“Tree of Heaven” It turned into hell A Brooklyn man has been hit with a huge fine of $230,000 from the city after cutting down a pesky, inconspicuous plant in his vacant lot.
The man is now suing, and his lawyers say the bizarre lawsuit is as clear-cut as a cut-down tree and nothing more than a twisted attempt by the park service to harass a vulnerable person as part of a money-making scheme.
“Parks never planted the trees, never did any work on them, never cared for them, and never even listed them on an online resource called the New York City Tree Map,” reads the lawsuit, filed by attorney Mikhail Sheinker on behalf of beleaguered plaintiff Theodore Trachtenberg.
An incredulous Shainker added to The Washington Post that the city has “never gone near” black locust, an invasive species native to China.
“People don’t usually climb over walls or fences to plant trees,” he joked.
But the lawsuit says Parks took down about $207,000 worth of trees to build homes on long-vacant Crown Heights land, creating a big hit in the property owner’s wallet.
“The city is trying to claim that the tree is a city tree,” Shainker said.
In February, city parks officials slapped Trachtenberg with huge fines totaling $230,400, saying a total of three trees were damaged during land excavation to make way for 10 new homes at St. John’s Place and Classen Avenue.
The largest tree, a black locust — which foresters calculated accounted for 90 percent of the tree loss — was inside a chain-link fence around the site that the city actually put up about 40 years ago, when the vacant lot was public land. Two other trees reportedly damaged still remain in planting holes on the sidewalk.
“In the 1990s, you didn’t see a lot of litigation over trees. The Parks Department rarely fined trees,” Shainker said, “but they realized this was a moneymaker.”
Typically, when a city-owned tree is damaged (most often at a sidewalk cutting site), the responsible party pays a fee calculated according to the diameter of the tree’s trunk, and the money is used to replant new trees in the city.
of Forest Officer’s Notice The two smaller trees were reported to have diameters of 5.8 inches and 6.7 inches, respectively, while the fenced tree was 28 inches in diameter.
Schainker does not dispute that the city owns the two small trees, which are clearly marked on city maps. Giant Tree Map.
“The ownership of the two trees is not in dispute, but the damage is,” said Sheinker, who claimed he had never seen any evidence as outlined in the report.
Not on the map are the fenced-off trees that a client cut down to build a six-story, 10-unit building in a neighborhood desperate for new housing. The three-bedroom unit on the top floor of the building is currently for sale, renting for $5,400 a month.
The city owned the property after foreclosing on it from the previous owner in 1979. Before the property was again in private ownership, a building there burned and the city Housing Department ordered it demolished, after which a chain-link fence was installed and trees grew behind it, according to court documents.
Shainker said courts have previously recognized that city-owned trees must be accessible to the public within a right-of-way. Because this tree has never been accessible, the argument that it is city property is “unusual,” he told The Post.
Since the current owners purchased it in 1999, and before the apartments were built, the land was used as a private car park, with large trees towering over the cars below.
But if the owner doesn’t pay the outstanding fines, the building may not get final approval, the lawsuit alleges.
City officials did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment, and Trachtenberg did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
