Mayor Bloomberg says he wants to turn New York City green by planting 1 million new trees.
So why is he firing up the chainsaws in Washington Square Park?
That was the question asked yesterday by a group of environmental advocates, who protested a city plan to chop some 32 trees as part of a $16 million renovation of the historic park.
“Pulling down the trees is a crime against nature,” said neighborhood resident Sharon Woolums, who was among a group of about 50 tree-huggers who joined a protest yesterday to stop the downtown deforestation.
The mayor was mum yesterday about the park plan, which seemed to fly in the face of his bucolic vision of his “Million Trees Initiative.”
The Parks Department, meanwhile, disputed the activists’ claims that nearly three dozen trees will fall.
They said only nine were on the chopping block and 37 will be planted to replace them.
“[The Million Trees] initiative not only adds many trees to our city but also offsets those that may need to be removed to allow for our city to expand and improve toward the main priority of Plan NYC: a more sustainable city as it expands,” the department said.
The activists said that newly planted trees will have none of the charm of the old boughs that are cut down.
“A new tree will take a long time to grow into a beautiful, old tree,” said Woolums.
Joel Kupferman, head of the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project, and his clients, the Emergency Coalition to Save Washington Square Park, recently lost a lawsuit to stop the extensive reconstruction plans.
The renovation effort – which began Dec. 10 and is scheduled to be completed in spring 2009 – has been the subject of nearly four years of fighting .
The city has maintained that the construction – which includes dismantling the center fountain and moving it approximately 20 feet so it aligns with the Washington Arch – will make the park more user-friendly and increase overall green space by 20 percent.
But angry park-goers point to a 2005 study by the non-profit group Project for Public Spaces that found that residents like the park the way it is.
“Repairing the fountain or the walkways is fine,” said Mitchel Cohen, a member of Brooklyn’s Green Party. “But it’s a whole other thing to tear the whole park up. There’s a huge history they’re destroying.”