The Elizabeth Street Garden Fight Should Never Have Happened

Protesting the potential development of the Elizabeth Street Garden during Fashion Week, September 2024.
Photo: Alamy

New York has a perverse way of amplifying a dispute over a half-acre lot into a protracted cold war. Endless hours and untold millions in lawyers’ fees have been poured into the saga of the Elizabeth Street Garden, which pitted the forces of housing against the defenders of greenery and has finally ended with a compromise that could have been reached a dozen years ago, if only the various parties had valued flexible thinking over hardened positions. On one side sit pro-housing progressives who saw the garden as a frill and resented the way an antiques dealer, Allan Reiver, colonized a city-owned site with statuary from his collection and let the public access it through his shop until he eventually added a street entry. In 2012, the Housing Department moved to reclaim the lot as the site of a future building with 121 affordable apartments for seniors, and it seemed like a righteous move. Opposition was decried as the most craven kind of NIMBYism, since the land at issue was in fact a backyard of sorts in the middle of Nolita. Pro-garden guerrillas, including the kind of celebrity players who know how to wrap themselves and their obsessions in mystique, saw themselves as protectors of a paradise that should never be paved over. They claimed the mantle of the community-garden movement, when New Yorkers of a generation earlier got dirt under their fingernails to reclaim weedy lots from abandonment and then had their labors enshrined into law.

Any square foot of New York real estate represents a zero-sum game: Every park could be another skyscraper, every plaza a parking lot, and every squat and creaky old building is preventing its patch of land from serving a broader purpose. From a developer’s (or housing advocate’s) point of view, the city brims with space that could be used to house more New Yorkers, if only the retardatory forces of “no” would just get out of the way. But New York needs its forgotten pockets, idiosyncratic spaces, and gaps in the asphalt, too. The 550 community gardens that have been blessed with permanence all around the city are gloriously wasteful, crowding out towers with tulips and tomato plants. The peculiar history of the Elizabeth Street Garden and the prices of surrounding condos don’t vitiate its value — they increase it, because it’s fundamentally a noncommercial space, a refuge on blistering July days and a bowlful of sunlight on a frigid February afternoon. Yes, the linear and narrow Sarah D. Roosevelt Park is just two blocks away, but that doesn’t change the charm of this little walled oasis.

Despite my affection for the garden’s quirks, I long ago wrote it off as a loss. Mayor Eric Adams backed his own Housing Department’s quest to take it over, and a succession of legal challenges seemed destined for ultimate failure. Continuing the fight wouldn’t protect any open space for future generations, I thought, but it would be very effective at keeping seniors out of housing on that spot until they gave up or died. In the end, Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro persuaded Adams to save the garden in exchange for dangling a few possible rezonings that might — eventually — produce 620 apartments nearby. It’s hardly an ironclad guarantee of more housing or an imminent prospect that desperate seniors should rely on. New York has reverted to what it does best: delay.

The saga shows the weakness at the heart of our city-planning process. Two sides abandon all perspective, politicians fail to broker between them, a sclerotic legal system draws out the stalemate, and the result is status quo, plus an infuriating escalation of costs. I’m glad the garden will remain and grateful to Mastro that he finally forced a solution. But I’m also mortified at the preposterous display of a global metropolis wasting eons and fortunes fussing for years over a speck.