New York City runs a government registry for this: the Parks Department's Great Trees of New York City list, started in 1985 and expanded in 2024 after a nomination drive drew more than 270 submissions. Most trees here carry that designation; the rest earned their place another way, like a magnolia that is a city landmark and a pear that came out of Ground Zero alive. The five boroughs each hold at least one. Some are colonial-era survivors; one was planted so a park would have something to be famous for.
0 of 27 visited in New York
English Elm (Ulmus procera) · 300-346 years · Greenwich Village, Manhattan
This elm is one of the oldest living things on Manhattan Island, and almost everything colorful ever said about it is unproven. Its nickname comes from a folk legend that traitors and criminals were hanged from its branches during and after the American Revolution, a story with no supporting court or newspaper record; the earliest known references to it as a hanging tree only appear in print in the late 19th century, generations after the events they describe. What is documented is its age: the New York City Parks Department measured it at 310 years old in 1989, later revising that to a more cautious more than 300 years, with some accounts pushing the figure to 346. It stands at the northwest corner of Washington Square, a plot of land that served as a potter's field and public execution ground in the early 1800s, close enough to the tree that a real 1820 hanging nearby, of Rose Butler for arson, may be the seed of fact the legend grew from. The tree survived a 2012 park renovation that construction crews came close to damaging.
Photo: Marty Aligata (Msact) (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Black Tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica) · 168 years · Upper West Side, Manhattan
Central Park has two competing claimants for its oldest tree, and this one has the better paperwork. A London plane near the Reservoir might date to 1862, when the Reservoir itself was excavated, but this black tupelo in the Ramble, the deliberately wild, maze-like woodland Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed into the park's plan, has documentation placing its planting at 1858, four years earlier, during the park's original construction. Black tupelos are native to eastern North American wetlands and swamps, not the schist bedrock Central Park sits on, which makes this a planted specimen rather than a survivor of the farmland and settlements the park displaced. The species is prized by ecologists for its brilliant, early scarlet fall color and by foresters for its resistance to rot, qualities that have let this tree outlast most of the park's original 1850s plantings. It stands in one of the Ramble's quieter, less trafficked paths, a 19th century engineering project that has spent a century and a half looking convincingly unplanned.
Camperdown Elm (Ulmus glabra 'Camperdownii') · 154 years · Prospect Park, Brooklyn
Every Camperdown elm on Earth is a clone, and this one is among the oldest. The cultivar began in the 1830s when a gardener for the Earl of Camperdown found a single mutant elm branch, contorted and weeping instead of growing upright, on the Camperdown House estate near Dundee, Scotland. Because the mutation cannot be grown from seed, every specimen since has been propagated by grafting a cutting onto a straight-trunked host, which makes each Camperdown elm in the world a genetic twin of that one Scottish branch. This graft was planted near Prospect Park's Boathouse in 1872, a gift to the young park, and by the 1960s had declined badly enough that Brooklyn nearly lost it, until the poet Marianne Moore, a devoted Prospect Park visitor, wrote publicly in its defense and helped rally the conservation campaign that saved it. She later called it Brooklyn's crowning curio. Its low, twisted canopy, propped and cabled for support, still spreads wide enough that visitors duck to walk beneath it, a shape no other tree in the park shares by nature.
Photo: Garry R. Osgood (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Sassafras (Sassafras albidum) · 150-200 years · Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn
Green-Wood Cemetery has counted this as its oldest tree, possibly older than the cemetery itself, which was founded in 1838 on rolling glacial hills chosen specifically because the terrain already supported mature, established woodland. Sassafras trees rarely reach the size or age this specimen has, since the species usually grows as a smaller understory tree that spreads through root suckers rather than living to great individual age; this one, or rather these two, since it appears as a pair of trunks a few feet apart, may be the last survivors of a larger colonial root system that once covered more ground. Nobody has cored the tree to confirm an exact age, and Green-Wood's own arborists are candid that the favorable growing conditions inside a manicured 478 acre cemetery likely inflate its size relative to a wild sassafras of the same age, making size an unreliable proxy for years here. What is certain is that it predates most of the 600,000 people buried around it, a rare case of a cemetery's oldest resident having no grave at all.
Photo: Marty Aligata (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) · 350-450 years · Douglaston, Queens
This tree was already centuries old when New Amsterdam was still a Dutch trading post, and unlike almost everything else on this list, nobody planted it. At 133.8 feet the Queens Giant is the tallest carefully measured tree in New York City, a tulip poplar growing wild in a stretch of Alley Pond Park's forest that has never been cleared, and the New York City Parks Department dates it to at least 368 years old, with other estimates ranging as wide as 350 to 450. Tulip trees can live 600 years and reach over 150 feet under ideal conditions, and this specimen's height alone marks it as one of the oldest living things in the entire New York metropolitan region, likely older than any building, monument or institution in the five boroughs. Some local histories connect the surrounding land to 17th century transactions between the Dutch West India Company and the Matinecock people who lived here before European settlement, though no source confirms this specific tree witnessed any documented exchange. It has simply kept growing, in a park most of the city drives past on the Long Island Expressway without knowing it is there.
Photo: Bruce Schaff (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Manchurian Linden (Tilia mandshurica) · 120-150 years · Flushing, Queens
This linden is a leftover from a 19th century nursery business rather than a park planting, standing 75 feet north of a restroom next to Kissena Park's tennis courts on land that was once part of Samuel Bowne Parsons's commercial tree nursery. Parsons, whose family also planted Manhattan's Hangman's Elm-era Washington Square trees and much of Central Park's original stock, ran one of the era's most important import operations from this site starting in the 1870s, bringing Japanese maples to America for the first time and propagating rhododendrons at commercial scale. After Parsons died in 1906, the city absorbed part of his former grove into what became Kissena Park, and this Manchurian linden, a species native to forests spanning China, Korea and Russia's far east, is one of more than 100 imported tree varieties that trace back to the original nursery grounds still growing in the park today. It carries Great Tree status as a living fragment of Flushing's forgotten reputation as America's premier 19th century horticultural center, a history most visitors to the tennis courts beside it have no reason to suspect.
Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) · 300 years · Sunnyside, Staten Island
Staten Island's tallest tree stands 119 feet, more than 14 feet shorter than Queens' record-holding tulip tree, but old enough on its own terms to anchor the north end of Clove Lakes Park, easily found along a paved path where its trunk, 21.4 feet around, dwarfs everything nearby. Tulip trees like this one are among the tallest native hardwoods in eastern North America, capable of shooting straight up through a forest canopy in search of light rather than spreading wide the way an open-grown oak would, which is part of why the species so often produces the height records claimed on lists like this one. Clove Lakes Park itself preserves one of Staten Island's last stretches of the mixed hardwood forest that once covered most of the borough before 20th century development, and the Colossus, reported at well over 300 years old, would have been an established mature tree when the surrounding land was still farmland rather than parkland. It remains one of Staten Island's contributions to New York City's official Great Trees registry, one of ten entries from the least visited of the five boroughs.
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · 106 years · Grymes Hill, Staten Island
This yew is one of 144 evergreens planted in 1920 around a glacial boulder called Sugar Loaf Rock, each tree standing as a living memorial to a Staten Island resident killed in the First World War. A plaque at the boulder names every soldier the grove commemorates, making Hero Park one of the more literal war memorials in New York City: not statues or a wall of names alone, but a planted forest where each individual tree corresponds to an individual death, a practice with a documented precedent in similar WWI memorial tree plantings elsewhere in the country around the same period. European yews are exceptionally long lived and slow growing, a species choice that all but guaranteed this planting would still be standing a century later, evergreen through every winter since 1920 the way the soldiers it honors never got to see. At just over a century old it is younger than most other trees on this list, but its age is not really the point; the grove was planted to hold a specific memory in place, and a century on, it still does.
Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) · 150-200 years · Bronx Park
This oak grows in the middle of the Spicebush Trail inside the Thain Family Forest, a 50 acre stretch of the New York Botanical Garden that has never been logged and represents the largest surviving remnant of the woodland that once covered most of New York City before European colonization. The Botanical Garden was deliberately sited here in 1895 specifically because this forest already existed, a decision that preserved a functioning fragment of pre-colonial Lenapehoking rather than planting a garden from scratch. At a trunk diameter over five feet, this red oak, designated a Great Tree in 2024, ranks among the largest and most accessible specimens in a forest that also holds tulip trees, sweetgums, hemlocks and beeches estimated at up to 300 years old in less visited sections. Red oaks support more moth and butterfly species as larval hosts than almost any other tree genus in the northeastern United States, more than 400 by some counts, making this single oak a small ecosystem of its own even before accounting for its age or size.
Red Horse Chestnut (Aesculus x carnea) · 100 years · Van Cortlandt Park, Bronx
This tree grows on the east lawn of the Van Cortlandt House, built in 1748 and the oldest building still standing in the Bronx, and local tradition holds that a member of the Van Cortlandt family planted it themselves, though no source confirms exactly when. Red horse chestnuts are themselves a hybrid, a cross between the European horse chestnut and a red-flowered American buckeye species, bred for ornamental gardens rather than found in the wild, which means whoever planted this one chose it deliberately for its spring flowers rather than letting it seed in naturally. At nearly 88 feet tall with a trunk over three feet across, it has grown large enough to be one of three horse chestnuts at the house included in the NYC Parks Great Trees registry, all three now part of a Great Tree Clone Program in which cuttings are propagated and planted at new sites around the city, extending the genetic line of trees like this one even as the originals eventually age out. Van Cortlandt House operated as a Revolutionary War-era headquarters at times for both American and British forces, meaning this tree, whatever its precise age, grows on ground that has seen the city's founding conflict up close.
American Elm (Ulmus americana) · 100-165 years · Upper West Side, Manhattan
Central Park once had roughly 500 American elms along its western edge. By 1985, a New York Times survey counted 23 left, and this is one of them. It stands right at the park's edge on Central Park West and 77th Street, directly across from the American Museum of Natural History, wider than it is tall: NYC Parks measures it at just under 51 feet high with a 55 foot canopy.
Dutch elm disease reached New York in the 1930s and worked through the city for decades, killing elms faster than anyone could replant them. This one kept standing while its neighbours came down one by one, close enough to the street that passersby now call it, without much competition, the most beautiful tree on the block.
Nobody has dated it precisely. What is documented is its survival: officially designated one of the city's Great Trees, standing beside a statue of Alexander von Humboldt, who spent his career cataloguing exactly this kind of specimen. No planting record narrows the guess further than a century or more, so that wide range is what the story states rather than a false precise number.
Walk in from the Museum of Natural History subway stop and it is the first tree inside the park, an entrance marker planted long before anyone thought to protect it.
American Elm (Ulmus americana) · 100-165 years · Central Park (Mall/Literary Walk area), Manhattan
Two American elms grow straight out of exposed bedrock east of Central Park's Mall, their roots spread flat across the rock like something poured rather than planted. NYC Parks designates them as two separate Great Trees, ids 38 and 39, but they stand close enough on the same outcrop that almost nobody visits one without the other.
The rock underneath predates both trees by a margin that makes their own age beside the point. This is Manhattan schist, some of it dated by geologists at over a billion years old, exposed here by the same nineteenth century landscaping that shaped the rest of the park. The trees carry no planting record of their own, each roughly 78 feet tall, trunks gnarled from decades of finding purchase where there is barely any soil to root in.
What they prove is less about age than persistence. An elm in open parkland can be felled by disease or storm in a season. One growing out of solid rock has already solved a harder problem, and its awkward, rock gripping shape is the visible record of that fight.
They sit a few hundred metres from the Mall's elm allee and about 600 metres from the Ramble, an easy stop on the same walk through the park's oldest plantings.
American Elm (Ulmus americana) · 100 years · Central Park (Mall/Literary Walk), Manhattan
Central Park's most photographed avenue of trees is not the original one. The Mall, also called Literary Walk, has been replanted with American elms twice before the row standing today: the first two plantings failed when foot traffic compacted the soil around the roots, and the elms there now went in during the 1920s, the third attempt, protected from the start by low fencing along the path.
That makes these trees roughly a century old, not the century and a half some press coverage implies by counting from the park's 1858 design. NYC Parks lists the grove as an official Great Tree, and it is often called the largest grove of American elms in the world, a claim the park's own conservancy states more carefully: one of the largest remaining plantations of a species that Dutch elm disease has been cutting down, city-wide, since the 1930s. Central Park still holds about 1,600 elms, several hundred on a rotating fungicide programme, and still loses 15 to 30 a year to the same disease that ended the first two plantings here by other means.
Walk the Mall in full leaf and it reads as a cathedral aisle, two unbroken rows meeting overhead. Every one of them is a replacement, and every one of them is still, by the numbers, worth the trip.
Camperdown Elm (Ulmus glabra 'Camperdownii') · 100-160 years · Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn
Brooklyn has two Camperdown elms, and genetically they are the same tree. Every Camperdown elm alive is a graft from one contorted branch found on a Scottish estate near Dundee in the 1830s, a mutation that cannot be grown from seed, so each specimen is a cutting of a cutting of that single original. The famous one stands behind the Boathouse in Prospect Park, planted in 1872. This one grows two miles south, inside Green-Wood, where Garden Path meets Pink Avenue.
Nobody wrote down when it went in. New York's Great Trees register named it in 1985 and recorded the species and the corner, not a date, and no later source has supplied one. What the sources do agree on is the order: this is the younger of the two, and old enough to be counted among Green-Wood's landmark trees. A precise year would have to be invented, so there is none here.
The shape carries it anyway. Camperdowns arch their limbs downward and tangle them into one another instead of reaching up, which makes a low dome you duck into rather than stand under, dark inside even at midday. Victorian day-trippers came out to this cemetery in numbers that helped make the public case for Brooklyn's parks, and they came for exactly this: a landscape with curiosities in it. Green-Wood is free and open daily, and the R train stops at the gate.
Kansas Hawthorn (Crataegus coccinioides) · 114 years · Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
The largest Kansas hawthorn in the United States grows in Brooklyn, and the species normally gives up at around twenty feet. This one reached 35, on a 20 inch trunk under a 28 foot crown, and in 1985 the American Forestry Association named it a national champion. New York State has carried it on its Big Tree Register since 2009 as one of only two champion trees in the five boroughs. None of that was the plan. Rochester's parks department sent it down as a gift in 1912, and it was planted across from the Lily Pool at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which had opened to the public only a year or so before. It has stood there through everything the garden has become since.
Crataegus coccinioides is a hawthorn of the American Midwest, a thorny, unfashionable small tree that most visitors walk past for eleven months of the year. October is the exception, when the leaves go scarlet and orange and the branches hang with dark crimson haws.
Entry to the Garden is paid. The pin here sits at the Washington Avenue gate rather than at the tree, because no survey has recorded its coordinates: walk to the Lily Pool by the conservatory and look for the small tree carrying an unreasonable amount of fruit.
Caucasian Wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) · 104 years · Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
This tree came from Rome in 1922, and one of its limbs now rests on a crutch. The Caucasian wingnut on the Flatbush Avenue side of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, just north of the Rock Garden, has grown heavy enough that the garden props and cables its lower branches to stop them tearing out of the trunk. That trunk is the argument: the Garden calls it nearly nine feet through, the city's Great Trees register measures ten, and the two figures have never been reconciled. It stands about 60 feet tall and close to as wide, with roots surfacing in long ridged patterns that run out from the base across the ground.
Pterocarya fraxinifolia comes from the wet forests between the Black Sea and northern Iran and reached European gardens in 1782, which is how an Italian nursery came to have one to send. The name is literal. In midsummer the tree hangs chains of small winged nutlets a foot and a half long from its branch tips, green ropes that stay up, browning, into autumn, and nothing else in the garden does anything like it. A clone of it went in near the Herb Garden in 1978, and the difference in size between the two makes the case for coming to see this one.
Entry to the Garden is paid, and the pin sits at the main gate: the tree is a walk away, along the Flatbush Avenue boundary.
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · 30-60 years · Central Park, Manhattan
Central Park's own Conservancy calls this a single cedar of Lebanon. A blogger who found the same spot in 2016 counted several, growing together as a small grove, both describing the identical trees just inside the park's 72nd Street entrance, behind the information kiosk near Conservatory Water. Nobody has resolved the discrepancy, and this project would rather say so than guess. What both sources agree on is the plaque at the base, dedicating the planting for grandchildren, a gift from patrons Linda and Mort Janklow, and the species itself: Cedrus libani, the tree on Lebanon's flag and, in the older stories, the timber said to have built Solomon's Temple. It is evergreen where almost everything else in this part of Central Park is not, a pyramidal, blue green shape that holds its form across every season rather than only one. Its cones grow upright on the branch instead of hanging, ripening through autumn into rows that look, from a distance, like eggs balanced along each limb. No planting date survives for this grove; a 2016 estimate guesses a few decades old for Central Park's cedars generally, honest but not a measurement of this specific planting. Conservatory Water sits a five minute walk from three of this walk's other trees, the closest addition this cluster has had.
American Elm (Ulmus americana) · 130-226 years · Central Park, Manhattan
Most of New York's elms are gone. Dutch elm disease arrived in the 1930s and by the postwar decades had killed the overwhelming majority of the American elms that once shaded nearly every street in the city, a loss so total that Central Park's surviving giants now register as minor miracles rather than ordinary trees. This one stands at the park's East 97th Street entrance, its northernmost officially designated Great Tree, an eighty foot canopy spread wide enough to be one of the broadest in the entire register, and a trunk the tree guides describe, not unkindly, as looking like an old witch, its serpentine branches twisting rather than reaching straight up. Nobody recorded when it was planted; city records only say the 1800s, a stretch of a century or more that leaves its exact age an open question. What is documented is what it survived: the fungus that erased its species from most of the city, and, per the park's own account, the storms that have since taken out other Central Park trees around it. New York designated it a Great Tree in 1985, one of the original class, decades before the citywide relaunch that added scores more in 2024. Walk in from Fifth Avenue at 97th Street and it is the first thing waiting.
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 100-164 years · Central Park, Manhattan
A tree with more than one trunk is hard to age by the usual rule of thumb, and that uncertainty is most of this one's story. The London plane on the Bridle Path near East 96th Street rises just over ninety six feet from a base that splits into multiple trunks fused so thoroughly that its combined diameter tops five feet, bark mottled in patches of green, tan and grey that one NYC Parks writer compared to an impressionist canvas. The claim attached to it, that it was planted around 1862 when the Reservoir beside it was first excavated, comes from one nature writer's educated guess rather than any planting record, which makes 'possibly the oldest tree in Central Park' a title worth repeating with the word possibly intact. A rival candidate exists across the park: a black tupelo in the Ramble that one book on the city's great trees dates to 1858, four years earlier, an argument nobody has settled because neither tree came with a receipt. What is not in dispute is the setting. The Reservoir's running path carries thousands of people past this trunk every week, most looking at the water and the skyline reflected in it rather than down at the multi-trunked plane that has, by the most generous reading, watched the water since before the Civil War.
Yoshino Cherry (Prunus x yedoensis) · 20-114 years · Central Park, Manhattan
Everyone knows Washington's cherry trees came from Japan in 1912. Fewer know New York got a gift the same year: a planting of Yoshino cherries along the Reservoir's east side, sent alongside the 3,020 trees that went to the Tidal Basin and somehow left out of the story that made the capital famous for its blossoms. Thirty five trees stand there today, city designated as a single Great Tree entry rather than thirty five separate ones, which is the honest way to register a planting nobody experiences tree by tree. They bloom white shading to pale pink each April, usually a week or two before the Reservoir's showier Kwanzan cherries on the opposite bank, and the flowers carry a faint almond scent the plum colored Kwanzans do not. Here is the part no one advertises: Yoshino cherries rarely live past sixty years even with good care, and nothing in the historical record says whether the trees blooming today grew from the original 1912 shipment or replaced it at some point since, the way Washington's own planting has been replanted in stages for a century. So the honest claim is not that these particular trunks are old. It is that this exact stretch of path has carried the same seasonal show, on the same imported species, since Woodrow Wilson's first year in the White House.
Southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) · 140 years · Bedford-Stuyvesant
New York has made exactly two trees official landmarks, and this southern magnolia is the only one still standing. The other, the Flushing Weeping Beech, is gone. William Lemken planted this one around 1885 from a seedling brought up from North Carolina, which makes it about 140 years old and a long way from home: Magnolia grandiflora is a tree of the American South, and one flourishing this far north is rare. It has had help. A wing wall on its north side shelters the straight trunk, which the Historic Districts Council puts at over seventy feet.
In 1968 the houses beside it were threatened with demolition and the ground with becoming a parking lot. Hattie Carthan, a Bedford-Stuyvesant resident, formed the Magnolia Tree Committee, local schoolchildren raised money, and on 12 May 1970 the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the tree an individual landmark. Carthan then founded the Magnolia Tree Earth Center in the brownstone next door. The parking lot never happened; the tree got an institution named after it instead.
Two honest warnings before you go. The building side has been partly hidden by scaffolding for years, so the view from Lafayette Avenue may be less than the tree deserves. And sources disagree on its street number by one, 678 or 679, which is why our pin is approximate. If you have stood in front of it lately, tell us what you could see.
American Elm (Ulmus americana) · East Village
On 9 October 1966 a monk from India sat down beneath this American elm and began to chant. A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and his followers sang the Hare Krishna mantra under it in what is remembered as the first outdoor Hare Krishna chanting in the West, and Allen Ginsberg sang with them. A movement that went on to reach most of the world began its public life here, in the shade of one tree in the East Village. Followers of the faith regard the tree as sacred, and they still come back to it.
NYC Parks counts it among the park's highlights, and a plaque placed in 2001, by most accounts, records the 1966 chanting and mentions the park's venerable American elms. That last detail matters when you arrive, because this is not the only old elm in Tompkins Square. The one you want stands near the centre of the park, by the curved row of benches. Our pin gets you to the right part of the park rather than to the trunk, so let the benches settle it.
Nobody we have read says how old the tree is. It was already big enough to sit under in 1966, and the park itself opened in 1834, but nothing we have found ties this particular elm to the park's early years, so we will not pretend it does. If you know when it was planted, or have put a tape round its trunk, tell us.
Callery Pear (Pyrus calleryana) · Financial District
This tree is on the list for what it survived, not for how long it has lived. It is a Callery pear, a species planted along city streets by the thousand, and in October 2001 it was found in the wreckage at Ground Zero with its roots snapped and its branches burned and broken. NYC Parks took it away and nursed it back to health. In 2010 it came home, replanted on the plaza of the National September 11 Memorial, where it stands today among the visitors who come to read the names.
How old it is, nobody has settled, and the accounts do not agree. Some place it in a row of pears planted on the World Trade Center plaza in the 1970s, which would make it about fifty. The New York Public Library's 2020 list of the city's famous trees called it 20 to 25 years old. Neither is a planting record for this tree, so we leave the age open. If you know, tell us.
What the tree does now is give. Every year seedlings grown from it go to communities that have lived through a tragedy of their own; one was dedicated at the New York City Fire Museum on Spring Street in June 2019. At the tree itself the Memorial hands out free weather-resistant tags so you can leave a message on it. Come in April and it is in white blossom.
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · Bedford-Stuyvesant
For almost forty years New York's official list of its Great Trees did not change. In October 2024 NYC Parks finally reopened it, for the first time since 1985, adding 61 trees chosen from more than 270 nominations sent in by the public. This ginkgo in front of a mansion on MacDonough Street was one of them, and the house is the reason people put its name forward.
The mansion belongs to the United Order of Tents, a Black women's fraternal order that has served this community for more than 150 years and is said to have helped people escaping slavery. Coverage of the new list described the ginkgo as holding a piece of that history, which is about the best job description a front-yard tree can have.
What we cannot tell you is how old it is. Ginkgo is one of the longest-lived trees on earth, but that says nothing about this particular one, and no source we have found gives a planting year, a girth or a height. If you have any of the three, tell us: a tree on the city's Great Trees list deserves a number.
The lawn is the Order's, so look from the sidewalk. The Hattie Carthan magnolia on Lafayette Avenue is about a kilometre north-west, which makes the two an easy Bed-Stuy pairing, best in November when the ginkgo turns gold.
English Elm (Ulmus procera) · 240 years · Washington Heights
It has been called the largest street tree in Manhattan, and it goes by the Dinosaur. An English elm on an ordinary sidewalk in Washington Heights, it has a trunk about five metres round: the NYC Parks register records a diameter of 60.7 inches. How tall it is depends on whom you ask. The register says 79 feet; Edward Sibley Barnard's book New York City Trees gave it about 110. Nobody has settled it, so we print both.
Its age is in the same state. One writer put it at roughly 230 years in 2008, another at 240 and more, and both think it was probably planted on the estate of what is now the Morris-Jumel Mansion, a couple of blocks south. Call it somewhere between two and three centuries. Rumour goes further and says it stood where George Washington watched a fire in 1776. Even the date of that story is disputed, 21 September or 16 November, so treat it as the rumour it is.
The documented part is the city's regard for it. In 2008 it was one of 25 historic New York trees chosen for cloning, and by 2015 a grafted copy had been planted elsewhere in the city, a spare Dinosaur in case of accidents. It is counted among the few trees left from the days of the Boston Post Road.
The most recent account of it standing that we have found dates from 2021. If you walk past, tell us it is still there.
English Elm (Ulmus procera) · 200 years · Flatiron
Madison Square Park is probably younger than two of its trees. The park was officially designated in 1847, and the two English elms on Farragut Lawn are believed to be older than that: over 200 years, by the reckoning of the Conservancy that runs the park, which is careful to say believed. When Ignatz Pilat redesigned the park in 1870, he kept them.
That they are still here is the remarkable part. Dutch elm disease is the reason English elms are now rarely planted in the United States, the Conservancy notes, so a pair that has stood through the whole life of the park, in the middle of Manhattan, is rarer than it looks from a lunchtime bench.
In 2023 the Conservancy nominated one of them for NYC Parks' Great Tree Search, and it went onto the city's Great Trees list in 2024. Here is our honest gap: we do not know which of the two it is. They share the lawn at the south end of the park, and nothing we have been able to read says which trunk carries the designation. Our pin marks the lawn, not a tree. If you can tell them apart, or know which one the city listed, tell us and we will point at the right one.
Until then, stand between them. Nobody has published a girth or a height for either, so a tape measure would be welcome too.
English Elm (Ulmus procera) · 160 years · Fort Greene
Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux are remembered for Central Park and Prospect Park, but some of their planting still stands in Fort Greene. This English elm, according to the coverage of NYC Parks' 2024 Great Trees list, was planted as part of their original design for the park, and the city now counts it among its Great Trees.
The Olmsted and Vaux work here dates from the 1860s, which puts the elm at about 160 years, give or take a couple of decades. Treat that as a derivation rather than a record: nobody has published a planting year for this particular tree, and one writer who went looking called the date simply unknown.
Its size is in a similar state. A blogger who walked the park counted 760 trees, 37 of them elms, and judged this one about 80 feet tall and the largest in the park bar one rival, with a trunk he guessed at ten feet across. That is an eyeball estimate, and it does not match other figures in circulation, so we print no trunk size as fact. If you bring a tape measure, the number is yours to give us.
Look for it on the eastern side of the park, along its Tree Trail; our pin puts you in that half of the park rather than at the trunk.