The Magnolia of Hattie Carthan

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.