From the New York City of my youth to the tiny Italian hilltop town where I now spend my advancing years – I’ve come full circle with planting trees.
Fifty-three years ago this summer, I started my first full-time job. I was put in charge of a program of planting trees throughout the five boroughs of New York City. “In charge” might be hyperbole, since I was employed by the landscape architecture firm that had a consulting contract with the City. A senior manager in the City administration officially managed the program. And the highly regarded Parks Commissioner, August Heckscher, had concocted the annual program, so he got the credit.
Then Mayor John Lindsay also touted this upbeat example of public investment, even though the early 1970s were one of the worst periods for quality of life in New York. The city was a cesspool of rotting garbage, dangerous subways, frequent break-ins and burglaries, and random muggings – all neatly depicted in the thrilling heist film The Taking of Pelham 123 – the actual name of the subway line that I took several times a week. Hardly comforting. Oh, and in the first two weeks of arriving, I was robbed of everything I owned.
But back to the tree planting program. Regardless of the official chain of command, I was the one on the front line, responsible for making sure the tree plantings were carried out and carried out well. No pressure.
The job involved picking up a rental car in the morning, driving to a dozen different neighborhoods in a day, and determining where trees could be planted along streets. The program required that the residents and businesses along any given block come up with half the cost. The City would provide the other half. In my position, I had both the bureaucrats and the public at large to answer to. Everyone knows that fighting two fronts is untenable.
The job was complicated by the fact that, for more than a hundred years, various utility companies had installed lines for gas, water, power, fire hydrants, cable TV, and sewer leading from the buildings to the main “trunk” lines running along the street. If any one of those lines were broken during the planting of trees, havoc would ensue.
I had to rely on photocopies of old, hand-drawn maps to find precise locations in between various pipes where a 4 x 4-foot hole would not result in a street repair crew descending on the scene like a SWAT team – a small army of backhoes, dump trucks, jackhammers, asphalt spreaders, and a 10-ton roller.
Incredibly, over two years, only once did a break occur. And it was due to an error on a map, not my fault – thankfully. I had to be very careful with my assessment, so I resorted to marking the exact corners of each rectilinear hole with spray paint. That might have landed me in hot water as this was the era when spray-painted graffiti was beginning to cover blank building walls and subway cars inside and out. It was a potent symbol of failed public-sector maintenance, one still shown in movies today and instantly recognizable as New York.
Despite the potentially suspicious activity, I was never interrupted. From time to time, residents came out to ask me to put a tree in front of their house. A few shopkeepers implored me NOT to put a tree in front of their business. Aside from those occasional disruptions, I was pretty much left alone. Once, an elderly Irish woman invited me in for tea and presented me with a gift of a hand-made handkerchief. An Italian housewife in Queens wanted to have a chat in her living room, with all the chairs, sofas, and lampshades covered in a thin protective plastic.
On one outing, I turned a corner and found myself surrounded by a sea of gregarious people in long black coats – it was a lively Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn. With my tan pants and sneakers, bundle of maps, and a spray can, I would easily have been picked out in the children’s picture book Where’s Waldo?
While I held that job, I oversaw the planting of thousands of trees. When I have visited New York in years since then, I have seen some of those trees – now mature – their high leafy branches creating green canopies over the street and admitting a dappled light onto the sidewalks. I was not fully aware of the science back then, but many studies have demonstrated the benefits of urban trees with respect to air quality, ambient cooling, and even property values.
In 1989, Tony Hiss wrote in The New Yorker about the last working farm in New York City. He eloquently reminded readers of the importance of experiencing living vegetation on a daily basis. Hiss went on to write a book expanding on this, The Experience of Place, which is still considered seminal. His words had a profound effect on me and my subsequent professional life. I recall being deeply affected by the impact of trees on daily life since I observed the result myself.
Flash forward to today, 2024, and my wife and I now live in an Italian village that dates back more than a thousand years. It’s almost entirely devoid of trees. Roughly 1,000 feet by 1,000 feet, it’s smaller than Seattle’s Pioneer Square where we lived before the move. Trees are found in parks and piazzas, but otherwise hard surfaces dominate in every direction and dimension, whether granite cobblestones, stone or brick walls, and terracotta roof tiles. I planted two trees in our garden, but that’s an exception for a domestic garden here, known as an orto. Such a garden is for the practical purpose of growing vegetables to eat.
Are we bereft of exposure to trees? Not really. Rather, we are embedded in a different intersection between horticulture and urban culture.
The little town of Santa Vittoria in Matenano itself, albeit with less than 1,200 people, is intensely urban. Solid masonry buildings three to five stories high line both sides of every street. There are no sidewalks; one’s front door leads directly to the street. When the mail carrier delivers the mail, she hands the letter or package across the threshold of the front door while still seated in her compact Poste Italiane car. At one end of the street is a sign that warns drivers that the roadway narrows at one point to 2.1 meters – less than 7 feet. Woe to anyone bringing in a big SUV. The driver of a large delivery truck carrying a load of firewood had to remove the side mirrors to make it through.
Simply stated, there’s no room for trees inside the village.
Instead, we are completely surrounded by trees, probably numbering in the millions. Just outside the city wall are forests and farms as far as the eye can see. The latter are often filled with long rows of olive trees, their canopies resembling leafy green donuts – pruned to admit sunlight to the center. Other trees form meandering windbreaks to protect the crops in between. Laced throughout are riverbeds flanked with densely packed woods. Serpentine rural roads are often lined with grand trees. The contrast between hard-edged urban and soft, green pastoral is as sharp as it gets.
Local land use laws zealously protect farms and forests from incursion by development. Farmhouses and farming structures are allowed, along with the occasional agriturismo. That’s a combination of a field-to-table restaurant with a few small cottages to rent for a holiday. Tax policy keeps farms as farms and cities as cities. Furthermore, there’s almost no corporate-style agriculture; most farms are small and family-owned just as they have been for centuries.
Even with an abundance of trees surrounding the town, villagers still highly value the small number found within its medieval-era walls. Recently, the municipality had to remove five mature trees with voluminous canopies. Locals were outraged; many grew up with those trees. It was an unfortunate choice of species, however, as they attracted beetles that had been happily hollowing out the insides for years. I inspected the stumps before they were removed; the innermost half looked like coal dust. Five trees have been planted in their place, but the painful memory lingers with many of our elderly neighbors.
We are not deprived of living green things. Indeed, we see them every day in the valleys and rolling hillsides just outside the windows. Great blankets of trees drape across the hillsides. The occasional thrum of a tractor reminds us of the importance – both gastronomical and psychological – of living near trees and other living plants.
I don’t think it’s entirely a question of whether there’s room for trees. There’s climatic adaptation, that has something to do with how the temperature varies throughout the course of a hot day.
Where it stays hot all night, you’ll see big deciduous trees, houses with breeze-ways around and under.
But if it cools off at night, it will be the opposite – courtyard walls, masonry baking in the sun – because thermal mass works. Your indoors is a comfortable diurnal average. When winter rolls around, those people don’t want any shade, because they’re still living in the diurnal average temperature and it’s a little cold and damp for comfort even in full sun.
Despite a sort of Mediterranean climate, up until recently anyway Seattle has been too cool for that to make sense, but people bring their attitudes from other places. Ballard was once sort of notorious for lack of trees, thanks to Scandinavians supposedly. More recently, one of my neighbors worked at a similar job for Utilities, and he said it was a struggle to sell people on the virtues of a shade tree, in the relatively treeless parts of the city.