Paul Bass Photos
Severed sycamore section, en route to mulching.
Holtorff and Fernandez make final visit to beloved tree.
A couple of yellow-crowned night herons will need to find a new springtime home, after a state crew took down their century-old sycamore along with nine other trees by the juncture of Sea Street and Greenwich Street.
The tree removal took place Thursday, drawing the ire of neighbors who lamented the loss of a feature of their historic stretch of City Point.
Tree removal tends to be an emotional subject in City Point, where towering, graceful trees contribute to the residential streets’ historic character. Neighbors had resigned themselves to the fact that the state Department of Transportation (DOT) needed to remove a line of sycamores along Sea Street to make way for a traffic-calming roundabout as part of the broader I‑95 widening project. Those nine trees are on state-owned property.
DOT agreed not to take down two trees it had originally targeted. But an honest miscommunication had left people believing that the sycamore right around the corner on Greenwich, plus one other, wouldn’t come down, according to Anna Mariotti, who lives on Sea Street and has worked with DOT on behalf of the neighborhood. So no one filed complaints with the city tree warden when a sign went up on those trees announcing their imminent removal.
It turns out DOT needed to take down the Greenwich Street tree to make way for a new driveway at a corner property that is losing its existing driveway to the roundabout.
Seacord admonishes Bombero.
The tree warden — city parks chief Rebecca Bombero — started hearing early from upset neighbors Thursday morning when the trees started coming down, as did Mariotti.
“This is a very tight knit neighborhood. The stately trees make a big, big difference, said Sandy Fernandez, a magazine writer who lives in a circa-1910 home across Greenwich Street from the sycamore with her husband Rob Holtorff, an audio engineer with the U.S. Coast Guard band.
They learned from a neighbor that a previous owner of their home planted that tree in the early 1900s. They noticed the pair of yellow-crowned night herons nesting there three or four years ago. The couple has returned to the tree each spring, while its offspring have begun nesting in a tree on Fernandez’s property.
“It’s a beautiful old tree. Trees like that are history,” Fernandez said. “You don’t get back history.”
Even though the public comment period had expired, Bombero asked DOT for a temporary reprieve for the Greenwich sycamore while crews took down the nine trees on Sea in the morning. She met with DOT staffers at their nearby I‑95 project office. She concluded that even if she had held a public hearing, she still would have ended up allowing the tree to come down, she said. “Within the next few years, this tree would have had to come down” anyway because of its declining health.
So, as neighbors like Willie Kearney (“They can take it down; looks like it’s going to fall down soon anyway”) looked on, the state’s contractor, Middlesex Corp. of Massachusetts, got to the Greenwich sycamore after a lunch break.
Neighbor Warren Seacord, a landscape architect, gave Bombero a piece of his mind. (Click on the video to watch a sample.) Seacord called the trees’ removal “a scandal,” and “catastrophic.”
“Without trees,” he said, “you can’t live.”
The crew’s climber, T.J. (he declined to give his last name) ascended to the top branches and began rigging them to a crane.
T.J. sawed branches, at which point the crane operator lowered them to the ground …
… where the operator of a Doosan excavator with a saw-equipped rotating claw chopped up the wood so that the crew could feed it into a chipper.
Then T.J. took his Husqvarna chainsaw to the trunk, preparing it for …
… toppling by a Caterpillar excavator. At which point the new look was completed for a corner of City Point.
