This summer, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the city’s Bureau of Street Services and Metro planted 77 new Mexican fan palms on Wilshire Boulevard, mostly along the sidewalk and medians outside the museum’s new David Geffen Galleries.
Local environmentalists, who are lobbying hard for more shade trees in L.A., are decrying the decision. They say palm trees are expensive to maintain, highly flammable and hopeless at producing the shade Angelenos need to dull the heat that radiates off the city’s streets, sidewalks and other hardscape surfaces.
Metro planted at least 48 fan palms in the new medians it rebuilt near the museum as part of its D Line Subway Extension Project, between Fairfax and La Brea avenues, said Dave Sotero, Metro’s communications director.
Metro planted at least 48 palm trees in the new medians it rebuilt on Wilshire Boulevard between Fairfax and Curson avenues, mostly in front of LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Sotero said the palms, interspersed with about five pink-blooming silk floss trees, were selected from the city’s palette of acceptable trees, which still includes Mexican and California fan palms.
He said palm trees were chosen “to achieve a continuity of the characteristics of the corridor,” with approval from the city’s Bureau of Street Services, and he emphasized that Metro is also planting more than 100 broad-leaved trees such as London plane and African fern pines to provide shade at its new Metro stops.
LACMA officials see palm trees as an integral part of the museum’s identity, according to testimony during a Sept. 1, 2021, meeting of the city’s Board of Public Works, which agreed to a LACMA/Bureau of Street Services plan to permit nine 35-foot Mexican palm trees and six African sumac trees on the south side of the broad sidewalk in front of the Geffen Galleries.
-
Share via
LACMA Director Michael Govan said the museum planted an additional 20 tall palms on its property along the north side of the sidewalk, in part because it wanted to play off artist Robert Irwin’s 2010 outdoor installation “Primal Palm Garden” of more than 100 palm trees — 18 species in all — around the exterior of LACMA.
“They should be planting oak trees, native trees,” said Joanne D’Antonio, chair of the city’s Community Forest Advisory Committee, who lives in the Valley Glen area of the San Fernando Valley. “Mexican fan palms don’t have any environmental value. It costs in the vicinity of $1,000 to just trim one palm, and if you don’t trim them, they’re a huge fire hazard. I’d really like to know who gave the green light to do this, because the City Council has been very adamant about not planting these things on public property.”
Officials for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art believe palms are part of the museum’s iconic look, thanks to a 2010 outdoor installation of more than 100 palms, 18 species in all, by artist Robert Irwin. The museum is meticulous about their care, says LACMA director Michael Govan, and has pledged to maintain all the new palms in front of its new David Geffen Galleries.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s truly a violation of the [City] Council motion from 2006 that we should not be planting fan palm trees anymore on our city streets,” D’Antonio said.
“It’s absolutely a case of art versus environmental concerns,” said Charles Miller, the Council District 5 representative on the Community Forest Advisory Committee. “Despite the city having biodiversity guidelines, its urban forest division is still stuck in the mid-20th century, never wanting to plant native trees, just palm trees because of that old Hollywood aesthetic. We’re fighting the notion that somehow palm trees are a distinctly L.A. branding thing, and it’s an awful thing we have to overcome.”
Metro planted at least 48 palm trees in the new medians it rebuilt on Wilshire Boulevard between Fairfax and Curson avenues, mostly in front of LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Govan, however, said while palms might be problematic for the city, they’re a good fit for LACMA, where the city’s past can be preserved.
“All those things you say [about the problems with palms] is true,” Govan said. “We’re well aware there will be less and less palms in Los Angeles, but we’re not doing this blindly. We’re creating an alley of palms that’s significant to the history of Los Angeles. They’ll be well cared for here and thoughtfully placed, like the [native] plantings we’re expecting by members of our Indigenous communities. So this is one of the few places you can always go and contemplate those histories.”
A close-up detail of one of the palm tree trunks on Wilshire Boulevard.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Critics have said LACMA’s campus is a huge swath of heat-radiating hardscape. But Govan said the museum will eventually add shade trees on the 3½ acres around the Geffen Galleries after it installs around 50 to 60 pieces of art that will be accessible to the public.
Govan said the museum is still planning its landscape outside the Geffen Galleries, and those plantings probably won’t be completed before the galleries open in April.
In the meantime, he said, people can find shade on the museum grounds under the covered Smidt Welcome Plaza or the roof that protrudes from the top of the elevated Geffen Galleries.
Govan said LACMA will do what it can to minimize concerns about its new palm trees, including being fastidious about keeping them trimmed.
Palm tree shadows line the sidewalk in front of LACMA.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
“We don’t want to delete them all,” Govan said about palm trees. “We just want to put them where they’re well cared for, like in botanic gardens. And our museum.”
Metro has committed to maintaining the palms in the medians on Wilshire Boulevard for three years, Sotero said, and then the task and expense will fall to the city.
For D’Antonio and other environmentalists, the new Wilshire Boulevard palms are just another example of the city’s tree failings, which are laid out in detail in the 2019 report “First Step: Developing an Urban Forest Management Plan for the City of Los Angeles” by Dudek, an environmental and engineering consulting firm based in Encinitas.
The report, commissioned by the nonprofit City Plants with money from Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service, compared Los Angeles’ urban forestry management with three other major cities — San Francisco, New York and Melbourne, Australia — and found that L.A. was “considerably trailing” those cities in achieving a sustainable urban forest, most notably in funding.
“On a per-capita basis, Los Angeles is ranked last, with only $6.30 per person devoted to trees,” according to the report. “New York City is close, but the amount is misleading due to the density of New York City’s population, which is on 50% less land area than Los Angeles. Even more telling, Los Angeles’ annual per-tree budget of approximately $27 is less than half of New York City’s and Melbourne’s $60 per tree, and one-third of the $78 per tree per year that San Francisco invests in its urban forest.”
The city of L.A. is still working on its urban forestry management plan, which was supposed to be completed at the beginning of this year.
D’Antonio expects a draft of the city plan to be presented at the Community Forest Advisory Committee meeting in November, but she said it’s still unclear how any part of the new plan will be funded.
L.A. County approved its new Community Forest Management Plan last fall. Steve Burger, the county’s deputy director of public works, said as of this year, L.A. County Department of Public Works has stopped planting any palms along county streets “because we’re trying to get as many broadleaf shade trees as we can into our communities.”
D’Antonio said the city’s already lackluster tree canopy has shrunk over the last two decades because of drought, pest infestations and development, and several upcoming construction projects will further decimate L.A. trees.
As examples, she cited the renovation and expansion of the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum that calls for removing more than 100 trees and the more than 500 trees identified for removal along Van Nuys Boulevard and some connecting side streets for Metro’s East San Fernando Valley Light Rail Transit Project.
The final design plans for the San Fernando Valley light rail project won’t be completed until late 2026, said Greg Gastelum, senior executive officer for the project, which calls for building the rail line down the center of Van Nuys Boulevard and keeping two lanes for traffic on either side, plus moving utilities that might be in the way.
“It’s a pretty tight corridor,” Gastelum said, “and if you have to move something 2 feet [like narrowing a sidewalk] and you have a tree well next to the curb, it’s going to have an impact on that tree. But our motto is to preserve the tree if it doesn’t have to be removed.”
As is the case with the city of Los Angeles, Metro’s policy is to plant two trees for every one it removes, Sotero said. Therefore, Metro expects to plant about 1,000 trees along Van Nuys Boulevard and side streets to replace those taken out.
D’Antonio doesn’t find this reassuring. She said when she raises concerns about projects requiring tree removals to city staff, the response is typically that “‘The trees will be replaced two-to-one, so don’t worry.’ But on Van Nuys Boulevard, that means a whole new generation of people who won’t have shade for 20 years.”
If the two-for-one trees aren’t planted, developers are required to pay in-lieu-of funds to cover the cost of planting those trees.
The fund for planting replacement trees in L.A. has swelled to $1.3 million, according to Dan Halden, acting director of external relations for the city’s Bureau of Street Services, a.k.a. StreetsLA. But replacement trees aren’t being planted at this time, he said, because the city has yet to complete a new Tree Guarantee Fee Planting Plan.
The broad sidewalk in front of LACMA’s curving David Geffen Galleries is visually interesting with its new corridor of palms, but pedestrians walking the block from the La Brea Tar Pits east of the museum to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to the west won’t find much in the way of shade.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
In the case of LACMA, the museum agreed to pay $120,590 into the fund after it got permission from the city’s Board of Public Works to remove 41 mature trees to build the Geffen Galleries.
Under an approved agreement, LACMA said it would plant 20 replacement trees along public right of way on Wilshire Boulevard and pay for 62 additional trees to be purchased, planted and maintained in the neighborhoods near the museum.
Longtime Carthay Circle resident Ann Rubin said she has asked for years about when the city plans to plant those 62 trees and the type it plans to plant to no avail.
“How can they sit on a million dollars worth of guaranteed-in-lieu fees when we keep hearing there is no money for planting more trees and they can barely maintain what has been planted?” said Rubin, an advocate for adding more shade trees in the area near LACMA.
It’s just one more reason the city’s tree advocates feel like they’re fighting an uphill battle, D’Antonio said.
“Our canopy [of public shade trees] is not growing,” she said, “and on private property, we’re losing canopy because of construction. … There just doesn’t seem to be a consciousness in this city of trying to save trees.”
