Storm-Felled Trees Get A Second Life

The huge oak that the weekend storm knocked down outside Larry Dressler’s living room window may become a public bench, as the city launches a new program to find creative ways to recycle downed trees.

As the city cleans up from the storm, parks officials are readying a pioneering program that would turn yesterday’s biomass hazards into tomorrow’s public amenities, and maybe works of craftsmanship and beauty as well.

The city got calls that four public trees and four private trees were knocked down by Sunday’s storm, said Deputy Director of Parks, Recreation, and Trees Christy Hass. A public tree is one in a park, clearly, or those growing between sidewalk and curb on city streets. Hass said the trees fared remarkably well, considering the 50-mile-an-hour winds that tore through the city.

“I can’t believe how lucky we were,” Hass said. ​“I was stunned.”

The unlucky trees that fell may soon have a second life, Hass reported: The city has selected a company called City Bench to take downed trees and make them into furniture, as well as teach New Haveners about sustainable tree reuse.

Not all trees that fell will make the cut. A tree that toppled over on Concord Street in Morris Cove, which the parks department was still clearing Wednesday morning, was sent to mulch. That tree created the worst situation from a public safety perspective in the storm. As it fell Sunday, it knocked out a transformer, leaving thousands of people in Morris Cove without power.

Over in Beaver Hills, another arboreal storm victim has a brighter future. The tree fell at Ellsworth Avenue and Glen Road, right near the home of Larry Dressler and his son Jake (in photo above).

Larry Dressler said he was outside shoveling snow Sunday evening when the great Oak across the street from his house fell across the neighbor’s front lawn, taking down some telephone wires.

The parks department cut up the branches and sections of the six-foot wide trunk and hauled them away on Tuesday. That wood will be mulched.

On Wednesday, Dressler examined the sections that the parks crew had left behind.

“I thought it would be rotted out. It looks healthy,” he said.

One large piece left behind (in photo above) is just the size of a bench, or a table or a church pew. Hass said the city will save it in the hopes that it may become just that.

“I’m going to bring that one over,” Hass said when shown a picture of the fallen oak. She said she plans to bring the trunk to the parks department’s East Rock Workshop at the Pardee Rose Garden in Hamden.

That’s where the future of fallen trees is slowly unfolding.

Christmas Tree, Reincarnated

It began to unfold with a 12,600-pound Norway spruce (pictured), the city’s official Christmas tree in 2009.

In the past, all fallen trees have been sent to the ​“stump dump” for mulching. Hass had long sought to do something more useful with the trees, and had been talking for a couple of years with Ted and Zed Esselstyn, who run a small company called City Bench. The company, headquartered in Higganum with a mill in Guilford, specializes in making furniture from fallen trees.

The Esselstyns have already made pieces for Albertus Magnus College of one of their downed trees and for the Yale Sustainable Food Project.

Hass said she wanted to see if the brothers could do the same for the city. Instead of sending the Norway spruce to the wood chipper, the city gave it to City Bench instead. With no money exchanged, it gave the company a chance to prove that it could turn a tree into something useful and perhaps even beautiful.

City Bench made five benches from the tree and donated them to the city. Two are at the Trowbridge Environmental Center in East Rock Park and two are at the Barnard Nature Center.

Those four are backless. The fifth (pictured) has a back decorated with a little Christmas tree. As Hass sat on it Wednesday afternoon, she seemed reluctant to give it up. It was destined Thursday morning for temporary residence at the parks department headquarters on Edgewood Avenue.

After seeing what City Bench did with the Norway spruce, the city put out a Request for Proposals in November for creative recycling of its downed trees, or ​“biomass,” into usable items. City Bench was the only bidder to respond. It has been selected to do the work, but has not yet signed a contract detailing the terms of the relationship.

Hass said that the department is not establishing a tradition to turn its Christmas trees into municipal furniture. The Christmas spruce was wet and sappy and not a good wood for furniture; it took the Esselstyn brothers many hours to dry it out in the kiln.

The city will have many other options to chose from: It removes about 600 trees from city streets each year, Hass said. The city plans to select some that have potential as stories or as furniture and turn them over to City Bench.

Under the proposed contract, no money would be exchanged. City Bench would take some choice logs from felled trees and in return create furniture for the city and run education programs.

“The history of the trees will be preserved. Each tree has a story. The idea is to preserve the story and create a thing of beauty,” Hass added.

The bench on which the deputy director sat Wednesday preserved its story with a kind of cartouche or name plate depicting a Christmas tree, which the bench had been in its previous life.

City Bench’s contract will contain an educational component in keeping with the mayor’s pledge to plant 10,000 trees in five years, Hass said.

She said it is important to teach kids and the citizenry not only the usefulness of trees while they’re alive, but to what green uses they can be put when a disease or a storm fells them.

Hass recalled the removal of a beloved tulip tree in Wooster Square two years ago. It had been hollowed out by disease and age and the department termed it a danger to passersby.

She sighed at the memory.

“If we had only been this far along [with City Bench] when the tulip came down,” Hass said. ​“That tree could have had a story that might live on. It could have been a conference table. Anything but mulch; that’s the driving force” behind the new initiative.

“I think it’s cutting edge,” she said, adding that cities nationwide are grumbling about how much work it is to grind up trees for mulch ​“when so much is a viable product.”

Just what the city will receive in exchange for the wood is still being negotiated Hass said. ​“It’s brand new territory,” she said but she was confident that whatever the exchange, whatever form it took ​“will be very good for the city and the environment.”

City Bench’s pact with New Haven would be its first formal contract, said Ted Esselstyn. He said he is looking forward to the chance to share the company’s work with the city.

“Using an un-utilized resource to make things people appreciate, and having a city behind you, that’s great,” he said.

Hass said she thinks the public will respond.

The five benches were brought down to the Green at the city’s recent tree lighting, she reported. When Hass announced that the benches had been part of last year’s tree, people ​“flocked” over to examine and sit on the benches.

“Obviously it means something. It connects people to the history of the tree,” she said, ​“and that’s a terrible thing to lose.”