Developers that had been slated to build affordable housing on a city-owned Manhattan lot long home to Elizabeth Street Garden sued the city Wednesday to challenge the city’s recent sudden designation of the property as parkland.
The development, known as Haven Green, would comprise 123 affordable apartments for seniors with public green space on the site in Nolita. The project had been in the works in partnership with the city’s housing agency for about a decade, led by developers Pennrose, Habitat for Humanity and RiseBoro Community Partnership.
The city had long pushed to build housing on the site, successfully fending off lawsuits that sought to maintain the garden as-is.
But in an about-face just weeks before the mayor’s term ends, the Adams administration moved to cancel the housing project earlier this month, reclassifying Elizabeth Street Garden as parkland in order to preclude building housing there.
The new designation took the developers by surprise, and they argued in the lawsuit, filed in Manhattan State Supreme Court, that the move was “a lawless act.”
The lawsuit warns that if the city’s actions were allowed to stand, they would create a “dangerous precedent” of City Hall acting to overturn a project that had been approved through a formal public process.
“This proclamation, issued without authority, without process, without public input, and without any supporting administrative record, was designed to accomplish by fiat what a small cohort of ESG supporters had repeatedly failed to achieve through law: the destruction of a duly approved and urgently needed affordable housing development,” the lawsuit alleges.
Elizabeth Street Garden, Nov. 19, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
The developers say in their court filing that they aim to “restore the integrity of the land-use process, to vindicate the rule of law, and to prevent an outgoing administration from destroying an urgently needed affordable-housing project through an act of naked executive power,” the lawsuit stated.
In a statement, Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro — who is a defendant in the case — called the lawsuit “meritless.”
“We are committed to ensuring Elizabeth Street Garden remains a beloved community park,” Mastro said. “Designating this space as parkland will make the park fully accessible to the public while also allowing us to allocate Parks Department resources to the garden. It is unfortunate that these developers have now brought a frivolous lawsuit to try to leverage a better deal in negotiations with the city.”
The saga of Elizabeth Street Garden goes back for many years.
Allan Reiver, an antique dealer who ran a gallery next to the Nolita lot, leased the then-vacant site from the city in the early 1990s. He stored some sculptures there and eventually transformed it into a park-like pocket. Upon learning of plans to develop housing on the site, he allowed people to access the garden from the gallery.
Over time, the garden, eventually run by a nonprofit helmed by Reiver’s son, held events and offered public hours, growing to become a beloved oasis for many locals.
Efforts to “save” Elizabeth Street Garden from becoming the site of housing drew in deep-pocketed and famous supporters, including Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro and Patti Smith.
The city had first supported Haven Green and even went to court to defend the project when garden supporters sued to try to stop the development. They were unsuccessful.
But in June, the Adams administration reversed its stance.
Mastro — who joined the administration in March following the departures of high-level staffers who supported Haven Green — cut a deal with Councilmember Chris Marte (D-Manhattan) to forgo housing on the garden and instead rezone three other sites in the district to build over 600 new apartments. (The promised outcome is not so simple to achieve and would take a number of years to come to fruition.)
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani said he supported moving forward with the long-planned affordable housing project at Elizabeth Street Garden, and would evict the garden in the first year of his mayorship.
The Adams administration’s move to reclassify the property as parkland appeared to be an attempt to thwart Mamdani, since building on parkland would require special approval from the state legislature.
