The Elizabeth Street Garden.
Photo: Barry Williams/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

Just before the New Year, as Eric Adams was facing down the end of his days in City Hall, his administration found time for “one final harebrained scheme,” per The Real Deal. The plot: to permanently protect Elizabeth Street Garden from future development by turning it into a public park and offering the developers trying to build housing there something they couldn’t refuse. Only the offer might not have been legal — and it didn’t even catch on. Classic Adams!

It’s another twist in a saga so twisty that it’s now strange to remember Adams had initially backed the idea of turning the city lot turned sculpture garden into apartments for seniors. But he flip-flopped in June, after bringing on Randy Mastro as his deputy mayor, and designated the garden as city parkland in November — a move that seemed designed to stop Zohran Mamdani from reviving the housing project on the site and secure Adams’s legacy as the savior of the celebrity-approved green space. But the developers who had been in line to build housing there sued, arguing the mayor can’t act “unilaterally” and skip over the city’s regular planning processes. The suit created a delay that threw the fate of the garden to the next mayor, who had already gone on the record promising to revive the housing plan for the site. The city said the development group (Pennrose Properties, Habitat for Humanity, and RiseBoro) was pausing its suit amid negotiations, but the developers themselves declined to comment, and it wasn’t clear they were on board.

Outside of the courts, Mastro was coming up with a new last-ditch scheme. On December 29, two days before his boss would have to step down as mayor, he wrote a letter to the developers, asking them to drop the lawsuit if they wanted to be selected to develop housing on another city-owned site at 22 Suffolk Street. But offering it to them seemed to override the city’s land-review process yet again. “A City Hall spokesperson could not immediately provide an explanation as to why the development of the Suffolk site was not decided by a public bidding process,” The Real Deal reported on Dec. 29. The Real Deal columnist Erik Engquist put it more bluntly yesterday: “Never have I seen the city announce a deal before it was reached.” Besides, the Adams administration’s offer of another site was far from a guarantee — the same multiyear approval process would have to be repeated all over again to get a project at Suffolk Street moving — hardly appealing, given the length of the fight they were still mired in at Elizabeth Street Garden.

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