The Courthouse Planes of Hamburgerstraat

These two planes were planted to hide an execution scaffold. Around 1860 Utrecht laid out a new square in front of its Palace of Justice on Hamburgerstraat, and the residents of the street objected to the scaffold planned there. Four or five plane trees went into the square to screen the courthouse and the scaffold from their view. The scaffold was never used. Two of those planes are still standing. The courthouse itself was built in 1837 by the Utrecht architect Christiaan Kramm, on the remains of the medieval Paulusabdij, the abbey of St Paul. The planes came a generation later, and the dating is unusually neat. The national monumental tree register puts the pair's planting between 1850 and 1860. Separately, the historical society Oud-Utrecht studied a photograph taken around 1875 in which one of these very trees looks ten to fifteen years old. Both point to about 1860, which makes the pair roughly 170 years old. They have outlasted the purpose they were planted for by well over a century. The building is the former courthouse now, and the planes are simply the trees on the square. Two more planes were added along the adjoining Korte Nieuwstraat in 1975 and have grown nearly as large as the originals, so count carefully: the monumental pair are the two on the square itself. Nobody has published a girth for them yet; if you have a tape measure, tell us.