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September 17, 2010

Thousands of Trees Killed by New

York Tornadoes
By N. R. KLEINFIELD and ELISSA GOOTMAN
As National Weather Service officials declared Friday that two tornadoes had indeed
swept into New York City on Thursday, some tree-lined streets in Brooklyn and Queens
looked - at least from the air - like Lego masterpieces that angry children had done their
best to sweep aside.

Some were more than a century old but still sturdy and doing their jobs. Many others
were young and willowy, just getting going. Some of them were inscrutable; no one truly
knew them or how they got there. But others felt like old friends. They were wonderful for
their blissful shade, to climb, to simply stare at and admire.

They were the most visible evidence of the fleeting but brutal storm that barged through
New York City on Thursday evening: the ravaged trees.

There was a beloved scarlet oak that had stood forever in a farm family’s cemetery in
Queens. There was a Callery pear that parrots preferred on a street in Brooklyn. Trees
that had stories to them that were now prematurely finished.

The tragedy of the storm, which meteorologists said Friday included two tornadoes, was
Aline Levakis, 30, from Mechanicsburg, Pa., the sole person to die, when a tree, as it
happened, hit her car on the Grand Central Parkway in Queens.

Buildings and houses were severely damaged, thousands of customers lost electricity and
many commuters were inconvenienced.

But destroyed were thousands of trees — trees torn out of sidewalks, others flung 30 or
40 feet through the air, still others shorn of branches, cracked in two.

On Friday, as the city plowed ahead in the painstaking process of cleaning up the
wreckage and repairing damage, it was still too early to tabulate a reliable tree death
count.

The city has over 100 species and more than five million trees, some as old as 250.
Clearly the loss was great.

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Adrian Benepe, the city’s parks commissioner, estimated that as many as 2,000 of the
650,000 street trees had been killed or else so crippled that they would have to be cut
down.

Mr. Benepe said hundreds of the two million trees in the parks were killed or damaged
beyond hope. Hundreds more lost limbs.

Storms periodically batter the city’s trees. A freak storm in August of last year toppled
about 500 trees in Central Park.

The storm on Thursday left Manhattan and the Bronx virtually unscathed but was
merciless in the other boroughs.

“It’s hard to compare to previous storms,” Mr. Benepe said, “but given the brevity of the
storm, the extent of the damage seems unparalleled.”

As workers began carving up the trees and trucking them away, they found decimated
oaks, Norway maples, catalpas, and more and more.

Mr. Benepe said the older, larger trees, like the maples, oaks and London planes that
were planted along city streets, suffered worst. They have a lot of leaf surface that catches
the wind, and they are inflexible.

Many Callery pears, with their showy white blossoms, also went. Although smaller, they
are weak-wooded.

The storm wiped out a dozen or so willow trees lining Willow Lake and Meadow Lake in
Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens. Some of them fell into the lakes.

On the blocks around Juniper Valley Park in Middle Village, Queens, hundreds of elderly
elms, oaks and maples succumbed. Youngsters — 7 to 10 years old — were yanked out like
matchsticks and whipped through the area.

Robert Holden, president of the Juniper Park Civic Association, walked around the
bruised neighborhood on Friday snapping pictures of fallen timber.

One majestic tree, regarded as the neighborhood’s treasure, was an immense scarlet oak
in the Pullis Farm Cemetery, an early American farm family burial ground. It was
believed to be more than 110 years old. It was a beauty, just about perfectly symmetrical.

“When you touched the tree, you felt like you were touching a part of the 19th century,”
Mr. Holden said.

The storm tore it down, ending its long life in a blink.

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“This hit me the hardest,” Mr. Holden said. “Some people said can we pick it up and put it
back? But you can’t.”

In All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village stood another cherished tree, a towering live oak
thought to be 180 years old. It was about 90 feet tall. After the storm, all that remained
was the bottom 12 feet.

“It was a cool-looking tree,” said Daniel C. Austin Jr., the cemetery’s vice president. “It
had these beautiful arms. Every time we drove by it, we used to talk about it.”

Grief was palpable in Forest Hills Gardens, a private nest of Tudor and Georgian homes
in Queens that is one of the city’s greenest neighborhoods, home to hundreds of trees.

It was only recently that the residents’ association planted 70 more — maples, oaks and
London planes. These newcomers, so much life left in them, bore the brunt of the storm.

Edward and Vera Ward, who live just outside the enclave, stroll through the
neighborhood every day, drawn by the serenity and welcoming shade of the tall trees.

On Friday, Mr. Ward, 58, was snapping pictures of men sawing a supine tree into bits.

“It’s like a part of me is gone,” he said, and his eyes welled up.

An elderly man was mourning a maple tree that he had planted outside his house on
Dartmouth Street when he was a teenager. It grew as he grew. It was one more that the
storm took.

In Park Slope, Brooklyn, a Callery pear tree stands across the street from the house of
Nick Lerman, 27, a Brooklyn College student. Almost two-thirds of its canopy had been
ripped off.

“I’m looking at maybe 37 percent of a tree,” Mr. Lerman said. “Now it kind of looks like a
bald guy with half a tonsure.”

He said parrots shuttled back and forth from the tree to the one across from it. He said he
hoped that the tree would live, that the parrots would still have it.

Reuben Slater had his own tree-loss story. He is 13 and lives in Park Slope. When he
walks to school, he passes a massive ash tree with a trunk that gives way to branches that
form a V. When he was younger, he thought of it as the tree of life.

The storm carved off half the V. The tree is expected to survive, but to no longer resemble
its old self. That saddens Reuben. He sees a tree “with a broken arm.”

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He snatched a small branch off the ground. He said he would keep it in his room. “I’m
going to name it Pablo,” he said. “I’ve always loved that name.”

Fernanda Santos and Rebecca White contributed reporting.

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