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The Replants Aren't Equivalent

525 saplings, not 500 mature trees. The new trees won’t be like today’s canopy for another 30 years.

If your kid is 5 today, they’ll be 35 before BPC has trees like these back.

What we’re losing

A mature BPC tree with a thick trunk and wide spreading canopy
Trunk + canopy
Thick base, wide crown
A 40-year BPC tree at full scale. The spreading crown is what 525 saplings can’t replace.
A tall mature BPC tree with branches and dense canopy
Decades of structure
Branching that took 40 years
Trunk and crown together. A young tree has none of this.
Looking up into a mature BPC tree's branching canopy
Mature canopy
40 years of branching
About 500 of these are scheduled to be cut.

What we’re getting back

A 3-inch caliper nursery tree photographed next to a man for scale — the trunk is about the thickness of a wrist
3″ caliper — the majority
Wrist-thick, with a man for scale
Two-thirds of the 525 replants will be this size.
Photo: Treeze.com
A 3-inch caliper sapling planted in a city sidewalk
3″ caliper — planted
Same size, in the street
What a 3″ replant looks like its first season in the ground.
A young street tree with a roughly 6-inch trunk
8″ caliper — the biggest
The largest tree in the plan
About as wide as a dinner plate — 8 inches at the very largest. ~16–22 ft tall. Only one-third of replants will be in the 4–8″ range.
93%
of BPC’s existing trees are larger than the smaller replacement trees being planted. Out of 1,769 measured trees, only 133 are as small as those replants.[2]

P.S. — Even the largest replant (8″ caliper) is exceeded by 59% of current BPC trees.

The trees being cut took ~40 years to grow. The replants are not equivalent — not for decades, and only if they’re the right species, in the right conditions, and they survive.

A 3-inch replant (two-thirds of the plan) needs ~30 years to reach the size of an average BPC tree today.

An 8-inch replant (the very largest) still needs ~15 years.

We are trading a 40-year-old canopy for trees that won’t catch up until the 2040s and 2050s.

Where these numbers come from

“Approximately one-third of the trees proposed to be replanted along the Esplanade and throughout Battery Park City will range from 4- to 8-in trunk caliper, which means that these trees will be several years old at the time of planting (i.e., not young saplings). The balance will be 3-in caliper or are multitrunk species and thus are not measured by trunk diameter, but rather by height, which is anticipated to be 8ft to 14ft at time of planting.” — BPCA construction update, May 2026[1]

“Caliper” is how thick the trunk is, in inches, when the tree is planted. A 3-inch caliper trunk is about as thick as a wrist. An 8-inch caliper trunk — the very largest the replant plan offers — is about as thick as a dinner plate is wide.

BPCA maintains a live public tree inventory at pg-cloud.com/BPCA (TreePlotter). It records 1,769 BPC trees with measured trunk diameter (DBH).[2] The 93% / 133-of-1,769 / 59% numbers above come directly from that inventory.

Catchup times use an NYC-specific growth rate. Honeylocust — the fastest common BPC species, ~23% of the canopy[3] — grows about 0.36 inches of trunk per year in NYC street conditions.[4] The other 77% are slower species (oaks, lindens) that take 30–50% longer. Weighted across species and adding a few years for transplant shock gives ~30 years for the 3″ replants and ~15 years for the 8″ replants to reach the average BPC tree today.

What we’re asking BPCA to do

  1. Justify each removal, one by one. For every one of the 500 trees, publish the specific design constraint that made retention impossible — and the alternative considered.
  2. Design alternatives built around saving trees. For each reach, a design that takes tree retention as the primary objective, with its projected tree count and tradeoffs.
  3. Independent review. Qualified arborists, flood engineers, and landscape architects with no financial relationship to the design-build contractor.
No further removals in any reach until the analyses for that reach have been published and independently reviewed.

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Sources