Elizabeth Street Garden

I recently discovered the Elizabeth Street Garden in Little Italy, which is beautiful and quiet and very unassuming. It is midway up the square block that has Elizabeth Street to the east, Mott to the west, Prince to the north, and Spring to the south. The entrance is on Elizabeth between Prince and Spring:

Here's a look facing west from just inside the entrance:

And facing east from the Mott Street side of the garden:

A cool feature of the garden is that it has many sculptures and objects scattered about the grounds. 

There's something about this sitting figure that I really liked:

The garden is not usually crowded, and there are plenty of places to sit.

There aren't any big streets surrounding the garden, so traffic and general noise is pretty minimal.
 
The garden is a certified wildlife habitat, which is pretty great.

The notice to the right in the above photo is about the danger of the garden being destroyed to make way for affordable housing. People in the community are trying to fight this. 

The garden's website says that it is a rare patch of nature in the neighborhood, and "Little Italy and SoHo account for 23 percent of [Community Board] 2’s population but have only 3 percent of its open space, nearly all of which is paved..." 

There are representatives, along with parks and community groups, that are supporting the cause to save the garden. I hope they succeed, because even though affordable housing is important, green spaces in the city are valuable and necessary for peoples' health and well-being. Maybe there's another space that could be used for the housing, because as the garden's website says, "Green space, once developed, can never be reclaimed, and no one is tearing down buildings to create parks."

One of my recent visits to the garden was on Earth Day, which was April 22. There were some nice signs in the garden for the day, and they also had a tree planting event scheduled in the late afternoon.

While I was visiting on Earth Day, a crochet artist named London Kaye was hanging up some works on the outside fence of the garden on Elizabeth Street. 

On her Instagram post of them, she wrote:

SOLAR SYSTEM #earthday #londonkaye #yarnbomb #esgsaveourgarden

Fortunately they were still there when I visited the garden several days later:

Here are some nice plants in the garden.

It was fascinating to see these folks just sprouting:

I don't know what this structure was, or is, but it has an interesting shape:

And this little birdhouse was just... can I use the word precious?

A few more looks inside the garden:

I wish I knew what this device was. It looks interesting:

I suppose I don't have much more to say about the Elizabeth Street Garden. But since a picture is worth a thousand words, I've already pretty much written a short novel about it. Anyway it's a wonderful place, so visit if you can. And let's hope it's still there in the years ahead.