Gideon Gil, the current president of the Macdougal-Sullivan Garden Association, said the springtime ritual is no longer an annual occurence because the garden, with its old-growth trees, has become more complicated to maintain.

Still, Mr. Gil, who works in commercial real estate and moved to the area in 2005 with his wife, Debra Perelman, the daughter of the businessman Ronald O. Perelman, said there are events like weddings, memorial services for deceased residents and “an unbelievable turnout when it comes to the Halloween party.” Indeed, with the arrival of Mr. Lurhmann, Halloween in the garden has in recent years become a full-scale Hollywood production.

As Mr. Elffers put it, philosophically, “The nature of the garden over the decades changes.”

Urban Fireflies

Alden Duer Cohen is the oldest and most tenured resident of the garden. Her father, Leland B. Duer, a lawyer, was one of the founding homeowners. Her mother, Marjorie, was the first “chairman of the civic committee.” After renting for many years, Ms. Cohen and her husband bought a house on the Sullivan Street side and raised four children there.

Sitting in the tiny ground-floor kitchen of that same house, with its pegboard wall organizer, Ms. Cohen said: “We bought for $50,000. And that was the most that had ever been paid for a house in the garden. And I thought, ‘What are we doing?’ That was 1960.’”

Ms. Cohen, a retired journalist and literary agent, is guarded about her age but said she grew up on the garden in the ’30s and remembers many of her long-gone neighbors: Dan Fuller, who had two daughters and ran a fabrics company; Richard Kellogg, who lived with his mother and sister and self-published a history of the garden; Mary Rower, who “always made the ham” for the Digging Day potluck.

And Ms. Cohen noted with regret the absence of young families, the loss of some of the communal togetherness, the cessation of Digging Day. “All of the cooperation that happened in the garden you suddenly realized happened because people didn’t have the money to sponsor gardeners,” Ms. Cohen said. “Every year, it seems to me, something gets dropped. And I think it’s sad.”