New Delhi: Nearly three months after taking office, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is yet to act on his campaign promise to replace the city’s Elizabeth Street Garden with low-income housing. The plan was blocked after his predecessor Eric Adams designated it as a city park just before his exit, meaning it will require state legislative approval to undo. But the clamour and polarisation over it show no signs of stopping.
“Mayor Zohran Mamdani must now decide whether to honor Adam’s move or press ahead with affordable housing plans as he promised to do so in his mayoral campaign,” asked the media outlet Spectrum News NY1 on Tuesday in a post shared on Instagram and X, where replies ranged from “save the garden” to “I will bulldoze the thing myself”.
During his campaign last year, Mamdani said affordable housing was a top priority and vowed to evict the one-acre Elizabeth Street Garden — known for its antique sculptures and a copper gazebo— in his first year. However, even before the Mamdani-Adams faceoff, this green space in Manhattan’s Nolita neighbourhood has been contested land.
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What is Elizabeth Street Garden?
The Elizabeth Street Garden site has nearly a 200-year history as a public space. From the 1800s till the present, it has served as an outdoor recreational and educational place for the local community.
Before the garden, the site was occupied by a public school designed by architect CBJ Snyder in 1904, featuring twelve classrooms and outdoor space. It was demolished in the 1970s, after which the lot lay largely unused. Then in 1991, Allan Reiver, who operated the neighbouring Elizabeth Street Gallery, began developing the site as a sculpture garden on a month-to-month lease from the city. Terms such as “urban oasis” and “beloved” are often used to describe it.
The garden is managed by Elizabeth Street Garden, Inc, a nonprofit organisation formed in 2016 with the mission of preserving the space as a public community green space. It is open to the public year-round with free events and is peppered with sculptures, many from Reiver’s collection. It also has various plant species as well as a copper gazebo designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, an American landscape architect.
However, in 2012, the New York City Housing Authority took over the land and planned to develop affordable housing on the site — a proposal called Haven Green that would have built 123 apartments for low-income seniors.
The land faced a lengthy legal dispute and in 2024 the New York Court of Appeals ruled to allow the development. There was an outcry from some sections of society, with celebrities such as Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Patti Smith participating in efforts to preserve the garden.
“The Elizabeth Street Garden is an entirely unique public sanctuary, where art, nature, literature and activism peacefully abide,” Smith wrote in an August 2024 letter to Mayor Eric Adams.
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The ongoing battle
Mamdani has no sentimentality about Elizabeth Street Garden. Last year, after then First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro scrapped an affordable seniors’ housing project on the site, Mamdani said on a podcast that he would evict the garden and revive the plan.
“My mother really disagrees with me on this, she tells me all the time,” he said.
But before leaving the mayoral office, Adams designated the garden as city parkland.
The website of Elizabeth Street Garden says the development would destroy 100 percent of the Garden and the affordability is not permanent. The Garden authority also wrote an open letter to Mamdani.
“Mr. Mamdani, your administration has an opportunity to set a new precedent for prioritising both community gardens and affordability. We urge you to listen to the people of this community, to meet with us, and support the new plan for more permanently affordable housing while preserving Elizabeth Street Garden,” reads the letter.
Last November, Mamdani acknowledged it made his plans “nearly impossible” but also reinforced his commitment to affordable housing.
“My focus will be on working with the Legislature to fulfill the affordability agenda that I’ve been working on,” he said.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)