East River Park

In January, 2022, I began documenting the planned removal of 991 trees from East River Park on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The trees were being removed as part of New York City’s East Side Coastal Resiliency project, a renovation of the park designed to protect the Lower East Side from climate-change-related flooding. The question on my mind was–and remains–how many years it would take before the new trees planted in the park as part of the renovation would grow large enough to begin to make up for the multifarious negative effects of removing the trees already there–especially as, for reasons never fully explained, the city had rejected an equally effective alternative renovation plan that would have kept most of the existing trees.