When All The Trees Were Cut Down

Dutch Elm Disease Marked A Bigger Transformation

When the last icy gray outcroppings finally melted from Wilshire Street in 1972, we were forlorn of the hopeful buds of new life, and entombed in a concrete landscape. Dutch Elm disease had claimed all the trees.

Vintage image of Dutch Elm tree canopy on Detroit street. Source: uncredited.

The high-arching displays of elm trees on Wilshire were much as I think of the place itself: cathedral-like. The trees protected us from the heavy hand of the sun, clouds and wind, while drawing our eyes to the heavens. They gave color, intimacy and nature to the neighborhood, sorting parcels for the block by block filing system of the urban grid and buffering roads and sidewalks. Like a paternal embrace, they painted a backdrop of security and peace, even if one could see through them to a relentless sky. I played with six brothers and sisters under that canopy. Massive trunks anchored bases and provided spectator seating. We languished in leaf piles or imagined flight on whirling “helicopter” seeds. That is cathedral-like.

When the last light of day was trapped in that tangle of tree crowns, we took turns throwing a rubber ball straight up into the morass and chasing it before it could detonate on pavement underfoot. You heard slicing and stripping as the ball cut a path through this forest, but its trajectory remained a mystery until the last instant. Such was the metaphor to which we were drawn, I’m sure, and it fueled gallant and spirited dives to intercede in the fate of each throw.

Trees reached to the heavens in public prayer while their roots intertwined underneath the earth in determined, though irrational, entanglements. I remember the sensuality of this underworld when the city excavated the lawns, sidewalks and streets to remove the dead trees in 1971. The Dutch Elm fungus had spread through the roots of century old trees, said to number 350,000 citywide, suffocating the flow of nutrients, until it was as if trees, too, had moved to the suburbs, abandoning us to the elements as long-time neighbors were doing.

Each household was stranded on its own island. The disembodied carcass of the neighborhood block revealed what it had taken to civilize this space. Pipes and wires like strong arms tethered the house to the street, in mathematically precise straight lines and right angles. The soil lay dutifully under the concrete. Trees stood like sentries in front of each house, their roots wrapped around everything in an orchestra of manmade and natural desires.

Houses in our neighborhood were built for people to lay roots, and storefronts for families to make a living. Structures were erected as families were formed and resources realized, with an encompassing vision: places for the young and the old; a more perfect union of workers, parishioners, ethnic groups and others both present and anticipated. The seal at the pinnacle of a store might remember the old country or tell a life story.

With the variety of housing, I was accustomed to meeting all varieties of people - who rarely moved. Our house was available because of the misfortune of its occupant, whose husband had vanished in some seedy circumstance. The street developed after the auto and thus had driveways leading to rear yards with garages. About one in five houses were two-family flats and another handful were small cottages. Few were the same.

I passed many an evening on a glider with a retired couple four doors down, strolling by as if they had been waiting all day to see me. I parked between them, feet touching the porch in a playful skip as the breeze wove each thought into conversation. I talked about my life and asked them about theirs. It was elegantly simple. Every house had a front porch: some, modest cement perches; some, expansive and welcoming; others, laid behind landscaping. Even upper flats had stoops to tether people to the street.

The neighborhood space was a natural surrogate for me. A rhythmic echo seemed ever-present. There were times I climbed out the front window of my bedroom, scaled down the roof tiles, and swung to the strong shoulders of the bungalow porch, to seek out that echo. Maybe I would just walk, powered by the engine of cicadas roaring from the trees. When I walked to the Houston-Whittier commercial intersection, if I had a dollar in my pocket from snow shoveling or delivering papers, I might have bought a pad of paper; even then I liked to write. What I really wanted was attention from neighbors always in these stores.

Everybody had roots that needed water. As the city excavated my surroundings to remove the dead elms on Wilshire, roots of another sort were severing across the city. An exodus that began with the deindustrialization in the late 1950s became its own religion. No longer was the family house an investment in the next generation, a commitment to something larger; it was the center of a financial portfolio through the mortgage writeoff and real estate equity.

When housing became big business, the postwar surge in new home construction became a tsunami that sucked everything into the deluge. In my first forty years, over 900,000 building permits were issued for new houses in a metro area with no increase in people. 250,000 buildings, largely in the center, were demolished from 1965 to 2005 as population emptied out. Houses into which generations put their lives were discarded like fast food packaging. Once the leafy façade of idyllic tree-lined havens became diseased, litter plainly laid on display.

Millions of Americans had known the city as a haven. It meant so much because it linked them to what sustains us all: the objects they made with their own hands found immediate use, and their food, shelter and other basics came from neighbors with whom they worshipped on Sunday and sent their kids to school all week. They passed their days graced by each others’ actions, or equally, indiscriminately diminished by them.

After Dutch Elm rolled through, when I sat on the porch looking up at the night sky occupying that space between sunset and sleep, light bursting through the cloud cover was the moon. But the mysteries were underfoot, not over the horizon. Just as the crowns and the roots of the mighty elms intertwined, so too, the souls of the people and the places in which they lived were linked. When this beautiful ecosystem was subverted, disease spread until the vital organs of community life atrophied and died, leaving cold hard concrete. Trees alone don't “save” a community, but tending to them sure did a lot to weave us together.