Chop the Trees!

Enter the Cherry Tree Backlash. The Stamford Advocate ran an article on Sunday about this being the last year before the Cherry Trees are removed from Mill River Park as part of a larger renovation. The trees were a gift from a Japanese immigrant & businessman 50 years ago.

The Advocate article was half assed and almost looking to stir up indignation. It stated the trees weren’t that healthy would be expensive to transplant, and would be replaced on the projects completion in 2010. Of course you are going to rile up the mob like that, both the reasonable and the ridiculous among them. To the reasonable, it looks like the city is chopping 20-odd trees down in a park and maybe they can consider tweaks in the plan to save them.

What the article didn’t go into is the details of the work slated for the park that will require the trees to come down. This is one of the first stages in creating a park/ greenway that will stretch from the sound to Scalzi Park. Central to the plan is the middle section of the park where the cherry tress line a man made pond created by the dammed river The dam stops natural flow of the river, contributes to flooding upstream, stops fish from swimming upriver, and creates scum filled stagnate water enjoyed primarily by Canadian Geese and the occasional shopping cart. The concrete walls that surround the pond stop wildlife from reaching the stream and people from getting anywhere close to the water. The Army Corp of Engineers have completed plans to remove the dam and the concrete walls and return the stream to it’s natural state, with native vegetation and trails.

In short you are replacing this…

with this…

and this…


The Mill River Collaborative explains this further on their website. $4MM of the costs are offset with federal funding. Removing the walls and the dam unfortunately bring down the cherry trees that are planted too close to their edge, but new ones will be planted in the reconfigured park. I think if the public was aware of this, they’d understand and probably fully support a plan that helps create a central park that replaces an unnatural design with an environmentally sensitive one.

There’s a group who won’t be happy knowing the broader implications anyways. You can already see that in some of the letters to the Advocate. It’s a Donald Trump plot! It’s trying to make Stamford New York! Yeah, keep your nice public parks New York, we want shitty ones that only look decent when driving past at 30 mph!

Removal of the trees isn’t any disrespect to their deceased giver. It doesn’t erase the 50 years the city had with them. They served the park then, the new & improved Mill River park will serve the city going forward.