NYC's Elizabeth Street Garden will be saved in a deal that includes 620 affordable housing units, sources say
New York City's beloved Elizabeth Street Garden will be saved after a years-long battle to preserve it, sources tell CBS News New York's political reporter Marcia Kramer.
The garden was set to close this spring and be replaced with affordable housing for seniors, despite lawsuits and pleas from the community to preserve the park.
Sources say Mayor Eric Adams has signed an agreement with Councilmember Christopher Marte, who represents the garden's district in Manhattan, to move forward with a plan that preserves the garden for the public and relocates the affordable housing nearby.
Under the deal, the city will allow the garden to remain open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily and, in exchange, Marte will support rezoning three other sites for even more affordable housing than had been initially planned. The mayor says this plan will lead to more than 620 new affordable homes, as opposed to the original 123 that would have been built at the garden site.
"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," Adams said in a prepared statement. "This is what smart, responsible leadership looks like: bringing people together to reach common-sense solutions that create more housing and protect green space."
"This incredible win-win for our community shows exactly why we should never give up," said Marte. "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."
"Miracles can happen"
Attorney Norman Siegel helped Elizabeth Street Garden lovers emerge victorious.
"Miracles can happen," Siegel said.
Neighbors who wrote letters asked the city not to change a thing. They were joined by celebrities, including Patti Smith, Robert DeNiro, and Martin Scorsese.
"Yeah, it took a little bit longer than maybe it should have," said Joseph Reiver, executive director of the Elizabeth Street Garden.
Reiver said he found the solution in January, with the the private owner of a vacant lot two and a half blocks away on Bowery who was happy to have the housing there as part of an even bigger plan for the area using private land.
"At least 600 new units that are coming toward here, coming to Lower Manhattan, is the greatest hits, the greatest injection of affordable housing unit [in] 30 years," Marte said.
Marte worked with Reiver to get the city to reverse course and it worked.
The next step is getting the land re-zoned, with Marte saying, "Rezoning typically takes between six and nine months."
There is a seed of an idea that NYC Parks will run Elizabeth Street Garden, but that will be decided later.
