where once the sweet birds sang

A Tree Grew in DTLA

Michael Sedano

There’s a triangle of cement near the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Here East Third Street crosses Main Street and veers sharply south toward J-Town and the river. And pa’lla, Boyle Heights and East LA. The Bradbury Building and Wayne Healy's Anthony Quinn "Pope of Broadway" mural are a few blocks West. If ever a spot deserved a magnificent tree, it's this hard monotonous slab of cement. A tree grew here, once.

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

Unknown souls live around here, spillover from adjacent skid row. Tourists like me pass en route from Pershing Square Metro to J-Town Metro. This is LA’s most interesting section for discovering architectural exemplars while immersing in LA’s rich cultural diversity and hard-ass struggle.

At one time, this now cyclone-fenced plaza grew trees. At the apex of the triangle grew a tree that must  have been a thing of beauty, this tree. A Coral Tree is my guess, Erythrina x bidwillii, whose scarlet-flowered spiny branches grow and twist into picturesque natural sculpture supporting a canopy of deep green curved triangular leaves. 

An early summer bloomer, Coral Trees are in season now. This one would have been approaching full flower. Pedestrians would have hitched a step, taken selfies, rested in the shade eating a paleta from a nearby vendor or shared a bottle with a fellow wino. Honeybees would have packed leg pouches with pollen and filled the air with their happy buzz. Colibríes would have browsed across the blossoms chirping and micturating and pooping like they do, before flitting away to plot returns that will never be. Not to be, like all the things that are absent when a tree is removed.

Hummingbirds and photographers love Coral Trees. Landscape designers love its natural shape but also its trainability into shapes and planted in rows forming traffic barriers, a shady promenade, a seasonal garden highlight, a shady respite on this anonymous urban street corner where trees belong. Where trees shouldn't be killed.

Coral Tree at Huntington Library and Colibrí Allen's, June 4, 2025

The Coral Tree at the corner of E Third and Main St had been managed. City workers pruned it into a sturdy upright trunk that rose high before branching toward the sun, its canopy cantilevered overhead making merciful shade.

Disused real estate in DTLA is not long for this world. This triangle of land where that wondrous tree--the last of its tribe in DTLA--grew, must occupy dreams of monied interests somewhere, waiting for the smoke to clear.

A tree that may in summer wear 

A nest of robins in her hair

May 22, 2025. Slated for removal, useless to the owners.

This Coral Tree was forced to die. And die it did. It has. It’s gone now

I passed the tree on May 22. I nodded my respects to its spent remains, its protected status. Cyclone fencing saves the skeleton from the ignominy of spray can taggers. Or conversion to leña by unhoused locals whose winter trash fires ravaged neglected fiberglass planters, burning them down to the dried fill dirt. Fires didn't last the night but they must have given a lovely light.

I passed again on June 7 to see a two-foot stump where once the sweet birds sang. Pa’lla, over by the parking lot, next to the massive Agave, sole survivor of landscape dreams, the decayed Coral Tree trunk reposes.

June 7, 2025. That Agave tree has been trimmed hard, but hangs on.

A Coral Tree takes a long time to die. It takes a lot of nerve to let it. But die it has. So it’s been a long time that birds nested in the crooks, colibríes hovered at the tree’s tubular flower clusters looking like deep sea petrified coral. It been a long time that people found respite from punishing glare and pavement heat in the Coral Tree’s shade. Now, ya stuvo for that Coral Tree.

So it goes.

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second-best time to plant a tree is now. 

 

It’s never easy to say goodbye to a tree.

Goodbye, Coral Tree at E. Third and Main. Ave atque vale.

Who can make a tree?

Joyce Kilmer, 1886 – 1918

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear 
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

This poem is in the public domain. https://poets.org/poem/trees

O Christmas Tree

When I was little, my father would supervise while my brothers, sister and I decorated the family Christmas tree. Though plastic or aluminum trees were all the rage in the 60s, we always had a real tree, the intoxicating smell of pine filling the downstairs of our New Jersey home. He would sit back in his leather butterfly chair, a gin & tonic in one hand, his omnipresent pipe in the other, and direct us in tinsel application as if he were conducting a symphony, the cherry wood pipe floating through the air like a baton. We had to put the lead tinsel on the branches one strand at a time. Whenever his attention would wander we would fling fistfuls up at the branches in front of us, and then when he looked back, resume our single strand application. He always noticed though. Despite the tight restrictions, it was a festive time, the turntable spilling out carols into the evening air, my mother baking in the kitchen, and my siblings actually being nice to me.

Despite the promises we make ourselves that we will not recreate the irritating habits our parents inflicted on us, they sometimes pop up like weeds. When I got my first apartment, I was so excited about creating my own Christmas tree without the restrictions of my family traditions. My Brooklyn apartment was decorated almost entirely in mauve and cream (give me a break, it was the 80s) and I spent that November carefully choosing and purchasing tasteful Victorian-style ornaments that matched my home. By mid-December I had the perfect tree; it looked as if I walked out of Gimbel’s seasonal department, hauling it over my shoulder in its entirety, lace trailing behind. I moved the ornaments with me to Vermont, and continued to collect pieces appropriate to the theme.

When I had my son, I considered how I would adapt the handmade ornaments he would undoubtedly come home with from day care to my carefully maintained tree design. For his second Christmas I installed a small tree in his room, complete with his own child- friendly ornaments (a transportation theme…scary, huh?) and twinkling primary colored lights. My son showed no interest in his little tree, gravitating towards the larger one in the living room with its monochromatic white lights. He would sit on the rug and joyfully rearrange the carefully placed ornaments. After he went to bed I would return the tree to its pristine state.

In between seasons we would store our Christmas tree decorations in a large plastic box in a loft in our garage. That year I had been given a large glass snowglobe that I carefully wrapped and placed in with the decorations. Well, during the change of seasons the water froze, then expanded and the globe shattered. In the summer the icy guts of the globe melted all over the tasteful ornaments, eventually molding them beyond recognition over the long hot summer. That December when I opened the box and discovered the green furry remnants of my decorations, a full range of feelings rushed through me: grief, repulsion, amusement but the loudest and most surprising was relief. I was free. That weekend I took my young son with me and we ran around Ames, purchasing relatively inexpensive, brightly colored ornaments with no thought to theme. Over the years the white lights have been replaced with colored ones, and the tree is every color of the rainbow, with his handmade ornaments looking right at home.

The Christmas tree is just one example of the many things in life that I have learned to let go of, to have fun with through my role as parent. That year I was reminded that Christmas is indeed a child’s holiday, and that, thankfully, it comes in colors other than mauve and cream, and though my son has grown and toys have been replaced with electronics, I remember that particular holiday with nostalgia. That was the greatest Christmas gift I’ve ever received…one that will not be forgotten.

Happy Holidays, gentle readers!