A little less than five months ago, Mayor Eric Adams gave up on the city’s long-running bid to replace the Elizabeth Street Garden in Lower Manhattan with affordable housing. But now that his successor, Zohran Mamdani, has vowed to take up the fight again, the Adams administration is apparently trying to make sure it won’t be easy.
In a Nov. 3 letter to the parks commissioner, Iris Rodriguez-Rosa, the commissioner of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, Louis Molina, said that the city “unequivocally and permanently dedicates this property to public use as parkland.”
The parkland designation means Mr. Mamdani now will most likely need the approval of the State Legislature to build housing on the site. The news publication Gothamist first reported on the letter on Wednesday.
Randy Mastro, the first deputy mayor, said in a statement, “We are committed to ensuring Elizabeth Street Garden remains a beloved community park and cannot be alienated in the future.”
The fight over the garden, a one-acre plot in the NoLIta neighborhood, has been an emblem both of how difficult it can be to build housing in wealthy areas and the passionate commitment of many New Yorkers to preserve green space. The project would have included affordable housing for older people and some 16,000 square feet of green space, about a third of the space in the garden.
Mr. Adams had initially supported the housing development, and the lot’s nonprofit tenant had been scheduled to be evicted in March. The nonprofit, community members and celebrities like Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese and Patti Smith had fought to save the garden over the past several years.
But then the mayor reversed himself in June and abandoned the plan, saying he would instead seek to build more housing elsewhere.
Mr. Mamdani said during his mayoral campaign that he would restart plans to build housing on the lot, angering supporters of the garden. His campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The move by Mr. Adams on Wednesday angered development advocates.
“With this disgraceful final act, the Adams administration is once again prioritizing elite comfort over affordable homes for vulnerable elderly people,” Andrew Fine, the chief of staff at the pro-housing group Open New York said in a statement on Wednesday. “Eric Adams’s time in City Hall may be over, but this fight is not.”
Mihir Zaveri covers housing in the New York City region for The Times.
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