One NYC artist recruited arborists and neighbors to record messages about the city's trees. She placed markers in the cement listing numbers to call to hear the recordings. (Photo by Samara Freemark)
Trees along big city streets have a rough
life. Between pollution, development,
and vandalism, street trees die off at
a pretty alarming rate. One New York
artist thinks if people knew more about
street trees, they’d appreciate them more –
and treat them better. Samara Freemark reports from New York’s “Tree
Museum”:
Transcript
Trees along big city streets have a rough
life. Between pollution, development,
and vandalism, street trees die off at
a pretty alarming rate. One New York
artist thinks if people knew more about
street trees, they’d appreciate them more –
and treat them better. Samara Freemark reports from New York’s “Tree
Museum”:
When artist Katie Holten was commissioned to do a piece commemorating Grand Concourse boulevard in the Bronx, the first thing she thought of was trees. The Concourse, after all, is lined with them. The problem was, no one else seemed to notice they were even there.
“I had conversations with people who were sitting under the trees for the shade. And I’d ask them about what they thought of the trees. And they would say, ‘oh, there aren’t any trees on the concourse.’ But they were sitting underneath one.”
And if people did notice the trees, they weren’t always thrilled they were there.
“Kids told me that trees should all be chopped down because they couldn’t see the view. A teacher told me that all trees were the same, that there was only one kind of tree.”
People didn’t pay much attention to the trees. When they did, they often abused them – which is pretty common treatment for the trees that line city streets. People pin street trees with flyers. They spray trees with grafitti. They chain their bikes around trees, stripping their bark. City buses jump curbs and plow into trees. And developers chop them down to put up new buildings.
“You can’t just stick a tree in the ground and hope for the best. It’s a really tough environment.”
In fact, half of all trees planted in New York City die.
Holten figured one way to protect street trees was to get people to understand all the good that trees do.
So she recruited arborists and neighbors to record messages about the Grand Concourse’s trees. She placed markers in the cement listing numbers to call to hear the recordings. And she called the whole thing the Tree Museum.
“There are 100 trees along the 4 miles. And each of the trees gets a small marker. So we can walk up here to 165th street and I’ll show you one. Here’s one of the markers- nice and dirty.”
(sound of dialing in)
We dial and hear…
“I’d like to a moment to say thank you to this tree. This tree is busy cooling the air and helping to keep the river clean. The leaves in the canopy above are pulling water out of the air, reducing humidity, like an AC.”
It’s not really clear how many people are actually calling in to the museum, or whether the recordings are changing anyone’s mind. But it’s a start.
Joyce Hoagy lives further up the Concourse. She recorded a message for tree number 31. And now she feels kind of possessive of it.
“This is my tree. It’s a honey locust and I’m identified by it.”
Hoagy says Bronx trees have been under particular threat lately. This year the city cut down hundreds of mature oaks to make room for the new Yankees stadium.
“One street had these giant oaks, and they formed this canopy. And on the hottest day of the year you could walk down…people didn’t know what they had till it was gone.”
So now Joyce Hoagy’s spreading the word about the Tree Museum too. She hopes it will give her neighbors a hundred reasons to care about trees around them – and watch out for them.
For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.