Secret Lives of the Street Trees of New York

You pass them every day. Perhaps that old friend outside your house was planted in your grandmother's day, but you were never formally introduced. What's its name anyway? And why did the Parks Department choose that spot for it?

You are looking at a beautiful stand of willows, quite unusual for a street tree and graceful as well. But what is it's dark secret, and why should you think twice before buying a nearby house? Furthermore, that tree has a venerable medical history and is the secret behind one of the most useful drugs in your medicine cabinet.

There are stories galore behind each of these trees. The New York City Parks Department has a multimillion dollar budget and does not make its selections lightly. Those beautiful trees with the dappled bark, once ubiquitous in Brooklyn and Queens. Why are no new plantings being made and what is the connection between those handsome plants and your child's asthma?

And what about those tries with the fan-shaped leaves planted everywhere?Why are they so popular with Asians and how did a tree venerated and preserved in secret Chinese groves make its way to New York City?

This is the story of the good, the bad, and the ugly of those commonplace plantings on the streets of New York City.

Some trees just seem to pop up. An example is the beautiful willow that once graced the grounds of Astoria, Queen's PS 122, known as the Mamie Fay School after a beloved principal. Another beautiful willow, also gone now, was planted outside the Astoria Park pool, a land-marked remnant of 1930's New Deal and one of the few Olympic-sized pools for public use. These trees also line part of the bank of the East River near Astoria's Polletti Number 5 Power Plant.

What do all these sites have in common? They are all swamps. Old timers tell us that the Mamie Fay School faces the bed of an old stream that once ran where Ditmars Boulevard stands today. Before Astoria Park was built, a farm with pasture land and wet ground stood here. In fact, present day Hoyt Avenue South was built over Linden Brook, an important watercourse in Colonial times.

So what does that tell you? Willows like their feet wet. They have what are called hydrophilic roots and an unerring ability to find water, including your pipes. Willows grow in streams and through your now broken pipes, so every graceful stand of willows is a warning to you. If you like dry basements and unbroken plumbing, look elsewhere.

But this is just the beginning of an even stranger story. Do you know that ancients used willow bark as a painkiller thousands of years ago? The genus name for willow, Salix, is also the root of acetylsalicylic acid, also known as aspirin.

Asprin is one of the most useful drugs known to mankind. But do you know that the German company that first synthesized it actually placed its money on heroin as its blockbuster drug? And do you know that this company, I.G. Farben, that synthesized so many excellent drugs and the first aniline dyes, which were derived from coal tars, also mutated to become one of the greatest supporters of the worst evil that the world has known-Adolph Hitler?

During the turn of the last century, chemists working for this company synthesized aspirin by chemically reproducing the active painkiller in willow bark with slight modification. Unfortunately, the drug fell into disfavor early on and lost marketing approval because it was thought to be injurious to the heart.

The drug's developer, Felix Hoffman, continued to work on it in secret against the wishes of management who put their bets behind their new blockbuster drug, heroin, named for the heroic way it made its users feel. Within a year or two of its introduction, heroin, now widely used in such popular medicines as children's cough syrups, showed its darker side, and aspirin was dusted off and substituted as the new star.

Although the company had benign beginnings and was responsible for many commercially important and medically beneficial products, it took a darker turn after World War I when executive Fritz Thyssen became one of the important men behind Hitler's rise, and its factories extensively employed slave labor.

Let's take a look at another tree commonly seen throughout the City of New York, the ubiquitous London Plane. This is the pretty tree with the mottled bark that all of us know and love. A hybrid of somewhat mysterious origin whose ancestry includes the sycamore, known as the barrel tree in Colonial days because its hollow trunks were used to make barrels, this tree is no longer planted extensively as it once was.

Even though the London Plane Platanus x Acerifolia is the symbol of the ParksDepartment of the City of New York and valued for its beauty and ability to brave prolonged exposure to car exhaust and factory pollution, this marvelous tree holds a hidden secret which was not discovered until it had been planted everywhere-it is one of the worst allergens known.

If you child is sneezing and wheezing you may need to look no further than that pretty tree planted just outside his bedroom window. Alas, many of the most beautiful, useful and familiar trees are somewhat problematic as sufferers fleeing pollen-plagued environs for the Southwestern American Desert states of Arizona and New Mexico learned when they inadvertently planted the same allergenic plants that had tortured them in their original homes-and paid high water bills to do so too.

Oak (Quercus), birch (Betula), ash (Fraxinus), walnut (Juglans), maple (Acer), hickory (Carya), beech (Fagus), and sycamore (Platanus) species are all among the culprits planted to the everlasting rue of the homesick.

The mysterious Maidenhair Tree, Ginko Biloba, finishes our list of the mysterious street trees of New York City. Seen everywhere with its pretty fan-shaped leaves, this is among the most useful trees in the Parks Department arsenal. Maidenhair is among the most pollution resistant and toughest trees known to man, and it should be since it goes back to the days of the dinosaur.

This tree is so unique that it occupies its own phyllum and its sex life is incomparably weird. Like many other trees, the Ginko has both male and female forms, to the eternal dismay of those who accidentally plant the stinky-fruited female instead of the desired male, but unlike any other tree it has motile, that's right, free-swimming, sperm.

This weirdness is a direct offshoot of the ancient lineage of this tree, thought extinct until a few specimens were found during the Victorian era in hidden groves in China where it had been preserved as the secret of monks for generations, completely hidden from Western eyes. The Maidenhair tree is still one to hide in plain sight as the despised stinky fruit is avidly gathered by members of the Asian community who know what the rest of us do not-that this fruit is both nutritious and medicinal with a pronounced ability to improve blood circulation, memory and eyesight.

When you pass the garden-variety trees of New York, pass with respect. Beyond the frumpy and commonplace lie a whole array of mysteries that have endured for generations unknown. This is your introduction to the hidden lives of the street trees, but so many more stories remain to be told. Perhaps you may be the one to tell them.

Sources:
http://www.greatschools.org/new-york/astoria/2410-P.S.-122-Mamie-Fay-School/
http://www.undercity.org/_Prints/aqueducts_undergroundrivers_sewers.html
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_34/b4097098922518.htm
http://www.bbg.org/exp/wickedplants/03_englishelm.html
http://www.umm.edu/altmed/articles/ginkgo-biloba-000247.htm