The Oldest Palm Tree in Los Angeles

The oldest palm in Los Angeles has been dug up and moved three times, and it is still going. It was taken out of a desert oasis and planted on San Pedro Street in the 1850s. In 1889 it was hauled across town to shade the entrance of the Southern Pacific Railroad's Arcade Depot on Alameda Street. On 5 September 1914, when the depot closed, someone decided it was worth saving again and moved it to Exposition Park, where it stands beside the drive at the Figueroa Street entrance. A plaque at its base records that last journey. It is around 100 feet tall now. Its documented life in the city runs to at least 170 years, and the real figure is higher, because it was already a mature palm when it was first dug up and nobody wrote down how long it had been standing in the desert before that. Washingtonia filifera is the only palm native to California, which is the quiet joke of the Los Angeles skyline: almost every palm you can see was shipped in, and the oldest one was already here. A dent partway up the trunk is old damage of some kind. Crews now use cherry pickers rather than climbing spikes to take the dead fronds down, so it collects no new scars. The Expo Line stops two minutes away.