The Dinosaur
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.
East side of St. Nicholas Avenue, just north of West 163rd Street, Washington Heights, Manhattan You can recognise it by the trunk, about five metres round, on a plain city sidewalk. It stands on the east side of St. Nicholas Avenue, just north of West 163rd Street.
Free; a street tree on a public sidewalk.
Nearest subway: C at 163rd St-Amsterdam Av, about 6 min walk; the Morris-Jumel Mansion is a couple of blocks south.