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The fight over one of downtown Manhattan’s most fiercely protected green spaces has finally sprouted a happy ending. The Elizabeth Street Garden—a dreamy, sculpture-strewn acre in the heart of Nolita—has officially been spared from the bulldozers.
On Monday, the Adams administration dropped its long-held plan to replace the garden with a 123-unit affordable housing complex for seniors, known as Haven Green. In a surprise pivot, the city will instead pursue rezonings for three alternate sites in Lower Manhattan, a swap that could eventually yield more than 600 affordable apartments. It's a win for open space advocates and housing proponents, assuming those rezonings clear the city’s famously glacial land-use process.
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“This is called using your heart and your head,” said First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, who brokered the deal with Councilmember Christopher Marte. The pair framed the move as a smarter way to tackle the city’s housing crisis, without paving over a cherished community garden that sees 200,000 visitors and hosts dozens of public events each year.
The garden’s backers, including A-list neighbors like Patti Smith, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, launched an aggressive campaign to save the space complete with letter-writing drives, political scorecards and fashion week protests. They argued the garden, with its whimsical mix of statuary, salvaged architecture and more than 1,200 plants, wasn’t just a patch of green—it was a vital, noncommercial refuge in a city where such spaces are vanishing fast.
But not everyone’s celebrating. Housing advocates slammed the decision as a betrayal. “After a dozen years of work...Eric Adams and Randy Mastro have decided to throw that all away,” Annemarie Gray, the executive director of Open New York, a grassroots, pro‑housing advocacy nonprofit, told Patch. Others warned that the new rezonings could take years to materialize, if at all.
For now, the L-shaped lot between Elizabeth, Mott, Prince and Spring Streets lives on, a rare urban Eden spared from New York’s ceaseless march skyward. Whether it’s a pause, a compromise or a miracle, the Elizabeth Street Garden has weathered its biggest storm yet.