Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out about a new list of “great trees” in New York City. We’ll also get details on the departures of a top official and two lower-level aides at City Hall.
Sue Donoghue agreed that she would never see a poem as lovely as a tree. But she has a list that she thinks is pretty great.
Donoghue is the commissioner of the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, which today will issue a list of 120 “great trees” in New York City — a list she called “magnificent” and “culturally significant.”
That is 0.0017 percent of the seven million trees in the city. Two of the 120 specimens on the “great tree” list are London plane trees, the most common species in the city.
The list is only the second that the city has ever compiled. The first was released almost 40 years ago, in 1985. The trees were “either so old, so huge, so unusual, so remarkably sited, so marvelously shaped or so much associated with a historic place or person” that they deserved lasting recognition, The New York Times said then.
But only 59 of the original 113 are still standing — 14 in the Bronx, 13 in Brooklyn, 14 in Manhattan and nine each in Queens and on Staten Island. (Another seven were added to the original list in 1990.)
Donoghue said that was not an unusual survival rate. “Think about what our trees have to withstand out there,” she said.
When I asked which tree on the new list was her favorite, Donoghue said she had expected that question. “It’s like asking to choose between my children,” she said.
But she mentioned one, a weeping willow in the 6/15 Green community garden at Sixth Avenue and 15th Street in Brooklyn. “I drive by it, walk by or bike by it quite often,” Donoghue said of the tree. “The way that it sets off this corner, it’s as if it’s protecting that community garden.”
The garden took shape in the late 1980s, after the original “great tree” list was issued. Neighbors cleaned a lot and put up a sign that said: “Druggies stay away.” And they started the garden.
Another tree on the new list was only four years old when the 1985 list came out: a dawn redwood in the Liz Christy Garden on East Houston Street, between Bowery and Second Avenue. The tree is now about 100 feet tall. Its trunk measures 30 inches in diameter.
Tessa Huxley, who was involved in planting that tree, remembers digging its hole — a fairly deep one. “We hit the top of what we believe was a subway tunnel,” said Huxley, a former executive director of the Green Guerrillas, the urban environmentalist group that was formed to turn the lot into a garden.
“Little did we know it would survive this long,” she said.
But longevity was not the issue, she said: “The issue was the garden.” It had grown from rubble, but “the city wasn’t too excited about having a garden there,” she said. “We were called the Green Guerrillas for a reason: There was no legal way to have a community garden on city land at the time.” The city finally ended its dispute with community gardeners in 2002, allowing some 500 gardens that had popped up in neighborhoods around the city to be left alone.
Huxley, who was later the executive director of the Battery Park City Parks Conservancy, noted that dawn redwoods were thought to have been extinct until botanists discovered live trees in China in the 1940s.
“The thing that’s pretty wonderful about them is how tolerant they are of urban conditions — pollution, drought, etc.,” she said of the trees. “I guess, if you’ve been around a million or a couple million years, you can survive a lot of things.”
Weather
Expect plenty of sunshine and temperatures in the high 60s. Tonight, the sky will be clear, with temperatures in the low 50s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Oct. 12 (Yom Kippur).
The latest New York news
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Jan. 6 rioter sentenced: A man from New Jersey and another from New York were sentenced to prison for attacking law enforcement officers during the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Around the city
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Mandatory curbside composting: The waste-reduction program that is in operation in Brooklyn and Queens is expanding to the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island. New Yorkers across the five boroughs are now required to separate their food scraps and yard waste from their trash.
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Vegetarian dining: Priya Krishna, a Food reporter and interim restaurant critic, visited a dozen of the city’s top restaurants to gauge how well they accommodate vegetarian diners. Some were welcoming, some discouraging.
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A case for nonfiction: Alissa Wilkinson, a Times movie critic, is excited about the prominent role given to documentaries at this year’s New York Film Festival.
At City Hall, 3 departures
The turmoil at City Hall continued with three more departures on Monday.
One was Philip Banks, the deputy mayor for public safety. The two others were lower-level aides who have also figured in the federal investigations that are swirling around City Hall.
One of the two lower-level staff members — Winnie Greco, the mayor’s director of Asian affairs — also resigned. The other, Rana Abbasova, who had cooperated in the federal investigation that led to the mayor’s indictment last month, was fired.
A spokesman for City Hall declined to say why, but an administration official said the dismissal was not a retaliatory move because Adams himself did not dismiss her — someone else in the administration did. She had been on unpaid leave for more than six months. Her attorney, Rachel Maimin, declined to comment.
In all, four federal investigations have enveloped Adams and his inner circle. The three departures came less than two weeks after prosecutors unsealed a five-count corruption indictment against the mayor.
Investigators seized Banks’s phones last month as part of a separate investigation into a possible bribery scheme, and also seized the phones of Banks’s brother David Banks, the schools chancellor, who will step down next week, and Sheena Wright, the first deputy mayor. Wright, who married David Banks in a ceremony on Martha’s Vineyard on Sept. 28, is expected to follow her brother-in-law and her husband and resign soon.
The inquiry involves another brother, Terence Banks, a retired train supervisor for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority who set up a consulting firm and represented clients with business before agencies overseen by his brothers.
Adams said on Monday that Philip Banks was leaving City Hall by choice. “He reached out to me and stated, ‘Eric, I’m looking to move on, and this is a good time to do so,’” Mr. Adams said during an interview on NY1.
The mayor said that Banks had wanted to leave about six months ago, but Adams had persuaded him to stay. “I said, ‘Listen, we got a couple of things in the pipeline. Can you please hold on and get them done?’ And he was willing to do that, and I appreciate him for that.”
A lawyer for Philip Banks, Benjamin Brafman, said in a statement that the prosecutors overseeing the inquiry focused on the brothers had “advised me that Mr. Banks was not a target of their investigation, and nothing about his resignation changes that fact.”
Banks and Adams have known each other since they were police officers in the 1980s, but Banks was an unusual choice for deputy mayor. He left the police department abruptly in 2014, and federal prosecutors later referred to him as an unindicted co-conspirator in a corruption investigation. The prosecutors said he had accepted paid vacations, cigars and even a ring worn by Muhammad Ali from two businessmen who sought power through connections to New York City leaders during the administration of Adams’s predecessor, Mayor Bill de Blasio. Banks was not charged with a crime.
METROPOLITAN diary
Bar cat
Dear Diary:
I was on a first date in a crammed bar on the Lower East Side. Just after we sat down at the bar, I felt a tickle on my leg.
I looked down and saw a bag that the woman sitting next to me had put on a hook under the bar.
She apologized, and we both joked that it felt like a cat and agreed that the bar should get a house cat.
The woman got up to leave after about 20 minutes. She said goodbye and grabbed her bag.
“I’m taking the cat with me,” she said.
— Mack Rosenberg
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters, Luke Caramanico and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post New York Has 7 Million Trees. Here Are 120 Great Ones. appeared first on New York Times.
