ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 Breathing with Trees: London Plane Trees from Rikers Island to 7th Avenue, 1959, follows juvenile London Plane Trees (Platanus x acerifolia) that grew in a Parks Department Tree nursery on Rikers Island-tended by incarcerated workers-to a community-driven tree planting on 7th Avenue in Harlem. From the city’s point of view, street trees, with their grand canopies and health benefits, offered a quality of urban living that might bring fleeing white urbanites back to the city. In Harlem, communities of color had long fought for decent municipal services, housing justice, healthcare provision, and community amenities-including the improvement of the streetscape with trees. At the time these trees (and tens of thousands more being planted throughout the city) came from Rikers Island. On Rikers Island, the city developed a tree nursery that could provide a cheap and continuous supply of trees for streets and municipal parks, using the unpaid labor of incarcerated people. This chapter looks at the street tree as an indicator of urban health, a marker of unequally distributed environmental amenities, and a character of gentrification as the privatization of public space really began to take shape in the late twentieth century. The street tree offers a reflection about the degree of continual care required for both humans and trees to thrive in urban habitats.
