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Ask the average Downtown Manhattanite about their favorite NYC garden, and you’re likely to hear about Elizabeth Street Garden, a beautiful green oasis near Soho featuring statues and hedges that look like they were pulled straight out of a British film set.
But if you’ve been on social media at all in recent weeks, then you know that the current green space may disappear: the city, which owns the property on which the garden sits, wants to sell it to a developer to transform it into affordable housing for senior citizens, according NBC New York.
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Elizabeth Street Garden as we know it today was created in the 1990s, opened to the public in 2016, and has since then hosted community events, including yoga classes and concerts that are free and open to anyone passing by.
New York City actually took over the space in 2012, when it marked the garden for affordable housing.
The plan set in motion is for 123 units of affordable housing for seniors, with 50 units set aside for currently homeless seniors and will be developed by Pennrose, RiseBoro Community Partnership and Habitat for Humanity.
According to the the Department of Housing Preservation, it is committed to including more than 14,000 square feet of open space for the community to use.
In the years since the project was announced, the garden’s leadership team has taken the city to court and won in the State Supreme Court but lost in appeals twice, according to the New York Times.
If the plan to remove the Elizabeth Street Garden does indeed go through, it’ll be torn down on September 10.
In a last ditch effort to save the garden, several prominent New Yorkers, including Patti Smith, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, wrote letters to Mayor Eric Adams this week. But even before that, local senior residents and elementary school students signed a letter to halt the garden's destruction.
Elizabeth Street Garden's website currently includes a link to a legal fund to help the garden stay open, as well as a proposal to Mayor Adams that presents alternative locations where the housing complex could be built, including 388 Hudson Street in the West Village. According to the advocates of the garden, the address is comparable to the garden in size and features.
The proposal notes that the Elizabeth Street Garden serves as a resting spot for migrating Monarch Butterflies, contains native plants and is a wildlife habitat that is recognized by the National Wildlife Federation.
As of now, it seems like the plans for the garden will go through in a couple of weeks.