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| Trees are absent from superhospital - adjacent sidewalks |
They are holes intended to host trees that have simply been left empty.
In the past I have harangued my borough to plant trees in various locations, with some occasional success. Once they showed up enthusiastically and popped one right here on Addington, on the lawn of a city housing project near where I was living about 10 years back. About a decade before that I personally planted a tree on the lawn of my apartment at 4129 De Bullion and it's quite big today. A couple of years later I got city councillor Georgina Coutu to pop two small trees and a flower planter in the area behind this truck at 1221 Drummond but I think the slob who took over that place let them die and they were carted off.
So I've had some success with sprouting wood in the urban setting but my one frustrating failure is on this hill. My repeated attempts to get these holes on St. James just east of Decarie filled never took off. About a decade after I first called, the city has still not been able to fill the 25-or-so holes that festoon the barren concrete. I think that the area is considered a sort of no-man's land just outside of the NDG/CDN borough limits, so finding and haranguing the appropriate authority was a trigger I wasn't able to pull.
So I've had some success with sprouting wood in the urban setting but my one frustrating failure is on this hill. My repeated attempts to get these holes on St. James just east of Decarie filled never took off. About a decade after I first called, the city has still not been able to fill the 25-or-so holes that festoon the barren concrete. I think that the area is considered a sort of no-man's land just outside of the NDG/CDN borough limits, so finding and haranguing the appropriate authority was a trigger I wasn't able to pull.
Urban tree planting can be done either in the spring or the fall so if you call your borough-city-town officials and bug them enough, they might get off their round wobbly bottoms and pop some trees in places where they should be, right this very week. This hill would be a great place to start.
During the final years of the Drapeau era, trees were planted downtown with those metal gatings in the sidewalk "protecting" their bases, however, over time their upper parts became damaged by city snow plows and eventually they died or were cut down and not always replaced.
ReplyDeleteI also remember seeing a TV news report about some blind people complaining that they would slam into these trees as well as those moveable, "flower-potted" ones, so evidently you can't please everyone.
The January 1997 ice storm certainly didn't help matters, but the city did replace many damaged trees in front of buildings and in some parks. Nevertheless, of late they have been inconsistent with their replantations and the timely removal of diseased and dead trees and stumps.
One also has to be careful when choosing the appropriate tree to plant next to a building or in a sidewalk since some species have roots which grow too long or erratically and can break through foundations and pavement.
I noticed that the trees that require maintenance around Papineau that I photographed earlier this spring never got the tlc they require as the rogue branches that should have been cut were never trimmed, so this was a bad year for trees in the city, I think.
ReplyDeleteTrees live only seven years on average in those sidewalks holes, the problem is the oppressive concrete radiant heat and the small amount of soil they have to spread their roots into.
The city tree people had a program to redesign the soil boxes beneath the sidewalk surface a few years back in order to help the trees get bigger and live longer lives but I only know of a few spots they did it in, perhaps it didn't get all that far.
Nonetheless you can see that the sole tree on St. James has been battling there for quite some time, so perhaps there's hope that new ones could also do well.
I watched as a construction crew working on the condos behind the old Forum casually cut down a 30 foot tall tree growing on the public sidewalk. The tree had to go to provide a place to park a dumpster for a few days.This tree had to be 20-30 years old. These big trees can't be simply replaced and should require an expensive permit to destroy.
ReplyDeleteI am constantly seeing broken sections of our concrete sidewalks replaced by ugly, cheap, crumbling asphalt. This is unacceptable and an issue not exclusive to Montreal, either.
ReplyDeleteSee: https://ca.yahoo.com/news/edmonton-needs-step-sidewalk-repairs-130000906.html
What bugs me most is when they replace a sidewalk without burying the phone poles.
ReplyDelete