The saga of Elizabeth Avenue Backyard, a sliver of greenery in Decrease Manhattan’s Nolita neighborhood, a topic of preservation campaigns, movie star testimonies, lawsuits, and civic angst, has taken yet one more bureaucratic flip. Mayor Eric Adams, in his remaining month in workplace, has designated the backyard as official metropolis parkland. On paper, the transfer complicates Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s vow to revive plans for 123 items of senior inexpensive housing on the positioning.
In a November 3 letter, Louis Molina, commissioner of the Division of Citywide Administrative Companies, knowledgeable Parks Commissioner Iris Rodriguez-Rosa that town “unequivocally and completely dedicates this property to public use as parkland.” Which means, any future improvement would now require legislative approval from Albany.
Randy Mastro, Adams’s first deputy mayor, framed the transfer as a promise fulfilled. “We’re dedicated to making sure Elizabeth Avenue Backyard stays a beloved neighborhood park and can’t be alienated sooner or later,” he mentioned.
For Mamdani, who ran partly on a pledge to restart the housing plan deserted by Adams in June, the timing was much less inspirational. “It’s no shock that Mayor Adams is utilizing his remaining weeks to cement a legacy of dysfunction and inconsistency,” the incoming mayor mentioned, reiterating that senior housing stays a precedence.
Since 2016, the one-acre lot between Elizabeth and Mott Streets has been upheld as both a uncommon downtown sanctuary or a logo of how resistant rich enclaves could be to new housing. The proposal, Haven Inexperienced, backed for years by town’s Division of Housing Preservation and Improvement, would have changed the backyard with a brand new constructing by a workforce of nonprofit builders and included a landscaped public passageway. Supporters argued the plan preserved greater than one-third of the present inexperienced house. Opponents insisted that any lack of its sculptural installations, its lush, its idiosyncratic allure, was an excessive amount of.
The struggle drew star energy within the type of Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, and Patti Smith. It drew litigation within the type of a number of appeals that the backyard’s advocates finally misplaced. It drew the type of breathless protection that makes the small park sound just like the final wild grove of Manhattan.
And but, the backyard has endured by means of each supposed doomsday deadline. Even after dropping in courtroom and being ordered to pay round $100,000 in again hire, its supporters discovered sympathetic ears at Metropolis Corridor. By June, Adams had reversed course totally, saying an settlement with native Councilmember Christopher Marte to protect the backyard completely whereas finding the 123 senior items two blocks away on the Bowery as an alternative.
The developer, blindsided and annoyed, mentioned in June that the Metropolis’s sudden cancellation undermined years of planning and leaves critically wanted senior housing in limbo.
The “menace” to Elizabeth Avenue Backyard at all times appeared to recede simply in time. The parkland designation merely formalizes what the politics already favored.
To pro-housing teams, the transfer lands like a remaining repudiation of a long-promised undertaking. “With this disgraceful remaining act, the Adams administration is as soon as once more prioritizing elite consolation over inexpensive houses for weak aged folks,” Andrew Wonderful of Open New York mentioned in an announcement.
Mamdani hasn’t mentioned whether or not he’ll ask Albany to greenlight improvement on the newly designated parkland. For now, he’s framing the struggle extra broadly, promising to pursue his affordability agenda wherever it’s achievable.
Elizabeth Avenue Backyard is beautiful. It’s leafy and serene, full with stone urns and moss-covered sculptures. However its scale has been inversely proportional to its protection. The backyard turned much less a query of land use than a proxy for civic values. Do New Yorkers care about inexperienced house or housing? Neighborhood character or fairness? Preservation or progress?
Beneath all of the media buzz, my query is, was Elizabeth Avenue Backyard ever on the brink? Each time the event appeared poised to maneuver ahead, political gravity pulled it again. And now, with the Adams administration’s parkland designation, it’s laborious to think about any bulldozers exhibiting up.
Maybe the true story isn’t a mayor blocking his successor. It’s that New York’s most over-analyzed patch of grass has as soon as once more managed to outlive, in a metropolis that loves declaring one thing “underneath menace.” Typically, the sky isn’t falling.
