Elizabeth Street Garden’s Counterpunch: Can the Park Paradise Survive?
By Susan M. Silver
After a long winter, the leafless pear trees near the entrance gates will soon display their dense white-flower netting, and floral fireworks are poised to explode in the dormant flower beds along the colonnade. Visitors to the Elizabeth Street Garden one early-March afternoon seem serenely indifferent to the delayed spring rebirth. The enchantment of ESG is perennial and palpable.
But the cherished Nolita sculpture garden has been under a death sentence for 13 years, and the protracted legal melee over the garden’s fight for life continues.
In mid-February, garden manager Joseph Reiver filed a federal lawsuit to protect the site “as a cohesive work of art” under the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA). The suit, brought by noted civil rights attorney and ESG activist Norman Siegel, “seeks to secure the Garden’s status as an irreplaceable physical and social sculpture, integral to New York City’s landscape.” As at other critical ESG junctures, this new action has been endorsed by bold-faced names: musician-writer Patti Smith, the artist JR, and The Cultural Landscape Foundation, among others.
The garden is a rare urban refuge for green dreaming, writing, coffee-drinking, and general escape from city cement. But since 2012, ESG has been locked in a legal tug of war with the City of New York, which intends to eviscerate the eclectic park paradise and replace it with affordable housing.
The Elizabeth Street Garden was the legacy of Joseph’s father, the late Allan Reiver, an archetypal Greenwich Village-style character often typed as a visionary. The senior Reiver first used what was an abandoned, garbage-filled lot as an extension of his art gallery, leasing it from the city. After learning that the city council had voted in secret to swap the one-acre space for 123 affordable housing units for seniors, he made the garden more accessible to the public through the front gates, even as he continued to develop his masterwork.
As Executive Director of the ESG Trust, Joseph Reiver is a fiercer guardian of the garden than the twin lion sculptures that have come to symbolize the fight. Reiver is a familiar figure around the space, greeting visitors and directing planting. Assisted by about 500 volunteers, he has consistently sought alternatives to the garden’s destruction, suggesting to City Hall both city- and privately- owned viable substitute sites. His argument, that housing and garden preservation need not be mutually exclusive, is a compelling one.
(Reiver and other garden reps, as well as Attorney Siegel, did not respond to repeated interview requests.)
Mayor Adams accepted Reiver’s invitation for a personal tour of the garden. After initially showing interest, seeming to sense the ESG magic, Adams concluded, “We have to house New Yorkers. The garden is a beautiful place, but there’s a great beauty to be able to house New Yorkers.” The statement misses the point that both goals are achievable.
Overlapping letter-writing campaigns, in which children, seniors, local businesses, and celebrities all pleaded for ESG’s life, resulted in more than a million communications to the mayor.
For cultural icon Patti Smith, the garden serves as a writer’s nook. Seeming to prophesy the innovative latest legal complaint, she wrote, “The Garden is not only an oasis of greenspace within our city, but truly stands as a work of art. The effort to save it is reflective of a mass effort to preserve the natural and ever evolving character of New York City.” And she added, “Affordable housing and greenspaces are both essential assets and should not [be] pitted against each other.”
Director Martin Scorsese of Goodfellas fame referenced his “concrete jungle” childhood in neighboring Little Italy: “We used to play in the alleys. There was no shade, no greenery, no respite…,” he wrote. “The make-up of Little Italy [now] may be different, but the need for a beautiful, refreshing oasis like the Elizabeth Street Garden has not changed. I wish it had been there when I was young.”
City Hall, typically, stonewalled on the letters. But the threat to padlock the prized plot of land was sidestepped by a judge’s temporary stay of eviction.
Reiver has knitted committed community members—as well as enthusiastic garden-goers from other neighborhoods and other boroughs—even more closely into the fabric of ESG by expanding a calendar of free activities. These include movie nights, concerts, tai chi classes, and events like December’s Winter Solstice Celebration.
As of this writing, the fate of the Elizabeth Street Garden continues to sway in the wind like the main lawn’s chimes, singing their erratic falsetto song. With the exception of a handful of electeds like Councilmember Christopher Marte and Assemblymember Deborah Glick, the powers that be remain gung-ho about bulldozing and building the housing project — ironically named Haven Green.
Asked in passing about the lawsuit, Joseph Reiver commented tersely, “We’ll see.”
Whatever the Universe decides, the frozen music of the garden will endure in the collective imagination and promises to linger as legend.
This is a fast-breaking story. On March 10, ESG posted a legal update to its Facebook page. Following a new eviction notice from the city, threatening to padlock the garden as early as March 24, ESG moved for emergency injunctive relief in the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) case. While a federal judge denied the injunction, on March 21, garden reps announced that they have filed an appeal to overturn the ruling, vowing to soldier on.
