Leaf these trees alone.
Plant-loving locals are looking to block the city from chopping down 78 trees in Fort Greene Park – a move they say would turn the greenspace into a “summer frying pan.”
A group of residents in Brooklyn’s trendy Fort Greene is suing the city and fighting with the parks conservancy over a plan for a pedestrian plaza despite officials pledging to replace the healthy trees with 300 saplings.
“The environmental concerns are important to all of us involved and for the people who live on this side of the park, it’s their backyard,” Enid Braun, a founding member of Friends of Fort Greene Park, told The Post.
The group has been fighting the city tooth and nail since 2017 saying the removal of the mature trees would destroy air quality, canopy shade and wildlife habitats, all of which could take decades to recoup.
The activists said the young replacement trees are neither good enough nor anywhere near the 520-sapling fleet the city previously estimated it would need to make up for the benefits of the mature trees, documents show.
The group is also accusing the city parks department of misclassifying the type of repair work being done so that it would not trigger an environmental review under the law.
“When you’re creating new entrances and taking down [dozens of] trees and putting in a plaza, that’s a redesign,” Braun said.
But attorneys for NYC Parks maintained Thursday during oral arguments for the case that the plan is “mostly a reconstruction project,” and the agency “exhaustingly” analyzed potential impacts.
A Parks rep told The Post it doesn’t comment on active litigation and referred comments to the Fort Greene Park Conservancy.
The conservancy’s executive director Rosamond Fletcher said the ambitious project is ultimately trying to make the park more accessible for all residents – but the civic group has “fought change at every turn.”
“If you are in a wheelchair, you cannot use that space,” Fletcher said. “We don’t like removing trees, but look at the benefits to the park – it’s going to be so much better, and the native [replacement] trees are going to bring so many environmental benefits to the park.”
Dubbed the Fort Greene Park Entrances, Paths, Plaza, and Infrastructure Reconstruction Project, the plan includes a multi-million dollar renovation aimed at expanding wheelchair accessibility to the 30-acre park and upgrading sections of the lawn that have been neglected for decades.
The plans, which also include staircase repairs and drainage improvements, have been challenged in lawsuits by the Friends for years — including a 2017 lawsuit that found the city lied about the health of its trees to move the project forward, according to Brooklyn Paper.
“The only reason we’ve sued [Parks] over the years is because they wouldn’t respond in a transparent way,” Braun said.
Parks allegedly “stonewalled” the civic group when it asked for a report detailing the health of the trees destined to be chopped in 2017, Braun said, prompting the group to file requests under the state Freedom of Information Law for the plans.
“It was so heavily redacted, it looked like a CIA dossier or something,” Braun said, adding that an appellate court finally gave the group the full documents in 2018.
The unredacted files revealed that roughly 49 of 58 trees in one section of the park were set be removed for “design” reasons, and not their health condition, the group said.
“Of those 48 trees that are being removed for design reasons, half of those are the invasive Norway Maples, and they do a lot of harm in the park,” Fletcher said. “The ones [Friends of Fort Greene Park] are referring to are planted too close together – I’m sure they’re not deemed to be in the worst condition … but they have a really dense canopy that keeps anything from growing underneath them.”
The current case against Parks was filed by the Friends in 2023, which challenged a “negative declaration of environmental significance” that Parks issued for the project that year — despite a laundry list of negative environmental impacts locals predict.
Specifically, the civic group claimed the proposal would convert “a respite with shade and accessible greenery for all” into a “cement plaza with no shade and fenced-in greenery — a summer frying pan.”
The locals also contended that the planned removal of the Brutalist-style mounds in the park used for picnicking, climbing and exercise would “obliterate” the space’s historic and unique design.
But Fletcher argued the site of the mounds will still be used for the same popular activities after construction finishes — only this time, it’ll be accessible to those who can’t maneuver the Brutalist creations in a wheelchair.
With each day that passes without a decision from the Manhattan court, the conservancy contends residents with disabilities are kept out of the beloved park space.
“You can’t preserve everything to the detriment of having accessibility, opening it up to a wider range of people,” Fletcher added.
Braun, however, argued it’s possible to both save the park’s trees and improve accessibility to the beloved park — with the right design.
“We’ve always supported adding an ADA[-compliant] entrance,” she said.
“Yes, do the long needed repairs: improve the drainage and repair the stairs and add an ADA ramp,” she added.
“We do want certain improvements, we just don’t understand why all those trees have to be cut down.”
