
The Lost Oaks of California Ave - garbowza
http://paulgraham.com/californiaavenueoaks.html
======
hedgehog
I like Cal Ave partly because it's about as close as you can get in this area
to my favorite neighborhood in Seattle (15th Ave).

A photo I took yesterday while they were taking the last one down:

<http://openbs.org/photo/wehavenotrees.jpg>

Quote from the notice they sent out:

"The City of Palo Alto Public Works Department ... shall be replacing most of
the street trees on Cal Ave ... most of the existing trees are Holly Oaks and
many of them are diseased and in poor condition. Their branches cover street
lights and grow over building storefronts and roofs requiring frequent tree
trimming. They bear and drop large acorn fruits that are tripping hazards for
pedestrians.

"The Holly Oaks will be replaced with Red Maples ... smaller seed fruits that
are safer for pedestrians ... metal grates will be installed ... which will
bring a uniform look to the business district. The existing tree wells in
sidewalks are open wells which may be tripping hazards."

Funny thing is there are maples on 15th Ave so I've seen how they are through
the year. When the maples start dropping sap on people's cars and all of the
restaurants' outdoor furniture is too sticky to sit on I don't know what
they'll do. I'll just laugh.

~~~
kevbin
"…which will bring a uniform look to the business district…"

Sweet, with a little more effort they can turn all of California avenue into a
strip mall. Uniformity is great in pencil leads and spark plugs, but the
fractal beauty of nature is not just a sitcom on Fox. If you want uniformity,
there's a few towns due south of LA where they shave the rough, non-uniform
hill-sides into perfect 45° slopes to ultra-flat plateaus on which to build
uniform tract homes.

This just doesn't seem like something Palo Altans would knowingly do. Well,
we'll always have Los Altos:
[http://www.losaltospost.com/PhotoGallery/photo/fullimages/Fu...](http://www.losaltospost.com/PhotoGallery/photo/fullimages/Full132109052125.jpg)

~~~
davidw
One of the things I love about the older bits of town here in Padova is that
stuff is 'fractal' in the way you describe. You can look at some old buildings
and see the interesting and somewhat random ways different portions grew
together. Up close you can sometimes see an old fresco or a fancy door or
something. You can walk around and see stuff you've seen before and not get
bored by the sameness of it all. I think it's healthy for your brain.

------
callmeed
Interesting. Where I grew up (San Luis Obispo county in CA), you'd need an act
of congress to touch a mature oak tree–even on your own property. Our church
actually had to build around one when they did a building project.

I bet if an entrepreneur or real estate developer wanted to cut down oak trees
for a building project, they wouldn't get past the first step in the permit
process ... but I guess when city wants them gone, they can run it through a
"Development" association and play the disease card.

~~~
pg
You can't cut down a mature tree on your own property in Palo Alto either. But
apparently the city can.

~~~
ja30278
I'm sure I'll be in the minority here, but doesn't that seem to stretch the
meaning of 'your own property'? I mean, if you can't even cut the trees down,
what exactly makes it 'yours'? (aside from the privilege of paying takes on
it)

~~~
Psyonic
"Owning property," at least in the United States, is just a fancy term for
describing renting property from the government. The price you pay for the
property buys you the contract, property taxes are your rent, and anytime they
feel like it they can evict you (eminent domain). And like all landlords, even
those as generally hands-off as the government, at the end of the day, they
make the rules.

------
ardit33
It is sad though, that Cal. Ave, is considered on the most nicer areas of
Sillicon Valley. There is nothing really special in it that you can't find in
any dinky town in the us, minus the charm that small towns have. Compare to
any nice areas to Cambridge, or W. D.C. or NYC, or Boulder. With the money
flowing in the area, that that's what they can achieve? At least during the
gilded age, the rich folks built memorial things, that are part of this
country's cultural heritage. Todays' rich, just build bigger pools or planes,
and that's it.

Tells you something about rich geeks being really introverted, and just want
to keep on themselves.

~~~
bkovitz
When I first moved to the Bay Area, I was puzzled by how "blah" Silicon Valley
is. The land of innovation is suburbia and strip malls? A cultural desert? My
manager at Palm, who had grown up in Cupertino, said that Sunnyvale and
Cupertino were "the two most boring towns in America".

Did they outside all beauty and culture to San Francisco? Or did they just not
_care_?

~~~
kevbin
Silicon Valley _does_ have some of the most beautiful, innovative office parks
in the world. They're huge and isolated, however. Maybe the combination of
strict zoning and ubiquitous automobiles aggregates retail into malls and
strip malls, commercial into office parks, industrial into warehouse
districts, etc.? Regardless, it's produced a grand, metropolitan brutalism of
inhuman scale, navigable only by automobile, with the humane portions
grandfathered-in between the cracks and targeted for extinction by city-
planners, bureaucrats, and real estate developers.

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supahfly_remix
It might be sacrilegious to ask, but what does this have to do with hacking
(other than say, hacking down of oak trees).

The fact that it's ranked so highly just goes to show the amount of ass
kissing going on here.

~~~
TriinT
It's a herd phenomenon. Even if PG writes something utterly pointless, he gets
upvoted to the stratosphere. It would be nice if this changed. Intelligent and
successful people like PG don't need this kind of adulation.

~~~
lionhearted
I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think this comment shows a slight
lack of... something... hmm...

This is a bit disorganized, but I'll try to lay out how the gears are turning
in my head:

When you implicitly call out a community or someone very admired in that
community (whose also running things for free for a lot of people's
enjoyment), it's courageous but it burns some of your future ability-to-speak-
out-and-others-will-listen-edness.

If you were to make similar comments frequently, eventually people would just
shrug it off instead of burning the mental energy to apply difficult critical
thinking.

Now, I was one of those disagreeable kids who used to argue with teachers when
they got their math or chemistry wrong, and eventually I stopped doing that
and started thinking:

"Do I want to burn some of my speak-out-and-people-will-listen-edness on this
particular topic?" Because you only have so much, and you might want to use it
on something important later.

Does the tree submission get submitted and voted if it's not Paul Graham or
another very admired poster? Probably not. But it's a minor thing to take a
banner up against, and it just oh-so-slightly decreases the resources you have
by taking up that banner. And maybe it minorly gets on the nerves of a few
people, and they don't like it, and so you get oh-so-very-slightly less
attention/goodwill in the future.

Or maybe not. Just something to ponder.

~~~
petercooper
_I was one of those disagreeable kids who used to argue with teachers when
they got their math or chemistry wrong, and eventually I stopped doing that_

That's depressing. That's what education is supposed to be about (rather than
blindly accepting incorrect facts).

~~~
johnnybgoode
Yes. lionhearted's example illustrates quite well the reason today's schools
are generally incompatible with good education.

~~~
jfarmer
There are good ways and bad ways to go about it.

You have to think about your goal. Is your goal to get the teacher to correct
their mistake and move forward? Or is it to boost your ego?

If it's the former, it's probably better to approach them later, in private,
and point it out politely. They will correct the problem next session, or send
out an email between sessions.

Either that, or be very polite, e.g., "Excuse me, Mr. Smith, but you wrote
down <wrong stuff> there. Why isn't it <right stuff>?"

If you say, "Mr. Smith, you're wrong. It should be <right stuff>, not <wrong
stuff>" you are strictly speaking correct, but you'll humiliate them. It feels
good for your ego -- I'm smarter than the teacher! -- but probably won't
advance the class.

This isn't about the "sorry state of education," it's about knowing what
people feel when you blurt shit out in class.

~~~
johnnybgoode
Why is it the student's responsibility to protect the teacher's ego?

Here is the admittedly unusual way in which I look at it: In most cases, the
school system (including the teachers) is implicitly claiming that students
are better off in school with them than anywhere else. When a ludicrous claim
like this is being made and enforced, I don't see why they should be cut so
much slack.

~~~
krakensden
It's not the student's responsibility to protect the teacher's ego, it's the
student's responsibility to be reasonable. Standing up and yelling because the
teacher forgot a semicolon in some example code, for instance, is a waste of
everyone's time, not just the teacher's.

~~~
johnnybgoode
Your somewhat extreme example notwithstanding, are you saying it's
unreasonable for a student to point it out when a teacher is giving incorrect
information to the class?

~~~
krakensden
I'm saying "It depends." My experience with that behavior indicates that it's
usually counterproductive- either nitpicking like my previous example, or axe
grinding that isn't really helping. Think an Ayn Rand follower interrupting a
class on Marxism every few moments.

The problem, really, is that it's impossible to make a fully qualified
statement and still be engaging. As a speaker, you have to skip over some
detail somewhere, thus there is always going to be a place to jump in and act
an ass.

------
thaumaturgy
This will have adverse effects on the speed and traffic on that street, too.
I've attended a couple of local community seminars on city planning, and
studies cited there have found that tree-lined streets tend to cause drivers
to drive slower and more cautiously. [1]

[1]: For example:
[http://www.naturewithin.info/Roadside/Tree&Driver_ITE.pd...](http://www.naturewithin.info/Roadside/Tree&Driver_ITE.pdf)

------
n8agrin
They may have suffered from Sudden Oak Death. My limited understanding is that
because the disease spreads erratically they prefer to remove infected trees
in order to prevent others from becoming infected, and to prevent damage being
caused from the dead, weakened tree.

Edit: It appears there is no known cure, only preemptive measures.

<http://www.suddenoakdeath.org/>

~~~
pg
At first I thought it might be some kind of serious disease. Why else would
they do such a crazy thing? But all the other arguments the city listed, e.g.

"Their branches cover street lights and grow over building storefronts and
roofs requiring frequent tree trimming. They bear and drop large acorn fruits
that are tripping hazards for pedestrians."

make it clear this wasn't the case. If they were infected by some tree plague,
it would have been enough to say just that.

~~~
pyre
Sounds more like the business owners didn't like the trees and wanted to get
rid of them. All other reasons are probably just there to justify it in a way
that doesn't make them look like the 'bad guys.'

------
dfranke
I can't recall the details any more, but I'm reminded that there's a historic
cemetery in Boston, where several of America's founders are buried, where the
tombstones have all been moved from their original locations. Someone during
the Victorian period decided they'd look nicer if they were all arranged in
nice straight rows. Nobody recorded their original positions, so the locations
of the remains are now unknown.

So, cutting the trees isn't _necessarily_ a case of corruption. It's at least
as likely that CAADA is run by people whose taste really is that poor.

~~~
pyre
The point is that such a drastic action (e.g. cutting down _ALL_ the trees on
a frequented, busy downtown area) should be voted on by the citizens/tax-
payers. In this case, a relatively small number of people instituted a
_drastic_ change without consulting 99% of the people that it would affect.
Not only that, but it is an _IRREVERSIBLE_ change. If they had decided to
repave the sidewalks or repaint the lampposts, it would be a different story.
Had it been a single tree or only a couple of trees (that weren't prominently
display -- e.g. signifying the center of town or something) it might be
excusable. But to tear down that many trees without any sort of public input
on the matter other than 'the public tasked us with beautifying the city' is
irresponsible at best and malicious at worse.

------
hristov
Yeah this is really bad. First of all too many people have the silly idea that
you can move trees around as if they are pieces of furniture or large heavy
pieces of sculpture. "Oh lets get rid of these trees and put in different
ones. Won't this be grand!" Moving trees is always tricky and not assured of
success. When they get those new maple trees in california ave, I am sure that
at least a couple of them will die and then they won't have equal height
trees.

As far as the trees being diseased, all city trees are unhealthy in one way or
another. That is because their leaves absorb all kinds of exhaust byproducts,
most of their roots are below concrete where they cannot get water or
nutrients, and a hundred other reasons. Cities are just not healthy places for
trees.

But that does not mean that we should not have trees in cities. Trees make us
feel better, clear up the air for us and make us happier in general. What if a
tree is not healthy -- it is not actually suffering and cannot pass the
disease to humans. As long as it looks good and it is green, it is serving its
purpose. I guarantee you that the new maples they put in will become diseased
pretty soon.

So, good idea to call attention to this Paul, but someone should have thought
of it earlier.

~~~
pyre
Maybe someone should track these people down in a few years when the new trees
are installed. Tell them that the new trees are diseased and need to be
completely replaced a second time. Then ask them what their opinion is. If
their opinion is, "There's nothing wrong with those trees." Then you know that
the axed the oaks just because they preferred maples... no other reason.

------
abstractbill
I used to think most American cities were ugly because nobody cared enough to
make them beautiful. Reading this almost makes me think it's _intentional_.
Very sad indeed.

~~~
philwelch
American cities are designed around the automobile. The rare American city
that's designed to be beautiful (Portland, for instance) is impossible to
drive in, while cities that can be driven in are almost necessarily inhuman
sprawl.

You'd think that, as a trade-off, American cities would be usable for
motorists. But traffic congestion is such a big problem that it's impossible
to build a city to satisfy even that requirement.

------
asdlfj2sd33
Relevant:
[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dis...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html)

~~~
sketerpot
_Very_ relevant. He says very eloquently everything that's wrong with American
city planning, with pictures. He doesn't mince words, either.

------
eserorg
Your tax dollars at work.

It's no wonder that the State of California is bankrupt.

While the state of California is piling on _billions_ of dollars in debt to
pay for unionized wellfare programs, raising tax rates across the board on its
citizens, cutting essential city and state services, closing state parks,
issuing "IOU's" to people in-lieu of tax refunds, and seeing its general
obligation bonds downgraded below "junk" status, it apparently is still OK to
spend taxpayer money cutting down perfectly healthy trees to make sure that
all of the trees on a street are the same height.

This in a state that has more Honda Prius' per-capita than any other state in
the union.

Isn't being "green" wonderful?

I'm sure there's an entire office of twinkie-munching government bureaucrats
that could be fired to compensate the California tax-payer for this gross
misappropriation of his hard-earned tax dollars.

------
tjic
Private owners respect and conserve their resources.

Governments (which is to say, politicians with short lifespans in their job)
use up resources in a rush to accomplish short term, idiotic goals.

You can look at the environmental records of capitalist countries versus
centrally managed totalitarian states.

...or you can look at golf courses (which don't "cut down all the trees to
keep things tidy") and compare them to the government of Palo Alto.

~~~
shykes

       > Private owners respect and conserve their resources
    

Except when they don't. Blanket statements like that aren't very helpful.

    
    
       > politicians [...] use up resources in a rush
       > to accomplish short term, idiotic goals.
    

Except when they don't. Or when the goals are decided by the private owners
who bought them lunch.

~~~
randallsquared
_Or when the goals are decided by the private owners who bought them lunch._

I think you missed the point. If the property in question were privately
owned, then the goals concerning the property would be the owners' goals, not
the politicians' goals. To the extent that the politicians' goals control
property, the property isn't privately owned (except for the corner case of
property the politicians privately own).

~~~
shykes
Allow me to reformulate my point for clarity:

1\. Politicians don't always mismanage publicly owned resources

2\. When they _do_ , it is often on behalf of a private interest, e.g. a real
estate developer contributing to their next campaign

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revorad
This reminds of the time they chopped down all the trees along Fergusson
College Road in Pune. It was one of the most beautiful streets in the city
with trees on both sides forming a canopy almost covering the entire street.

The excuse then was creating more space for vehicles and improving traffic
flow.

The trees are gone; the traffic jams haven't. Very sad.

------
rglovejoy
Something I don't understand: cities and counties in California are said to be
broke, so how is it that the Palo Alto public works department is able to send
out a work crew to cut down these oak trees? Is Palo Alto running a surplus
that they need to spend before its fiscal year is over?

~~~
jfarmer
They've been doing road work up and down College Ave all year, too, so
presumably they have money for something.

------
barrkel
A similar situation almost occurred in my home town of Galway, Ireland. The
main square, Eyre square, has historically been shaded by trees - Wikipedia
says early ash was planted in 1631 - but the council wanted to remove 80 of
105 of them, "because the landscape levels were to be altered".

There was a lot of opposition, though, and eventually they backed down.

------
gcv
Could the trees have been infected by Dutch Elm Disease? I've regrettably seen
many old trees cut down from it, and you can't see much damage until it has
progressed significantly. Granted, I've never seen it affect an entire street
full of trees at once, so that seems suspicious...

------
e40
Are there any Maple trees that do not either drop sap or other liquids or
large seed pods? We're all familiar with the mess the former makes of our cars
and sidewalks. The latter, at least the ones from Sugar Maples, are a real
pain in the ass, clogging storm drains and such.

------
balding_n_tired
Acorns are a tripping hazard? I have never been especially graceful, I have
lived under oaks for about half the last thirty years--including at least four
that were astonishingly productive of acorns, and bless me if I've ever
tripped on an acorn.

~~~
jobu
It happens - my aunt broke her tailbone after slipping on acorns. I don't
blame the city one bit. Oak trees are beautiful trees for forests and parks,
but they are very messy for public walkways. They drop small branches
constantly as well as piles of acorns that attract squirrels and mice.

------
cdibona
I drove by today on El Camino and I thought it looked naked. Now I know why.
Freaky. That said, I had a diseased oak lose a limb , if it had hit someone ,
or my car, it would have really done some damage.

------
BRadmin
From Palo Alto Online - California Avenue trees get the axe:

<http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=13827>

------
projectileboy
Hmm... tell me again why I would want to live in Silicon Valley?

------
christofd
I don't mind talking about trees.

The bigger picture behind this concept is urban planning, which is a huge
issue to be fixed in the U.S. (if you want sustainable development).

------
jrwoodruff
This might be unconnected, but having just read PG's piece on publishing, and
being in the local news business, it seems as though there may have been
meetings about this decision? Published in the local newspaper perhaps?

At least, most developments and streetscaping projects around here don't go
down with at least a (public) city council vote.

I'm not sure what my point is... maybe just that I'm curious what the local
media coverage of this is/was?

------
Methusala
If governments have so much power that they can demolish well loved landmarks
in the center of American entrepreneurship, imagine what they can do to a
whole state or even country...wait a minute.

What needs to happen to save the state and country is the exact opposite of
this travesty-entrepreneurs should replace the real deadwood, government on
every level.

<http://lewrockwell.com>

------
spiralhead
People should be pissed about this for a number of reasons. PG--I suggest
putting their phone numbers up. Emails are too easy to ignore.

------
fjabre
Plenty of Oak trees still here in Cambridge PG as I'm sure you recall. Just
beautiful this time of year. =)

I'd miss them if they were gone too.

------
EinhornIsFinkle
@earthlink.net for the Mayor? Ouch! He probably has a Flowbee and a Zack
Morris bag phone to boot.

~~~
pmorici
I emailed the guy and got a response.

------
jonursenbach
Where were the tree sitters at?

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cpr
Is the old Kirk's hamburger joint still there? Wonderful place.

(This is dating me--haven't been back there for 20 years.)

~~~
nvoorhies
There's no longer a Kirk's on California. The Palo Alto location moved over to
Town & Country village a couple miles away. Kirk's has a few other locations
in nearby towns too, though, so I suspect it was more because the California
Ave. location was getting old and run down than financial troubles.

------
ecq
absolutely terrible.

