The street entrance to the Elizabeth Street Garden, in August 2021. Activists and community members have been fighting to halt the redevelopment of the site for over a decade, a fight that successfully ended yesterday. Image Credit: Google Maps.
On June 23, 2025, Mayor Eric Adams announced an agreement to create over 600 affordable homes in Lower Manhattan while preserving the Elizabeth Street Garden site, which had previously been scheduled for closure and redevelopment into housing.
The Elizabeth Street Garden is located on a city-owned lot that had been leased out and used as a sculpture garden accessible through an art gallery. The garden was made publicly accessible from the street in 2013. The lot was identified as a site for potential affordable housing for seniors. In the original plan, the Elizabeth Street Garden would have been closed for the redevelopment of 123 affordable homes. There was a long court battle challenging the decision and the plan’s state environmental review, in which the Court of Appeals had sided with the site’s potential developer in June 2024. This agreement halts the city’s plan to build affordable housing on the Elizabeth Street Garden site.
Under the agreement, in exchange for permanently pausing the plans to redevelop the site, Council Member Christopher Marte will support the rezoning of three other sites in his district for the creation of over 620 new affordable homes, over five times the amount from the original plan. In exchange, the Elizabeth Street Garden will expand its hours and be open to the public from 8 AM to 8 PM daily. In addition, the garden may become a part of the City’s Department of Parks and Recreation if the city chooses to do so.
The three sites that will advance for rezoning include 156-166 Bowery, 22 Suffolk Street, and 100 Gold Street. 156-166 Bowery consists of seven contiguous lots between Broome and Kenmare Streets which are currently zoned for market rate housing. The lots will be rezoned for at least 123 additional units of affordable housing for seniors in addition to the planned housing. The additional units are the equivalent of what would have been built at the Elizabeth Street site. Approximately 200 units of all-affordable housing will be constructed at 22 Suffolk Street, a city-owned lot. The agreement also secures at least 300 units of affordable housing at 100 Gold Street.
Mayor Adams stated, “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. Whether it’s creating record amounts of affordable housing two years in a row, passing the first citywide rezoning effort in 60 years, or reaching agreements like this to build more housing wherever we can, we are proud to be the most pro-housing administration in New York City history.”
Council Member Marte stated, “This incredible win-win for our community shows exactly why we should never give up. Since the beginning of this fight almost a decade ago, we’ve been saying that we can save community gardens and build new affordable housing. And with this historic agreement with Mayor Eric 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.”
Joseph Reiver, son of Allan Reiver, the creator of the Elizabeth Street Garden, said in an issued statement, “. . . The Garden has been misunderstood by those who believe it must be sacrificed to meet housing needs. But doing so perpetuates a false choice, one I hope we can now leave behind in light of what this work has affirmed. In our efforts to preserve Elizabeth Street Garden, we have always pursued a solution that provides affordable housing without any loss to the community. Thanks to Councilmember Marte’s dedication and the support from Mayor Adams, we now have a resolution that delivers even more housing while preserving the Garden. . .” The full letter can be read here.
By: Veronica Rose (Veronica is the Editor of CityLand and a New York Law School graduate, Class of 2018.)