stone pathways, and sculptures of angels and animals – in order to build affordable housing came to a close yesterday (Monday, June 23), when City Council member Christopher Marte and Mayor Eric Adams announced a deal that will bring affordable housing to other Lower Manhattan sites in exchange for preserving the garden.
The Elizabeth Street Garden – a 20,000-square-foot publicly owned lot between Spring and Prince Streets – has been the focus of controversy since a 2014 announcement by the City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development that it planned to create affordable housing for low-income seniors at the site. Critics of the plan (dubbed “Haven Green”) were unappeased by a vision that proposed a smaller park, at 6,700 square feet, in addition to the affordable homes.
In lieu of this plan, City Hall and Council member Marte have agreed to retain the garden in its current form, while building a minimum of 620 affordable homes at three other Downtown locations. The first of these is 166 Bowery, three blocks from Elizabeth Street Garden, where the Adams administration has agreed to create 123 additional units of affordable housing for seniors, beyond market-rate development already planned for this site. This is the same number of homes that would have been created at the Elizabeth Street Garden site.
At 22 Suffolk Street (near the corner of Grand Street), City Hall and Mr. Marte have agreed to create 200 units of affordable housing. In the third component of this agreement, the Mayor and the Council member have committed to including at least 300 units of affordable housing in the recently announced development plan for 100 Gold Street (alongside the Brooklyn Bridge).
“This incredible win-win for our community shows exactly why we should never give up,” said Council member Marte. “Since the beginning of this fight, we’ve been saying that we can save community gardens and build new affordable housing. And with this historic agreement with Mayor Adams, this will be the largest influx of new, permanently affordable housing in Lower Manhattan in decades. Our rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods have been desperate for homes that working people can actually afford – and now we will have hundreds of new neighbors, and old neighbors with new homes, right here, all while saving a beloved community garden that is a home away from home for Lower Manhattan families.”
Mayor Adams said, “the best way to tackle our City’s housing crisis is to build as much affordable housing as we can. 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. This is what smart, responsible leadership looks like, bringing people together to reach common sense solutions that create more housing and protect green space.”
First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro added, “this is an example of good government working to achieve mutual objectives through partnerships that produce results otherwise unattainable. We will now be creating more than five times the affordable housing in this district than would otherwise have been possible from taking this Garden site alone and, at the same time, preserving this community garden in an area largely bereft of parkland. That’s a win-win for everybody.” Multiple sources said that Mr. Mastro (who joined the Adams administration in March) played a crucial role in brokering a compromise between the Mayor and the Council member, who had been at an impasse over the Elizabeth Street Garden (as well as multiple other issues) almost from the day that Eric Adams took office in 2022.
In exchange for 620 units of new affordable housing in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Marte has agreed not to oppose rezoning the first two sites to accommodate the extra development, and also not to oppose City Hall’s plans for 100 Gold Street. These concessions by the Council member were likely viewed as crucial by City Hall, because of a City Council tradition known as “member deference.” This custom translates into an effective veto in the municipal legislature, through which each member is given right of refusal over projects in his or her district, with the entire Council voting in support of the local representative.
In particular, Mr. Marte’s opposition could have blocked the Adams administration’s plans for 100 Gold Street, which the Mayor views as an urgent priority. Mr. Marte’s acquiescence to the Mayor’s plans for 100 Gold Street represents a significant concession, because he had originally staked out a position calling for all of the 1,000-plus new apartments to be created at the site to be set aside as affordable units, rather than the 30 percent he is now agreeing to.
Joseph Reiver, a sculptor who is also the executive director of the nonprofit that has fought for years to prevent the closure of the Elizabeth Street Garden, said, “the Garden has been misunderstood by those who believe it must be sacrificed to meet housing needs. Thanks to Council member Marte’s dedication and the support from Mayor Adams, we now have a resolution that delivers even more housing while preserving the Garden.”
Mr. Reiver is the son of late art dealer and gallery owner Allan Reiver, who created the space in 1991, by turning a onetime abandoned lot into an open-air annex to his adjacent Elizabeth Street Gallery. In the quarter century that followed, the father-and-son team (supported by a small army of volunteers) filled the half-acre parcel with sculptures and cultivated an idyllic garden. Decades of improvements turned the community space into a de facto public park that is now regarded as a treasured amenity.
Monday’s development offered a denouement to years of legal battles in both New York and federal courts, and frenzied political organizing and activism to preserve the Elizabeth Street Garden. This drama seemed to wind down in March, when the City received final permission from a judge to padlock the park and physically evict any people or art works on the site. Such a move would have cleared the last hurdle to beginning construction on the Haven Green plan. But, unexpectedly (and without explanation), the City did not push ahead with this process, a development that may have been related to Mr. Mastro joining the Adams administration that same week.