when i go to a new city, i always look up which parks i should go to. i like to know about green spaces to walk in, to sit in, to enjoy a morning coffee in. a place to see birds and to meet up with friends in the area. to be surrounded by foliage or flowers or both.
of course, new york city is not a new city to me — i’ve spent many months here across friend visits and work trips. but in a practical sense, it’ll always be a new city. there’s an ever-replenishing number of restaurants and cafes to visit and an uncountable number of parks to sit in.
the elizabeth street garden is, if you’d believe the name, not a park. it’s not going to show up in the lists of the top 5 or 15 must-see parks in manhattan, let alone new york city. those lists are based off of size usually, and history — of which this garden has relatively little publicly available.
but it is green, it has chairs and benches aplenty, it has flowers and birds and children playing. it’s tucked into Nolita, and when i came across it last week, i realized it wasn’t even my first time there. i’d come there to sit to eat some food from a food truck the taste of which i have now since forgotten during a street fair seven years ago. i’d forgotten about the garden too.
that’s okay, because i’ve gotten older, i’ve learned to Notice a lot more, and i’m sure this garden has seen more too. this time, i was reintroduced to it with a latte in hand from caffe paradiso across the street. the latte was iced on a hot day, and caffeinated on an early morning. and it was perhaps because it was an early morning that there were so many birds around. not a variety, mind you, every single one was a house sparrow, but there were many, swooping above our heads and hop-hop-hopping across the ground.
and it was nice to sit and enjoy my coffee under the shade of trees during a heat wave, watching the birds walk and admiring the moss growing on the walls, first with Isha, and then alone after she went to go explore. i watched a group of women try to pick much-too-young apples off of an overflowing tree. and i smiled at a toddler who joyously smiled back and showed me a fallen tree branch he found and was dragging behind him, the leaves tracing a trail.
the space was filled with chairs pulled up into circles by groups of people talking, and benches filled with couples and one very-well-dressed woman having a photoshoot with sprawling vines. and between the groups were stone statues of eagles and columns and two lions both facing east and two sphinxes facing each other and a random large skull and a greyhound dog and a man playing the flute, but the flute seems to have broken off.
and before i could figure out why one of the lions was covered in vines and the other one wasn’t, Isha found me to bring me to a bush of lavender that had a few wandering bumblebees but one beautiful light yellow butterfly making a meandering path, trying its earnest to smell each lavender stalk. a few feet away, there is a patch of purple coneflowers with many bees doing the same, but they seem to be more organized in their approach. there’s some succulents and a lot more flowers and a large japanese pagoda tree with some new growth.
and Isha and i strolled and sniffed and stalked some more buzzing bumblebees trying to notice if they were following a pattern, before coming back to the first lavender bush fifteen minutes later where the butterfly still was, no more complete in its journey than we are in ours.
apparently a century ago, where the garden now lies, there used to be a public school. and today, there’s a desire to build affordable housing on the site. i don’t have the context as a non-resident to opine, but providing public housing for folks in an increasingly-expensive city seems like a valuable opportunity for an affordability crisis. and if the garden is to be replaced, this love letter is to document the inherently impermanent beauty i was able to see in it.
i just hope there remains some patches of lavender, so that future light yellow butterflies and buzzing bumblebees can sniff to their hearts’ content, and i can come visit them.
Ross would be proud