Inside the Fight to Save Little Italy’s Most Romantic Garden

Elizabeth Street Garden, an unexpected patch of green nested between apartment buildings in Little Italy, does not resemble your run-of-the-mill community garden. Instead of utilitarian vegetable plots, the lot boasts half-dissembled neoclassical columns, gazebos wreathed in wrought iron flowers, and paper lanterns strung up in shade trees. Cement lions perch alongside clusters of overgrown rosebushes and beds of blackeyed Susans. The garden feels like a place that might be found on the other side of an enchanted wardrobe—full of mysterious characters, a natural home to secret pathways and hidden corners.

On a warm fall afternoon, when the garden is open to the public, it’s not uncommon to find glamorously appointed Nolita-ites Instagramming themselves in the bushes. The garden’s romantically cluttered pastiche of sculpture and untamed greenery makes an ideal site for a windswept photo-op. The garden has recently hosted a slate of high-profile designers and magazines: Lela Rose used the garden to premiere her Fall 2018 bridal collection, while U.K. Harper’s Bazaar shot Ashley Graham for the cover of their July 2017 issue there. In 2015 and 2014, Stella McCartney rented the garden to host “Garden Party”-themed fashion shows. In a 2014 interview, she told i-D that she chose the site because she “wanted to highlight these precious pockets in New York. They exist but they’re in danger, and they need to be supported, and they need to be recognized.”

McCartney was right—green spaces rarely exist without contest in downtown Manhattan, and Elizabeth Street Garden is no exception to the rule: In 2012, New York City Council member Margaret Chin helped slate the site for development into affordable senior housing as a part of a larger urban renewal plan. Formerly the location of a public school, the land that the garden sits on has been government-owned for many years, but leased month-to-month since 1991 by a neighboring gallerist and antiques-dealer, Allan Reiver. In the early 1990s, Reiver cleaned up the garbage-filled lot, planted trees, and adorned the garden with its menagerie of quirky sculptures. For decades, the garden served as a sort of half-park, half-private yard to Reiver’s business (though in recent years, Reiver has opened it to the public on a more regular basis). The city mostly overlooked the land until 2012, when Councilmember Chin’s decision quietly transferred oversight of the land to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.