New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s decision to move ahead with plans to sell the space that Elizabeth Street Garden currently occupies to a developer with plans to build a housing complex for senior and homeless citizens has spurred a last-ditch effort to save the park, with celebrities writing open letters to the mayor.
The city has not backed down in the face of stepped-up grassroots pressure. If the park, located in Manhattan’s Little Italy neighborhood, is demolished next week as scheduled, a seven-story housing complex will replace it, featuring at least 6,700 square feet of green space and 123 units for senior residents, 50 of which will go to homeless seniors.
Among the many advocates for the park who do not want to see it sold are a nonprofit organization incorporated in 2016 with the express goal of preserving the park and an advocacy group called Friends of Elizabeth Street Garden.
A legal fund is raising money for court challenges to the city’s plans, and the campaign to save the park has also drawn vocal support from activists, merchants, schoolchildren, and New York celebrities, including film director Martin Scorsese, actor Robert De Niro, and poet-songwriter Patti Smith.
Advocates for the park say they are not against building affordable housing and that they have gone to lengths to identify places elsewhere in the borough with similar dimensions to those of the park that could become sites for new buildings.
In its ruling, the court cited two earlier cases to support the argument that the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) gave all due consideration to the environment of the proposed development and set forth a clear rationale for its choice of location.
The city’s lawyers haven’t publicly commented on the ongoing dispute.
Calls for Preservation
In her letter to Adams, Smith cited her credentials as a New Yorker who has, for many people, become synonymous with the cultural life of the city. She began the letter by stating that she received a coveted Key to the City in 2021, calling it “a symbolic reminder of the city’s treasures.” She said she had joined her supporters and “countless citizens” in calling for the preservation of the park.“The Elizabeth Street Garden is an entirely unique public sanctuary, where art, nature, literature and activism peacefully abide. Flourishing fig trees, flowers and ivy frame historical sculpture, enchanting all who visit,” Smith wrote.
Similar sentiments were expressed by De Niro, who, in his letter, told Adams, “Taking away the Elizabeth Street Garden is erasing part of our city’s unique cultural history and heritage.”
In a longer letter to the mayor, Scorsese said that the issue touches him “on a very deep personal level” because he grew up in Little Italy at a time in the neighborhood’s history when it lacked the kind of green, abundant open spaces that Elizabeth Street Garden offers visitors.
“When I was growing up, Little Italy was more or less a concrete jungle. We used to play in the alleys. There was no shade, no greenery, no respite—something that every neighborhood needs,” Scorsese wrote.
“The make-up of Little Italy may be different, but the need for a beautiful, refreshing oasis like the Elizabeth Street Garden has not changed.”
A Need for Space
The park is a needed corrective to the severely congested conditions prevailing in much of Little Italy, according to Jeannine Kiely, a member and former chair of Manhattan Community Board 2 and a longtime activist on behalf of Elizabeth Street Garden.Though this may be part of its idiosyncratic character, Little Italy is a tight neighborhood with an average of only six square feet per person, Kiely told The Epoch Times.
If the city goes ahead with its plans, the neighborhood will lose its only public park with green space, she said.
“The garden is a unique, green oasis in an otherwise dense, concrete neighborhood. It is a community gathering place for seniors and families with young children, those least able to walk to farther-away parks. It also is heavily used by neighbors, small businesses, visitors from other neighborhoods, and tourists from around the world,” Kiely said.
Joseph Reiver, executive director of the nonprofit that shares its name with the park, shares Kiely’s view of the park as a magnet to visitors from all over.
“We get over 200,000 visitors a year, which is highly significant in terms of square footage. And with the news right now, everyone’s very concerned. We’re getting a heavy volume of people coming in to see how they can help,” Reiver told The Epoch Times.
Currently, a volunteer force of 480 people from various parts of the city, including Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, are helping maintain the park and keep it attractive for the strong inflow of visitors, he said.
“We have been engaged in this lawsuit since 2019, based on environmental implications,” Reiver said.
“That case went all the way to the Court of Appeals, but unfortunately, we lost that case. That’s why this kind of red alert is happening right now; the city is attempting to move forward.”
Both Kiely and Reiver point to the availability of other sites that would be suitable for building more housing.
Kiely does not credit the argument that either housing for seniors and the homeless or the park must receive priority.
“This is a false choice. Friends of Elizabeth Street Garden identified several alternative locations in our community where up to five times as much housing can be built—for example, at 388 Hudson Street and the federally owned parking garage at 2 Howard Street,” she said.
The Manhattan Community Board, on which Kiely serves, has argued in favor of constructing new housing units at 388 Hudson Street, Kiely said. This location has been under consideration as a possible housing site for more than two decades, but according to Kiely, the city told her and her colleagues that building units there would take too long.
“The city is finally moving forward, but this housing could already have been built,” she said.
Reiver said that supporters of Elizabeth Street Garden are not against building units in the same neighborhood. He said he had personally submitted a proposal that, if put into action, would result in a building with more units than the plan to replace the park with affordable housing currently envisions.
Dueling Imperatives
Rosemarie Ruggero, founder and CEO of ElderCare Advocacy, a New York City-based geriatric care provider, said part of the resistance to selling the park to a developer and paving the way for affordable housing may stem from a lack of concern for senior citizens as compared with other segments of the population.Some people may assume that the plan is another phase in the chronic mishandling of the city’s illegal immigrant crisis and a case of misplaced priorities, she said.
“People in the area may not believe that a new building would provide housing for the elderly as much as it would for the homeless. With the influx of immigrants and the negative exaggeration of ‘immigrant crime,’ people don’t want ‘affordable housing’ or homeless shelters next door,” Ruggero told The Epoch Times.
“Of course, it is assumed that property values would decrease as well.”
The city has experienced an inflow of more than 200,000 illegal immigrants since the spring of 2022 and has a persistent homelessness problem. The battle underway over the fate of Elizabeth Street Garden is familiar to people who have studied and grappled with the issue of homelessness.
“There is a constant urban dilemma; namely, creating new developments versus preserving urban spaces such as historical landmarks, old housing units, or, in this example, green spaces,” Clark told The Epoch Times.
His HomeMore Project is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that seeks solutions to the homelessness crisis.
In places with large homeless populations, such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City, the expression “sprawl hits the wall” has become common, Clark said, adding that this phrase denotes a situation in which the urban core has ceased to expand space at a premium.
In such circumstances, it is important to consider the moral and strategic rationales for new developments on a case-by-case basis, Clark said. He pointed to the example of San Francisco, a city with a large number of vacant parking garages and office spaces. In such instances, he favors policies that convert the spaces into housing for the homeless, the poor, senior citizens, needy families, and other vulnerable segments of the population.
However, in the case of public spaces with far more cultural, historical, and social importance, such as Golden Gate Park, Clark said he would not advocate conversion, even for a goal as beneficent as providing housing for the homeless.
“To me, it comes down to the dynamics of the community and trying to get to the closest possible hypothetical line of the neighborhood’s needs and wants: the ‘needs’ being people in need of housing, the ’wants’ that people want desirable amenities where they live. It can’t be only about housing,” he said.
Municipalities should look into whether they are making the most economical use of the space that they allocate for housing, Clark said. One solution is upzoning, which removes restrictions on the height and number of units within a building, he said. This solution has its share of advocates in certain areas of San Francisco, but again, it is necessary to review all such prospects on a case-by-case basis, he said.
“I believe there needs to be a balance between developments that meet the housing needs of the community while also preserving the amenities that are important reasons why people choose to live in those communities,” Clark said.
Adams’s office did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
