The Elizabeth Street Garden will not be Developed by the City
By Manhattan Real Estate Tracker, August 8, 2025
The Elizabeth Street Garden will remain a permanent public green space under a new agreement announced July 23, 2025 by Mayor Eric Adams.
The original proposal was for the city to build an affordable housing development on the site of the Elizabeth Street Garden. Now instead the city will construct more than 600 new affordable housing units across three alternate sites in Lower Manhattan including the Financial District, the Lower East Side, SoHo and Tribeca. The original plan for the site included 123 units of affordable senior housing and a new public garden space.
Mayor Adams stated, “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.”
Rezoning efforts for three separate locations in the surrounding area at 156-166 Bowery in Nolita, 22 Suffolk St. on the Lower East Side and 100 Gold St. in the Financial District will be undertaken. The Bowery site in Nolita is anticipated to include at least 123 affordable apartments for seniors.
The Elizabeth Street Garden is a one-acre community sculpture garden in Nolita at Elizabeth Street between Prince and Spring Streets. The garden is owned by the city government and managed by the Elizabeth Street Garden (ESG) nonprofit and is available for the public for general use and community events.
Under the new agreement, the garden will expand its hours to the public from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and it is possible that it may become one of the city Department of Parks and Recreation’s green spaces. However, the city said it will retain the right to revisit plans for housing for the garden site if the rezoning for the three new alternate sites does not go forward.