Elizabeth Street Garden Faces Eviction
TAKE ACTION NOW - The Elizabeth Street Garden has been served and eviction notice - contact New York Governor Kathy Hochul and ask her to stop New York City Mayor Eric Adams from evicting this urban gem.
It's been touch and go for years since 2018 when The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) first began advocating for the New York City's Elizabeth Street Garden, a unique and idiosyncratic oasis created by the late Allan Reiver who began transforming what was a vacant and overgrown one-acre city owned plot starting in 1991. It was leased to Reiver on a month-to-month basis and became the site for an assortment of neoclassical sculpture and architectural artifacts. The statuary collection includes a pair of marble columns and an iron gazebo designed by Olmsted Brothers for Burrwood (the former home of Walter Jennings) and a stone-and-granite balustrade designed by French landscape architect Jacques-Henri-Auguste Gréber. The garden also became a beloved gathering place that included musical performances, movie screenings, and other activities - nearly 200 each year - in a section of Lower Manhattan starved of public park space.
At the end of 2017, the city announced that the Elizabeth Street Garden would be replaced with Haven Green, a mixed-use housing project that would have 123 apartments and some 6,700 square feet of open space, a faction of the existing site. Since then there have been a string of court cases and a sustained public advocacy campaign that has yielded more than one million messages to Mayor Adams, and support for the garden from bold face names including actor Robert DeNiro, director Martin Scorsese, and musician/poet Patti Smith. On October 2, 2024, the city issued an eviction notice that required the garden to vacate the site by October 17. The day before that deadline an appellate court judge issued a stay and has scheduled a hearing for October 30.
The Elizabeth Street Garden needs your help RIGHT NOW. Click on this link to contact New York Governor Kathy Hochul and ask her to stop Mayor Adams from destroying this irreplaceable and beloved jewel.
