The Elizabeth Street Garden project is on ice. 

Just how frozen is it? The administration insists it isn’t dead. The mayor supports the affordable housing project, but it also isn’t moving forward, for now. 

After years of litigation, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration can finally evict the garden, but hasn’t because First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro is “reviewing” the project. 

The administration hasn’t spelled out what this review entails. Mastro joined the administration four days before the city could kick out the group that runs the green space, and nearly six years after the City Council approved 123 affordable senior housing units for the site, a development known as Haven Green.   

The administration is eyeing 22 Suffolk Street as an alternative site, according to the New York Daily News. City Hall spokesperson William Fowler said on Thursday that the administration is not considering alternatives to the garden site, asserting that the development team from Haven Green cannot simply move their plans to another plot. 

“Just because we’re exploring housing development on one site doesn’t mean we’re forgoing plans to build housing on another,” said Fowler. 

But that also doesn’t mean the administration won’t prioritize housing on another site before it takes further action at the garden. In fact, that also doesn’t mean that the garden project won’t be paused indefinitely, say, until a new mayor comes into office. 

This also wasn’t the first time that the spectre of “alternate sites” has been floated. The mayor told TRD last week that “nothing has changed yet” with the project, and also said that he needs “alternate sites,” though he didn’t elaborate. At the time, City Hall indicated that the “alternate sites” were a reference to the need to build housing on as many sites as possible, not just at the garden.

The pause, however long it may be, is enough to give pro-housing groups and officials in former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration chills. 

Alicia Glen, who served as deputy mayor for housing and economic development under de Blasio, and Carl Weisbrod, who was City Planning head, called the project’s pause a “betrayal” in a New York Daily News op-ed. 

The city began leasing out the vacant space in 1991 on a month-to-month basis to the owner of the Elizabeth Street Gallery next door, Allan Riever. The lot originally served as an outdoor showcase for the gallery’s sculptures, and could only be accessed through Riever’s shop. 

In 2016, the city issued a request for proposals to develop the site, tapping PennRose, Habitat NYC and Riseboro to build senior housing on the city-owned site. Riever’s son, Joseph, formed a nonprofit in 2016, also named Elizabeth Street Garden, aimed at preserving the garden as a public space that is open year-round (it had been overseen by another nonprofit and open to the public intermittently before that). The nonprofit has also urged the Adams administration to consider building housing on other sites. 

“We continue to work on saving Elizabeth Street Garden & building affordable housing at nearby alternative sites,” the group posted on X on Wednesday.  

The development team said in a statement that “any backing down to self-interested opposition would be seen as an open door to those most effectively able to fund and elevate a coordinated Not in My Back Yard (NIMBY) campaign.” 

The City Council approved Haven Green in 2019, but the project was quickly challenged in court by the nonprofits. After securing a key legal victory in June 2024, the city served the garden with an eviction notice in October, but a court paused the eviction. Another eviction notice was issued in March. 

Mastro joined the administration a few weeks later. The Daily News highlighted in April that Mastro has ties to attorney Norman Siegel and Adams’ former chief of staff, Frank Carone, who have supported opponents of Haven Green. Celebrities Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese and  Patti Smith have called on the mayor to reconsider the development. 

The mayor has called his administration the “most pro-housing” in the city’s history, pointing to the passage of zoning changes made in the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity. One of Haven Green’s most vocal opponents, Council member Chris Marte, was the only Council member from Manhattan to vote against the measure. 

The project’s trajectory could have bigger implications for developers considering partnering with the city on projects. Community opposition and long delays from litigation are nearly always a threat when building in the city, but an administration reversing course after fighting and winning the ability to move forward with a project could signal a new risk for those sinking time and money into a site. 

The optics of reversing course and the logistics of actually evicting the garden and its supporters, are likely on the list of Mastro’s considerations as he reviews the project.  

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