Urban Roots

For a famously crowded and sleepless city, New York has a surprising number of quiet, shady retreats. Shaded parks and playgrounds line Riverside Drive, cemeteries form a belt between Brooklyn and Queens, and there’s even an old-growth forest at the northern tip of Manhattan. More than 8.6 million people live in the city, but 7 million trees grow alongside them.

Spurred by concern about climate change, cities across the United States have committed to growing what city planners call the urban forest, but few have done so as successfully as New York. In 2015 the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and local nonprofit New York Restoration Project completed an eight-year project to plant 1 million trees.

New York hasn’t always embraced trees. Local reformers were ahead of their time when in the 1800s they suggested trees promote public health, says landscape historian Sonja Dümpelmann in Seeing Trees. In the 1870s, one physician argued for planting trees to “equalize the temperature” in the city, after noting a correlation between the highest average weekly temperatures and deaths among young children from “diarrheal diseases.” By the 1930s, city planners had taken a cue from Europe and began planting the hardy London plane tree just about everywhere—a foreign tree for a city made of immigrants.

As New York faces a new climate challenge, the city’s trees are even more important, says Emily Nobel Maxwell, who directs The Nature Conservancy’s New York City program. The city is already seeing more intense heat waves and frequent storms, she says, and it will need to keep planting and tending its urban forest. Trees will cool the air and help absorb the torrents of rain.

And trees simply make city life more pleasant. “I think about climate,” says Maxwell. “But I also think about 365 days a year, what it feels like to walk on a street that has beautiful trees.”

Scroll through photographs of New York City trees by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel.