The Elizabeth Street Garden Fight Should Never Have Happened

New York has a perverse way of amplifying a dispute over a half-acre lot into a protracted cold war. Endless hours and untold millions in lawyers’ fees have been poured into the saga of the Elizabeth Street Garden, which pitted the forces of housing against the defenders of greenery and has finally ended with a compromise that could have been reached a dozen years ago, if only the various parties had valued flexible thinking over hardened positions. On one side sit pro-housing progressives who saw the…