Alas, by Tuesday afternoon when we walked by, the last park tree was gone.
The story began on Monday morning, when the first tree fell.
Then the project manager decided that the second would have to come down as well. Like the first, its roots were also growing sideways along the edge of the sidewalk, and it had no wide root system to give it a good grip. More will be planted.
I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.
As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.
As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.
More by Lydia Chávez1 Comment
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The city *really* needs to stop killing these. A few years ago the Dolores St utility undergrounding killed several, turning more than one nicely shaded upstairs unit that used to overlook a nice green canopy into a greenhouse.