By Talia Winiarsky

About 40 years ago, Lydia Argote and her daughter, Liza, were taller than the newly planted trees behind their apartment building on West 108th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. Eventually, two of the trees reached four stories high, providing shade for many residents of the building. When Liza grew older and visited from California, her children played in their shade, too.

Now, Argote and her daughter are once again taller than the trees. On a quiet Saturday morning, July 30, with no advance warning to the neighborhood, the trees became mere stumps after the city ordered them cut down.

“We would have strapped ourselves to the trees to find out why,” said Argote, who only learned of the city’s plans as she saw the workers putting the finishing touches on the job. “That would have at least kept them alive for a little bit, but it was too late. They had already started to cut them down.”

The tree removal is part of a Department of Education (DOE) renovation project on the playground at PS 165, an elementary school on West 109th Street, where the trees were planted, according to a department spokesperson. Three trees lined the back borders of the playground, and a fourth grew in its center.

Cutting down the trees will create room for “state-of-the-art blacktop asphalt flooring, tables and a comfortable seating area, play equipment, a full basketball court, and a track,” DOE explained, following an inquiry from the Rag a few weeks after the trees were cut down. The trees also needed to be removed because rodents burrowed in them, and their roots presented a tripping hazard, according to the department.

Nearby residents – some of whom said they had cherished the trees for decades – told the Rag that DOE did not inform the neighborhood of its plans or justifications in advance. Nor did they make it easy for residents to get answers once the trees were gone.

John Graham, a resident of one of the buildings that received shade from the trees, was on a Zoom call in his apartment that morning when he heard a sudden loud sound. He said he excused himself from the call to see what was happening and was devastated when he looked out his window to see the cut trees.

“We thought that the city valued trees for all of our lives, and the notion that it’d be cutting down healthy trees was just beyond belief,” Graham told the Rag.

Tree canopies cover about 22 percent of the city, according to The New York Times, and various programs have sought to increase that number. In 2007, the city launched a MillionTreesNYC initiative with a goal to plant a million trees, which they achieved in 2015. Earlier this year, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine proposed planting a million more trees by 2050.

The city’s Department of Parks & Recreation maintains a map that calculates the environmental benefits of each tree on city streets, including intercepting stormwater, removing carbon dioxide and other pollutants from the air, and conserving energy by shading buildings.

No work may be performed on or within 50 feet of a street tree without a permit from Parks & Recreation, their website says. However, the trees in the playground were not street trees, and were under the jurisdiction of DOE. It’s unclear whether that department needs permits from other city agencies to work on trees within a DOE-regulated area.

School administrators at PS 165 “were on-board after notification from project management,” a DOE spokesperson told the Rag. Neither the school’s principal nor its PTA responded to inquiries from the Rag.

Regardless of who was responsible, the neighborhood should have been informed, said Graham. “Even though they may be on one property, like a schoolyard property, they’re valued by everybody in the neighborhood,” he said.

Nearby resident Chelsea Bassman said the action contradicted the city’s values. “We can’t seem to find the purpose, especially when the city wants to become greener,” she said, adding that the two largest trees — a maple and a locust — were native species particularly well suited to the local environment. These two trees were located at the border of the play area, and it was unclear to Bassman why they had to be removed to install a new playground, she said.

Some local residents said the trees were a home to many birds. Hearing them sing in an urban environment was a rare treat, and the trees may have sheltered some high-vulnerability species that live in the area, according to Audubon Society.

After the trees were cut down, Bassman said she and her husband pored over Community Board minutes, called the company that cut down the trees (which said only that it was doing a job for the city), and reached out to Shaun Abreu, the City Council representative for the neighborhood.

A spokesperson for Abreu, Emmitt Sklar, said Abreu’s office didn’t know about the plan in advance but will work to ensure that the city keeps the neighborhood informed going forward about the playground renovation plan, including how new trees might be incorporated into it.

“Making sure that our community has the trees and the foliage it needs to keep our landscape cool is really critical for the community, but also for our city as a whole as we’re trying to tackle the climate crisis,” Sklar said.

Planting new trees would be a good step forward, but no substitute for those that were cut down, said Bassman, who added that the loss of shade has made her apartment hotter this summer. “For the first time, my husband and I looked at each other like, ‘Wow, it’s hot in our apartment now.’ So we turned on our AC when we normally wouldn’t have,” she said.

The city did eventually provide answers a few weeks later to those who doggedly pursued them. “The design decision was made to remove the trees due to existing root-patterns,” one local resident was told. “The trees were damaging and lifting up the original asphalt playground surface, causing a tripping/safety hazard. Allowing the trees to remain would have negatively impacted the new playground surface in the same manner, eventually becoming another safety-issue.”

The city also said the resurfacing of the playground will eliminate its current rodent problem. The school is in zip code 10025, which had the city’s largest number of 311 rat complaint calls at the end of last year.

For Argote, however, the removal is still devastating despite the explanation. If the tree roots truly posed a risk, she said, they would’ve been pulling up the asphalt years ago, as these trees had been around for several decades. “I felt they didn’t remove these trees — they killed them,” Argote said.

However, the incident and the neighbors’ collective advocacy illustrated their strong bond, Argote said. “I’m happy that I’m in a community that cares.”