What Upper West Side Trees Put Up With

by Yvonne Vávra

Do you remember the couch that got stuck high up in a tree on 95th and Amsterdam? A handsome wicker loveseat, perched a good 20 feet off the ground in the bare branches during the bitter January of 2019. It looked like it had been through something, and the tree held it up with patient heroism while the city tried to figure out which department, exactly, handles airborne furniture. It took nearly a week.

No one ever figured out how the couch got up there, and the theories ranged from muscular squirrels to the Almighty. Mostly, though, Upper West Siders didn’t even notice. And when news crews pointed it out, the general mood of the passersby they interviewed was: Sure, it happens, we’ve seen worse.

You’d think a couch up there might be enough to get a tree noticed. But we don’t really pay much attention to them. If you leave your house, you’ll pass at least a dozen trees and probably not register a single one. Still, they have our backs. They protect us from the weather, save energy, clean the air, calm us down, boost property values, and give our sidewalks that special Upper West Side charm. Not to mention catching a couch before it falls on our heads. And I only started thinking about all this because Earth Day and Arbor Day this week reminded me to pay attention.

Once you do, it’s hard not to want to take care of what you see. As Ian Frazier wrote in The New Yorker in 1994, about plastic bags hanging in trees: “Maybe it was a mistake to notice them in the first place; now I notice them everywhere.”  And he couldn’t live with it. Frazier went on to make it his mission to get bags out of trees. He roped in friends, and together they invented a device they called the bag snagger. Eventually, they patented it, manufactured it, and even sold a few—including to Bette Midler, who used them in her New York Restoration Project, founded in 1995 to restore and care for the city’s green spaces.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Frazier snagged bags out of trees not only in New York, but across four time zones in the United States. Thousands upon thousands of bags. But he aged out of his snagging abilities, and no one has taken over the mission. So the bags keep working on us, sometimes to the point of unraveling, as immortalized in a 2011 episode of 30 Rock, where Liz Lemon is driven to the brink by a plastic bag in a tree outside her fictional 168 Riverside Drive apartment. She ends up getting tased on the sidewalk, undone by a bag and the realization that none of us are getting out of this alive.

Sure enough, the couch on 95th Street had to share its tree with several plastic bags, as the news footage shows. They’d clearly been there a long time—shredded, faded, no longer quite bags at all. They looked like they belonged there, as if the tree had grown them itself.

Bags are not the only thing our trees have to put up with. There’s trash, sudsy water from the morning sidewalk wash, dogs, not to mention our Halloween shenanigans. One poor tree on 73rd Street between Columbus and Amsterdam has a particularly curious problem: a witch has been clinging to it year-round, for as long as I can remember. Who knows what kind of unfinished spell she’s been working on, the tree stuck there all this time, an unwilling accomplice.

Then there’s boredom. Some trees are condemned to entertain themselves with nothing but their own rustle, standing in front of vacant storefronts, staring at wasted potential all day long. Sometimes they get lucky, like the two trees that flank the newly opened Springbone Kitchen on the corner of 86th and Columbus. For 12 years they looked out at the abandoned former 3 Star Coffee Shop. Twelve years of nothing at all. Now they’re surrounded by Upper West Siders with health goals, immunity broth, shiitake drinks, and sustainable salmon in hand. Their corner is now all about improving well-being, which is right up the trees’ alley.

Our street trees ask for almost nothing. They put up with us as best they can. We don’t need to hug them, though I suppose they wouldn’t mind. We could just look up once in a while. Notice they’re there. And maybe go along with the feeling that follows.

Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.

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