The Weeping Beech of Douglaston Station

If the local historians are right, this beech on a traffic island in Douglaston is a first-generation cutting of the most famous tree Queens ever lost. The Flushing Weeping Beech, planted in 1847, became a city landmark and was declared dead in 1998. Its possible offspring is still here, across the street from the Long Island Rail Road station, sharing the island with a World War I memorial. The cutting story is a belief, not a record. Forgotten New York calls it possibly a cutting, and the experts the Queens Chronicle asked disagree on its date. Tom Gaines, who surveyed trees for the Douglaston-Little Neck Historical Society, puts the planting between 1870 and 1880, pointing to a 1910 photograph in which the tree looks about 30 years old. Bill Sievers of the same society favours the era of the station, which was built in 1887. Dr. Kellerman argues it could be as early as 1850, because Douglas planted community trees here from 1835 to 1862. That spread makes it somewhere between about 135 and 175 years old. It has not had an easy time. A regrade of the station in the 1960s damaged its roots, and on an island in the road it gets little water. Marooned, at least, its roots go untrodden. Gaines called it in remarkable condition, and it was still standing in photographs published in May 2026. Nobody has published its girth or height. If you measure it between trains, tell us.