Opinion: Mayor Adams, please let us keep Elizabeth Street Garden, our green jewel box

BY CONNIE MURRAY | Dear Mayor Adams, have we, as a city, the greatest city in this world, really come to this moment? Is New York City actually about to destroy a rare and cherished green urban space in Downtown Manhattan? And for expiration-dated, “affordable” housing?

As of this writing, more than 824,000 people have already penned letters to you asking to save the Elizabeth Street Garden. I am just one of almost a million voices imploring you to better measure and weigh this moment.

The first and most glaring conflict of interest is that the development proposed to replace the garden, Haven Green, will not provide permanent affordability. Its space will also house Habitat for Humanity’s 11,000-square-foot office and other high-end retail, squarely negating any commitment to use the entire structure for low-income housing.

The project has also wavered on who exactly is slated to live in its tiny homes. Years ago, they had claimed low-income Black and Brown families would benefit from its residences — but that goal has since morphed into housing a population of formerly homeless L.G.B.T.Q. seniors; I am curious what legally appropriate means the city and Haven Green will use to substantiate the sexuality of its occupants.

reminds me of haven green’s marketing with trench-coat-wearing elderly white people walking with canes next to a hottie in a backless dress heading out for brunch

blatant false yimby propaganda pic.twitter.com/Py0xL2ZuG8

— fuelgrannie (@fuelgrannie) January 1, 2021

There is also Habitat for Humanity’s track record in our city; we are still reeling from their betrayal in Brooklyn in 2016, when we learned that just because an organization is a nonprofit with a couple of allegedly caring words in its name doesn’t mean it executes fair or good work for needy New Yorkers.

Haven Green supporters, the exact same characters who had vociferously pushed for the 2021 Soho/Noho rezoning, are now howling for the destruction of the Elizabeth Street Garden. This group, known as “YIMBYs,” is much smaller in size than the hundreds of thousands of letter-writing supporters of the garden; Haven Green’s X account has only 87 followers, despite having been launched in 2019.

Lower Manhattan residents are already quite familiar with YIMBYs. Members of New York’s only YIMBY organization, real estate lobbying group Open New York, usually in groups of less than 10 people total, attended community board meetings during the 2020/2021 Soho rezoning hearings, despite having zero connection to the neighborhood, where they mocked area residents for being “NIMBYs,” and accused aging, liberal hippy artists of being in the Ku Klux Klan.

Open NY brags about being the architects of that rezoning, which passed in late 2021, and had promised the land-use adjustment would result in the creation of thousands of three-bedroom units in the area for “Black and Brown families” that would rent for $800 to $900 a month. Three years later, the neighborhood remains waiting for anything even close to that broken promise to materialize, while, as had been feared, its already existing deeply affordable housing is being destroyed.

As this city crests the 23rd anniversary of September 11, Lower Manhattan finds itself once again betrayed and tricked by YIMBYs who seek to destroy the Elizabeth Street Garden with false narratives around the garden keepers and garden enjoyers. These YIMBYs push an agenda that erases our city’s history, architectural beauty and homegrown quirkiness. This area has already lost so much.

Low-cost, permanently affordable homes for vulnerable populations is a critical goal — but at what cost? And if the affordability doesn’t even last, what on our good green Earth is the very point? Demolishing green space for luxury homes is an abomination.

There are other and better sites for such a city housing development, like the long-vacant, city-owned lot at 388 Hudson St., at Clarkson Street, where five times more units could be created, a patiently waiting no-brainer.

I wonder what game the city is trying to play by pretending the only option for low-income housing — for Black and Brown families or for L.G.B.T.Q. formerly homeless seniors — is right on top of the Elizabeth Street Garden and that there is no other place, no other city-owned lot, like 388 Hudson, that could be utilized and developed. What a cruel scheme to pit lovers of this city against real estate development lobbyists, the latter who are striving to spin the outrageous optics of destroying this oasis. The lobbyists want that win, they want that notch on their belt, so as to increase what they see as a portfolio of their successes — especially after the Soho rezoning — their résumé for destruction, a pursuit to increase their influence over this city, its politicians, its planners and its real estate investors.

Mayor Adams, have you ever even been to the Elizabeth Street Garden? Its space is compact, lush and cozy. It is snow white and stony in the winter and light green in the haze of summer. Chubby bugs collide into your neck and land on your forearm. There is a pagoda, a stage of sorts, where poetry is read and music is played. There are sequestered pockets throughout the trees and sculptures, offering heavy stone benches tucked behind half walls, seats for lovers and friends, a place to breathe, to slow our pace, to turn our chins to the sky and to the water towers atop red-brick buildings with white-trimmed decorative facades, the New York rooftops from a time gone by. How nice to have that angle, away from the street, to be able to behold such a view.

I can personally attest to how beloved this lot, now garden, has always been, from the jump.

In the early 1990s, I lived around the corner from what was then known as the Elizabeth Street Sculpture Garden. My roommate, a waiter, and I, a hostess and coat check girl, both worked at the former Time Cafe on Lafayette Street. When we could, we drank our late-morning coffee outside the garden, where slants of sunlight slashed onto stone angels and carved lions. “What is this place?” some people walking by asked us, while others remarked, “I love this spot, I’m going to bring my coffee here, too, good idea!”

Even back then, the sculpture garden was known in our neighborhood and it was loved. For me to have seen it grow into a publicly accessible venue, when I had dreamed some 30 years ago of being able to sneak into the lot, just to be inside it with the angels and lions, is a delightful wonder. The Elizabeth Street Garden is now even more magical and verdant than I could have ever fathomed back then. How can we destroy it, especially the foliage? The greenery is not even fully matured; it is nowhere close to being finished.

And, Mayor Adams, we are not finished with the Elizabeth Street Garden, we as a city and we as a global community. Social media, especially TikTok videos, has demonstrated how precious this space is to so many people. This garden is adored. It is a free space. It offers a mystic breath, a hint of lost forest, a snug, surprising respite that this city so desperately needs.

Please let us as a city keep this jewel box. Please let it persist. Please let us keep our garden.

Murray manages a private event space in Lower Manhattan and is a tenant and housing advocate who blogs about New York City on her Web site, fuelgrannie.com. Murray, posting as fuelgrannie, can also be found on X and Instagram.