The American Elm at the East 97th Street Entrance

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.