On a cool April evening, Patti Smith stood on a makeshift stage in Nolita’s Elizabeth Street Garden and eased into the 2004 deep cut “Peaceable Kingdom.” She serenaded a crowd that was there to protest the city’s plan to build much-needed senior housing on the site. Then, the refrain “build it back again” gave way to a couple verses and the chorus of Smith’s jangly 1988 activist tune “People Have the Power,” transposed into a contemplative key.
An ageless avatar for downtown New York, Smith has publicly championed numerous political causes over the years, from civil rights to responding to climate change. That she was now standing against low-income seniors priced out of the neighborhood speaks to the ideological incoherence of the pro-garden coalition—a group of wealthy transplants and aggrieved aesthetes, NIMBY bloggers and edgelord podcasters, who together pressured the Adams administration to rescind its eviction orders. In June, the administration capitulated to their demand. Nolita’s picturesque little oasis was spared.
The Elizabeth Street Garden saga was always a struggle over competing visions of New York as a real place where working people can live versus a private playground for the rich. But the same might be said about any proposed development in any of the city’s affluent zip codes. What made this particular tempest so annoying—and revealing—was the regression of political mentalities it represented. Smith dedicated “People Have the Power” to the “mass effort to preserve the natural and ever evolving character of New York City.” Never has “mass” felt so niche.
Elizabeth Street Garden lion. Benoit Tardif
For those unfamiliar with this lower Manhattan morality play (count yourself lucky), some backstory is in order. Until 2013, the grassy plot on Elizabeth between Spring and Prince, long slated for housing development, was mostly used as a holding pen for bad statuary by the owner of an adjacent gallery, who rented it from the government on a month-to-month lease. When then-Mayor Bill de Blasio indicated that the city was finally ready to build, the gallerist—opposed to this plan—made the space accessible to the street in a bid to engender public affinity for his dime-store Arcadia.
The ploy worked. The garden quickly amassed stans, and the most influential of this set launched lengthy legal proceedings to stall construction. The Habitat for Humanity–backed project known as Haven Green promised to deliver 123 units of “deeply affordable,” income-restricted apartments, plus services for LGBT seniors. Fifty apartments would have been set aside for formerly homeless seniors with rental assistance (including those with zero income), twenty-six for households with incomes under 60 percent of area median income (AMI) (about $68,000 for one person), twenty-five for households with incomes under 40 percent of AMI (about $45,000), and twenty-two for households with incomes under 30 percent of AMI (about $34,000). The plan would have even preserved 85 percent of the current park.
In spite of these merits, social media savants, real estate goons, and wistful celebrities raced to protect the precarious green space. Martin Scorsese confessed in a letter that he wished the “beautiful, refreshing oasis” had existed when he grew up in the neighborhood, while Robert De Niro somewhat contradicted him by arguing that preserving the park would maintain the area’s “historic character.” Downtown antidevelopment stalwart Eileen Myles penned a poem lamenting the “de blah ment.” Smith threw her support behind the case brought by the Elizabeth Street Garden nonprofit in February, which contended that the lot constituted a “work of art” and so fell under the Visual Artists Rights Act. Trendy NIMBY influencers joined the chorus. One representative group, Youth Against Displacement, subscribed to the view that the garden was an important community resource worth sparing from the rapacious encroachment of development.
It’s a cartoonish simulacrum of David versus Goliath–esque standoffs of yesteryear. It’s standing athwart history yelling “affordable for whom?!” It’s Jane Jacobs’s Permanent Revolution.
While clearly not exclusively the domain of conservatives, political advocacy for the garden’s preservation had taken on a reactionary bent. Adams’s fateful decision came at the behest of some of his most unsavory cronies—homophobic and antihomeless First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro reportedly worked overtime alongside ex–chief of staff and comically corrupt real estate sleazeball Frank Carone to halt Haven Green, even after the final legal objections had been cleared. On the campaign trail, Andrew Cuomo stated that he opposed the city’s plan, and Curtis Sliwa went so far as to pledge that he would put his body in between the garden and the wrecking crew. (The rest of the candidates, including the eventual Democratic nominee, Zohran Mamdani, were pro–Haven Green. Sliwa will survive to split the opposition’s votes in the general.)
This confluence of actors, which, yes, included some Nolita denizens, proved powerful enough to stop the inevitable. But their success only accentuates their ideological divisions. It’s horseshoe theory in the shape of a one-acre lot—equal parts fake trad and fake rad.
Little more than a contrarian disposition united this oddball assortment of would-be activists. Some were skeptical of promises of affordability, which is fair in the abstract, though the Haven Green proposal did in fact provide housing for the lowest possible income levels for at least sixty years. Many countered that the project could be moved elsewhere in the vicinity, though building on a nonvacant lot would cost significantly more, decrease affordability levels, and restart a lengthy planning, financing, and permitting process, delaying housing even further. While the city’s deal to scrap Haven Green does zone for new housing elsewhere, there is no timeline for development and no developer attached to work on the projects.
Progressives in the pro-ESG camp spoke about the sense of community the garden has created, yet were blind to how this purported value could be so easily co-opted by MAGA maniacs. Above all else, supporters agreed that the garden was just too beautiful to give up, that the aesthetic value of the site should trump all.
I should clarify that I’m no abundance bro, callously indifferent to beauty, hostile to community input, and zealously calling for the raising of ugly new towers everywhere. I have spent the better part of the last decade organizing with low-income renters in New York, fighting slumlords, and expanding tenants’ rights. It’s precisely this experience that informs my desire to bring the wrecking ball to the Elizabeth Street Garden, even as this outcome is now off the table. But even more than a desire to demolish it, I want to annul a nihilistic, backward-facing way of thinking that has perniciously planted itself in the minds of too many New Yorkers, like an invasive weed proliferating among the garden’s patches of perennials.
It’s horseshoe theory in the shape of a one-acre lot—equal parts fake trad and fake rad.
The decade-long scrabble over Elizabeth Street Garden was just one of a number of similar flash points where artistically inclined New Yorkers join a preservation campaign and in doing so aim to prove some true sense of belonging, perhaps to their peers, perhaps to themselves. The same script played itself out at the East River Park, albeit with a different ending. There, Myles led efforts to halt a much-needed climate resiliency plan on the grounds that it uprooted too many trees. After The New York Times published a feature about the public housing residents who supported the plan, the poet cried foul: The white artists heading up opposition groups weren’t interlopers, as the article intimated, but long-term community members. Yet once the reconstruction work commenced, Myles “hightailed it to Marfa” because they “couldn’t take” the sight of trees being felled. The project has now been completed, with new plantings and an improved park and critical climate infrastructure in place. When I stopped by at the onset of summer, it was overflowing with New Yorkers of all stripes.
Though they may not agree on broader political issues, wealthy liberals such as Smith and Myles are more than able to find common pact with their ostensible adversaries—the likes of Cuomo, Sliwa, and Anna Khachiyan of the Red Scare podcast, who likened the Haven Green plan to a slum. The basis for their agreement lies in the privileging of an aesthetic experience of the city above all else—the left perhaps for more pure, if naive, reasons; the right in order to cater to the rich and powerful and preserve an amenity that will drive up property values. It’s a cartoonish simulacrum of David versus Goliath–esque standoffs of yesteryear. It’s standing athwart history yelling “affordable for whom?!” It’s Jane Jacobs’s Permanent Revolution.
Like it or not, New York City will continue to change, as will the communities that inhabit it. I wish that rather than building collective power for the purposes of preserving our flawed present, the enormous and expensive organizing efforts put toward saving the garden were aimed at winning a more equitable future—the type that prioritizes both low-income housing for seniors and public green space on the same lot.
Those dedicated to preserving some core essence of old New York (or at least the New York that existed when they arrived on the scene) could perhaps stand to focus more on the long-term working-class residents who shaped it. To that end I recommend joining a tenant union. Fighting against evictions and rent hikes would no doubt be a better use of one’s time. Fighting for a positive urban vision, where deeply affordable social housing is built on blocks in every borough, would be even better. “The people have the power to redeem the work of fools,” Smith sang. When it comes to the Elizabeth Street Garden, bring in the wrecking ball, yes. But let that only be the start.