After nearly a decade of legal wrangling over the fate of Elizabeth Street Garden in Manhattan’s Soho neighbourhood, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is expected to step back from plans to raze the beloved sculpture garden to make way for an affordable housing development.
This week, Gothamist and The New York Times reported that Mamdani’s administration is expected to abandon plans for an affordable housing development on the garden site, potentially bringing an end to a long-running battle over one of downtown Manhattan’s most unusual public spaces.
Located in the heart of Soho, the one-acre garden is owned by the city but operated by an eponymous non-profit, which opens it to the public nearly every day of the year. Filled with plants, sculptures and seating areas, the garden hosts public programming including yoga classes, outdoor films and art contests. It has become a popular destination and counts Patti Smith, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro among its high-profile fans who have called for the garden to be saved.
"Our work has always been about preserving Elizabeth Street Garden while addressing the need for low-income housing within our community," Joseph Reiver, who leads the garden non-profit, told The Art Newspaper in a statement. "For years we've maintained that the need for public community greenspace and affordable housing can be fulfilled without any loss to the community. This is the kind of resolution all New Yorkers deserve."
Patti Smith performed at a rally to save Elizabeth Street Garden in Lower Manhattan in April last year Photo: © Daniel Efram / ZUMA Press Wire / Alamy Stock Photo
The garden is the centre of a long-running battle over development and public space. Reiver's father, gallerist Allan Reiver, started the garden in the early 1990s when he leased what was then an abandoned lot from the city to store garden statues. He eventually began allowing the public to visit, first by appointment through his gallery next door and later according to a regular schedule through a public entrance. In 2012, the city transferred the lot to the New York City Housing Authority, which announced plans to build affordable housing on the site.
Allan Reiver opposed the destruction of the garden, and led a community effort to block the development. It is a fight that has continued after his death in 2021 through his son. Hundreds of volunteers now help maintain the garden, which welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.
The garden was scheduled to be razed to make way for Haven Green, a proposed affordable housing complex for seniors with 123 units, as well as ground-floor retail space and offices for Habitat for Humanity, a partner on the project alongside the developer Pennrose and the non-profit RiseBoro.
Over the years, Elizabeth Street Garden has become a flashpoint in debates over some of New York’s most pressing issues, including affordability, housing and access to green space. While supporters see preserving the garden as a victory for public green space and cultural programming, opponents of the preservation campaign have argued that anti-development sentiment can exacerbate the city’s housing crisis and gentrification.
Eric Adams, New York’s previous mayor, initially supported developing the site but later reversed course. Mamdani, now the city’s mayor, indicated during his campaign that, if elected, he would evict the garden in his first year in office—even against the advice of his mother, the film-maker Mira Nair. “My mother really disagrees with me, she tells me all the time,” Mamdani told Hell Gate last year.
One of the sculptures in Elizabeth Street Garden Photo: Valeriyap
Mamdani ran a progressive campaign centred on affordability and has been a strong proponent of new housing construction to bring down New York rents, some of the highest in the world. His “Block by Block” plan calls for the creation of 200,000 new affordable housing units over the next decade, alongside the preservation of 200,000 existing units. Reiver says his issue isn’t with building more affordable housing, but with the razing of Elizabeth Street Garden specifically.
“There's a lot of ways you can address the housing crisis without destroying a community garden,” Reiver told The Art Newspaper in 2024, adding that Elizabeth Street Garden "became a work of art in its own right".
Last year, after Mamdani was elected but before he took office, Adams’s administration designated Elizabeth Street Garden as parkland, making development on the site more difficult because reversing the designation would require action by the state legislature. The three developers behind Haven Green subsequently sued the city.
Court filings indicate that the developers and the city intended to reach “an amicable resolution” before a court hearing scheduled for Thursday (13 August). Part of that resolution, a spokesperson for mayor Mamdani confirmed to The Art Newspaper, will involve the development of 180 affordable homes at nearby 22 Suffolk Street, which had previously been proposed as an alternative site for affordable housing.
”We are continuing to work toward a resolution of the lawsuit initiated under the previous administration concerning the Elizabeth Street Garden site,” the spokesperson, Matt Rauschenbach, said. “We will keep fighting to create more affordable homes, stronger neighbourhoods and public spaces that make New York the greatest city on earth.”
