The Street Tree Considered

Mount Vernon Square Tree

Years before creating his award-winning designs for urban plazas and parks, legendary landscape architect Lawrence Halprin studied trees. Street trees, to be precise. In a meticulously detailed article for an architectural magazine, he sketched the patterns, colors, and shape of their canopies, leaves, and seeds, noting nuisances or special features in loving detail. In a way, I find it fitting. Trees are an important component to the construction of outdoor urban space, a living framework to the city itself.

The urban tree can be an irreverent challenge to city order: obscuring our beloved buildings, taking root where they are unwanted, and up-heaving our delicate sidewalks with their persistent growth. Else, they can be embraced by the hardscaping, celebrated as landmarks.

Treebox

Taras Shevchenko Monument

Grove Triangle

Their form itself contains an architectural quality, the branches supremely evolved supports for a delicate canopy of leaves, the city’s ceiling.

Mount Vernon Square Tree

Sculpture

leaves

A tree can be a memory of a past pattern or time: in Cape Town, South Africa, an effort to eradicate a mixed-race neighborhood during apartheid was survived by a hardy date palm, surviving to the present day amid acres of grassy wasteland. In Georgetown, the rhythm of trees seen below documents the former route of a street long cut short.

Rose Park

The tree provides shape and structure to the street; an unpleasant street and a treeless street are nearly synonymous, a point not lost on a Greensboro, North Carolina urbanist who finds trees the major difference between a desolate street an an inviting one. Here, the lived experience of an urbane street is revealed to contain a highly regular rhythm of trees in plan view.

O St NW

Street Trees

The tree takes on additional burdens in the suburban context, defining the very boundary of the street. Is this a street lined with homes, or lush foliage?

View to Metro Station

Trees have been recognized as indispensable to livable cities: they are natural air conditioners and purifiers, and perhaps necessary to help combat global warming. The organization Casey Trees has gone so far as to assign dollar values to the trees in Washington, D.C.: according to their formula, a Willow Oak outside my front door is worth $12,226.

Carter G. Woodson Park

Many cities celebrate their trees with surveys and press releases announcing their calculated value. Their benefits come with one caveat – at least one allergist fears the over planting of male trees may boost pollen levels in urban areas.

The subtle impact of trees on cities can extend far beyond aesthetics and air. One researcher found that people are willing to spend more in business districts with trees than without them. Another found that, among 28 architecturally identical high-rise apartments, residents of buildings with trees had better relations with neighbors and experienced less violence.

Rhodes Island Avenue NW

As central as trees are to a city’s life, they have a role to play in death. Ailanthus altissima, made famous at Betty Smith’s tree growing in Brooklyn, can grow in highly polluted soils with no human care. In Detroit, German artist Ingo Vetter found the trees (known locally as “ghetto palms”) helped him understand the decaying cityscape: “… from their height, you could guess about the time these places were left abandoned.”

One imagines when our cities shrink, in forested areas it will be our garden and street trees who will repopulate the place, obscuring the remnants of our industry with their quiet canopy.

Rock Creek Park

Author: Rob Goodspeed

Comments

  1. As a Chicagoan, I always thought that Chicagoans cared most about our trees. We certainly would not allow things like powerlines to cut through them. The non-buried powerlines or at least lines not hidden in alleys — has always been shocking to me. It strikes me as a very southern (read: corner cutting, anti-regulation) way of handling the situation. There are parts of the Chicagoland area that have had undergrounded powerlines since the 19th century! And we did a much better job of not just planting the trees and then letting them sit and die of thirst.

    Metro-DC does have a handle on planting forests, though. Perhaps that’s just the way the growing season works, but I’m always amazed at the wilderness effect of the area. Chicago wasn’t quite so “wild” unless it was specifically a forest-preserve. One would assume though that there were trees to begin with (like a greenway). But look at photos of Arlington or McLean in the 50s — which appear to have been developed in a forest, now — and you realize that much of that land was clear cut.

  2. Can I use one of your images of a street tree scene for my upcoming newsletter from the Glass Garden, a non-profit botanic garden/horticultural therapy program in the middle of new york city. The image is the one with the bicycle. It’s from Rob Goodspeed’s b;og, “The Street Tree Considered”, posted 7/26/07, filed under District of Columbia, Street Trees, Urban Development

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