Cobble Hill Tree Fund

09/02/2026

Cobble Hill Tree Fund is helping grow Brooklyn’s urban forest, one tree at a time
(written by Brennan LaBrie in 2026)

New York City’s first-ever Urban Forest Plan, released last month by the Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice and a long list of partner agencies, states a commitment to cover 30% of the city in tree canopy by 2040. To achieve this, tree plantings have to accelerate, the report says.

In Cobble Hill, one organization is already working on it.

If you walk up and down Court Street between Pacific and Degraw, you’ll notice young trees rising out of beds on most blocks, held up by support posts. Most of them were planted in the past year by the Cobble Hill Tree Fund.

The organization has been around since the 1960s, but it’s ramped up efforts in recent years to fill the gaps in Cobble Hill’s tree canopy.

The trees lining NYC’s streets are technically the dominion of NYC Parks. But with an extensive planting schedule covering five boroughs and budget constraints, a significant planting backlog has built up, according to Louis Cox, Tree Planting Coordinator at the Fund.

Plus, Cobble Hill is near the bottom of Parks’s planting schedule, Cox said—and he gets it. In terms of tree cover, the neighborhood is doing pretty well comparatively. However, there is still plenty of room for improvement, as the number of new plantings along Court Street demonstrates.

“Court Street really was a desert before,” Cox said. In some stretches, he adds, it still is.

According to Cox, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s campaign to plant a million trees drove some real progress. The issue is, trees are still cut down here and there, and their replacements aren’t coming anytime soon.

Trees are needed and not always part of city’s planning

“The city will take care of it eventually, but it might take one to five years,” he said. When he joined the Fund in 2023, a Parks forester told him that no tree plantings were planned in Cobble Hill for the foreseeable future. That year, when locals voted to commit $355,000 towards planting 100 trees in council district 39 via the participatory budgeting process, his team noticed that none were in their neighborhood. So, he proposed 25 spots to Council Member Shahana Hanif’s office, 14 of which were approved.

Those 14 trees are the result of extensive deliberation, planning, a permitting process, and a good chunk of money.

For the Fund to plant a single tree, they often must work with a slew of stakeholders, including Parks, landscaping contractors, a nursery, and sometimes homeowners, community board members, and local elected officials.

The process usually starts with Cox identifying an empty tree bed or barren stretch of sidewalk. He then calls a Parks forester—he’s gotten to know a few pretty well by now—to check out the tree bed. Together, they talk about bed size, potential barriers, and tree species. Diversity, sun exposure, and disease resistance are also considered.

Once Parks approves a planting permit for the Fund, Cox sources a tree from a nursery and calls up a contractor to prepare the bed and plant the tree. Sometimes, several contractors might have a hand in the work.

In total, the whole process can take anywhere from two weeks to nine months. But Cox keeps the same energy regardless of timeline: “I want to plant a tree and I’ll keep trying until I do it.”

A tree usually costs $1,200. Planting it costs another $1,200, and chopping up stumps and concrete can add another $1,000. If they’re working with a homeowner to replace a tree, the Fund will split the cost. Much of their funding for this work comes from individual and family donations.

The ideal planting windows fall in the spring and fall, but road bumps happen. Cox planted a Japanese Zelkova outside the Court Street CVS last December and it’s doing just fine, he said. In fact, Cobble Hill’s trees all share something in common: Resilience.

“Most of these trees should not be doing well,” Cox said, pointing to the older trees extending over Court Street

While there are bureaucratic hurdles and city regulations to overcome, each planting really comes down to a “judgement call” from Cox and the foresters.

“There are best practices and ideal conditions but I’d rather have a tree in the ground in bad conditions than no tree at all,” he said.

The urban forest

Groups like the Cobble Hill Tree Fund play a key role in building and maintaining NYC’s urban forest, Cox said.

Parks looks at trees from the forest level, making decisions that benefit the health of the greater ecosystem, Cox says, while advocates like him can commit time and energy to advocate for a single tree.

This means he takes factors like emotional attachment into account. When a resident loses the tree that’s shaded their stoop for decades, there’s often a sentimental motivation to have it replaced.

“I never underestimate the psychological benefits of a tree,” he said.

In the NYC Urban Forest Plan, city leaders like Mayor Mamdani and Parks Commissioner Tricia Shimamura stressed the crucial role trees play in cooling a city that breaks heat records each year. Lowering temperatures on Cobble Hill’s streets is a major goal of Cox’s work, but there’s another very important driver: Making them look nice.

“Parks sells trees on hard data like stormwater capture and cooling effects, and these are all real—but they’re also just really pretty to look at,” he said.

Since joining the Fund in 2023, Cox has helped plant 25 trees around Cobble Hill. A filmmaker by trade, he started his tree advocacy journey in 2015 when he began caring for the trees left behind by his father in their family’s backyard.

Each tree he plants is a contribution to the neighborhood that raised him, a source of shade and beauty for the next generation of Cobble Hill residents like his 3-year-old daughter.

“It’s a multi-generational baton-passing kind of work,” he said. He’s being mentored by Fund President Gale Synnott, and he’s training his neighbors to care for their trees too.

The more advocates he can recruit, the better.

“I just want to plant as many trees in empty beds as I can,” he said.

Locals looking to support the Fund can stop by their plant sale on the corner of Court and Amity Streets on May 16 starting at noon.

--
https://www.star-revue.com/cobble-hill-tree-fund-is-helping-grow-brooklyns-urban-forest-one-tree-at-a-time/ .

New York City’s first-ever Urban Forest Plan, released last month by the Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice and a long list of partner agencies, states a commitment to cover 30% of the city in tree canopy by 2040. To achieve this, tree plantings have to accelerate, the report says...

09/02/2026

Just fifty or so years ago, Cobble Hill was nearly treeless. Thanks to the insistent efforts of local resident George Polimeros, Cobble Hill now boasts hundreds of trees, including London Planes, Red Oaks, and Norway Maples. Polimeros, an engineer and tree lover who died in 1979, started his tree campaign single handedly back in the 1960s. The story goes Polimeros would go door to door asking his neighbors to contribute to the tree fund. “He planted more than 2,000 trees,” his widow, Demetra Polimeros, told the New York Times in 2008. The Cobble Hill Tree Fund was created to carry on his good work.

09/02/2026

Trees Really Do Grow in Brooklyn – Thanks to the Cobble Hill Tree Fund
(written by Molly Culver in 2011)

It’s quite possible that the beloved streets of Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and the surrounding neighborhoods – currently festooned with pink and white Cherry and Magnolia blossoms – would not be as cheerful in spring, nor provide such welcome shade in the summer, were it not for the vision of one determined resident many years ago.

In the 1960s, George Polimeros of Clinton Street began a dogged door-to-door neighborhood greening campaign, beseeching neighbors rather than asking.

“Wouldn’t you like a tree planted out front?” he'd ask.

Mr. Polimeros planted and pruned the trees himself. After his death, his supporters created the Cobble Hill Tree Fund under the auspices of the Cobble Hill Association.

Today, the Cobble Hill Tree Fund is made up of about fifteen volunteer members, led by Co-chairs Georgia Willett and Tom Synnott, and Dick Van Bolt, Treasurer, who plan, organize and carry out annual spring and fall tree plantings around Cobble Hill and contiguous neighborhoods. Between six and ten new trees are planted each year. Over 200 trees have been planted by the Fund since 1981. The group primarily raises funds through individual donations to the Cobble Hill Association (earmarked for the Fund) and their popular annual plant sale, which is coming up this Saturday, April 30.

Willett, a lifelong resident of Cobble Hill, remembers her parents’ recounting of the day Mr. Polimeros knocked on their front door some forty years ago, requesting to plant a tree on the sidewalk outside their house.

“It grew from a little stick,” says Willett, smiling.

That tiny seedling became a regal tree now standing a proud thirty feet tall, higher than the building Willett was raised in.

The mission of the Cobble Hill Tree Fund is “to plant as many trees as we can within our capability,” says Willett on a recent tour of the neighborhood’s new and past plantings.

Walking around the neighborhood, the work of the group is evident and impressive. A young Silver Linden has just been planted in front of Blue Marble on Court Street, thanks to joint funding from , (nextdoor), and the Fund. The group collaborates with storeowners and residents to nurture new trees during the early and more vulnerable stage of life, when diligent watering is key to survival.

On the corner of Court and Kane streets, a towering Callery Pear stands tall; its broad canopy of delicate white blossoms fall softly around it. Several feet away stands an empty tree pit where a similar Callery Pear once stood – it was fatally hit by a truck.

“Trucks are a huge hazard,” explains Willett.

She estimates that the neighborhood loses between five and seven trees a year to vehicle accidents and imprudent delivery truck drivers. Disease and old age are other common (though less preventable) causes of tree losses.

Next to run-ins with cars and trucks, lack of watering is the “biggest” threat to young trees, explains Willett.

“Educating people is part of our mission,” she says.

Other striking Cobble Hill Tree Fund plantings include a magnificent Japanese Pagoda tree in , at the corner of Clinton and Congress streets, a Silver Linden on Congress and Henry streets and a newly-planted Columnar Oak on Congress Street by the Chapel entrance at the .

A couple more plantings are on the horizon this spring: a Silver Linden or Callery Pear on Tompkins Place, and both a Red Oak and a Callery Pear on Warren Street.

For the Fund, trees bestow many benefits upon city dwellers.

“Beauty in each of the seasons, homes for birds and small animals and a source of oxygen – a rare commodity in a city as large as New York City," reads a pamphlet for the group.

One example of the beauty and character trees provide for residents is a giant leaning Mulberry (“rare for this neighborhood”) on Kane Street.

Purchases of street trees through the Fund are tax-deductible; the total cost of an average street tree planting is $800 (includes delivery, potential tree pit expansion and planting).

Locals can support the Fund by patronizing their annual plant sale in Cobble Hill Park, this Saturday, April 30 from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. This year, the plant sale will feature lots of hanging baskets, a variety of annuals, an increased number of herb and tomato starts, as well as an increased variety of perennials.

There will also be a plant/tree identification activity for kids, and a bake sale run by the PTA. If your home is in need of a little spring greening, or you’d like to learn more about the Cobble Hill Tree Fund, make sure to stop by this coming Saturday. Volunteers are also needed.

George Polimeros’ legacy surely is a beautiful one. Without it, our beloved corner of Brooklyn would probably look a lot less inviting. One need only visit the CHTF’s website to witness a striking before-and-after video of Warren Street (1970 and present) to appreciate the decades of dedicated greening work he inspired.

If you’re looking for a local cause to support, the Cobble Hill Tree Fund is undoubtedly a worthy one.

--
https://patch.com/new-york/carrollgardens/trees-really-do-grow-in-brooklyn-thanks-to-the-cobble082cb0ac72 .

One of your neighbors posted in Community Corner. Click through to read what they have to say. (The views expressed in this post are the author’s own.)

09/02/2026

A Sapling Grows Into a Giant; The Streets Around It Change, Too
(published in 2008)

It may have been a sapling, but it looked like a stick. Diane Dillon, for one, was fairly skeptical that the branch her elderly neighbor stuck in the ground in front of his Cobble Hill brownstone one day in the late 1960s a twig, no thicker than her finger would ever amount to much. She was pretty sure the wind would just blow it away.

But the neighbor Ms. Dillon remembers him only as Mr. Greiner must have had a feeling about that stick. As the neighborhood around it was transformed, from a rough-edged enclave of immigrants to one of the most sought-after ZIP codes in the city, with the prices of houses climbing from the low five digits in the 1960s to millions today, the twig grew as well.

The tree, on Kane Street near Tompkins Place, became a giant, with branches that reach across Kane, roots that have torn apart the sidewalk, and a trunk wrapped in vines that leans into the street like an old man warning cars away.

“This is what it has become,” said Ms. Dillon. “This little tiny branch we thought would never survive.”

In recent weeks, though, residents who live appreciatively in the mulberry’s shade feared the tree faced a new threat: a city chain saw. In May, a note on green paper appeared in the mailbox of the Melameds, who live in Mr. Greiner’s old house, announcing that a city inspector had determined the tree was facing removal pending review because it was diseased.

Then, one morning in early June, Mark Melamed saw posted signs explaining that trees on the street were scheduled for trimming or removal. The family feared the worst.

The Melameds’ 16-year-old daughter, Caroline, went to school that day “close to tears,” her mother, Helen Melamed, said. The mulberry’s branches scraped Caroline’s window, providing a leafy prism on the neighborhood. She anxiously called home from school to find out what had happened to the tree.

Was the tree’s success something like the neighborhood’s? Just as the houses are now so expensive too expensive for some who grew up there now perhaps the tree had grown too large, damaging the sidewalk, raining mulberries and branches on cars, and even endangering those who walk beneath it.

In 1966, when Ms. Dillon moved to the neighborhood, there were few street trees in Cobble Hill. The brownstones sold for $10,000, and many had been cut up into rooming houses, where Irish, Italian and Syrian immigrants rented space for about $100 a month. Feuding gangs, the Playboys and the Black Diamonds, shared the streets with the knife sharpeners and the horse-drawn fruit carts. Parents in Brooklyn Heights told their children not to wander south of Atlantic Avenue. Banks called it a “transitional neighborhood,” Ms. Dillon said, and it was hard to get a mortgage.

But a well of civic pride fed the residents of Cobble Hill. They fought for the park that today sits next to the mews houses on Verandah Place, and they issued a design guide for preserving brownstones that was circulated in historic neighborhoods in New York and beyond.

And they planted trees. George Polimeros, an engineer who was the tree manager for the Cobble Hill Association, led the effort. “He planted more than 2,000 trees,” said his widow, Demetra Polimeros, who still lives in the neighborhood. Her husband, who died in 1979, would go from house to house with his guitar to persuade residents over drinks and music to contribute money to the tree-planting effort.

Mostly, he planted the disease-resistant London planes. “They were hardy, and would tolerate the salt the city would throw around during a snowstorm,” Mrs. Polimeros said.

Ms. Dillon has forgotten the first name of her neighbor, Mr. Greiner. She thought that he was German and had a wife named Rosa, and she remembers him as a fearless home improver, known, when he was in his 70s, to hang from a rope to paint his house. But one year, she forgets exactly when, Mr. Greiner chose to plant a mulberry, an aggressive tree that needs no coddling. Of the nearly 600,000 street trees in New York City today, about 1,200, or 0.2 percent, are mulberries, according to Jennifer Greenfeld, the director of street tree planting for the city parks department.

“It’s not a tree we recommend planting,” she said. “They’re opportunistic.”

The sapling came from a mulberry tree in Mr. Greiner’s backyard.

But now ...

The branches nudge the neighbors’ trees, and wind around a nearby lamppost. One massive limb has reached clear across Kane Street, nearly touching a house on the other side. “I’ve never seen one that large,” said Tom Synnott, the chairman of the Cobble Hill Tree Fund.

And the tree is something constant in a neighborhood where the pace of change seems to accelerate daily. The homes on Kane Street are now called “town houses” by property agents, Ms. Dillon noted with a laugh. Atlantic Avenue, that once-feared divide, is dangerous only for those afraid of shopping.

Mrs. Melamed and her family are part of the change, having moved to Kane Street from Manhattan three years ago. On the day that they feared the mulberry would be cut down, she joined the latest wave of neighborhood activists, calling the parks department’s Brooklyn Forestry Office to learn the tree’s fate.

The news was good. A man who answered the phone told her the mulberry had won a “stay of execution,” for now.

Unsure how long the reprieve would last, the Melameds posted a polite, pleading note on the mulberry’s trunk, addressed to Andy Rabb of the Brooklyn Forestry office. “We are very anxious that this tree be preserved if it is at all possible,” they wrote. Then they waited.

On Tuesday, the parks department said that the mulberry, which was inspected again last week, would not be cut down.

Parks officials said they had received complaints about the damage to the sidewalk under the tree, and about the branches and mulberries that fall off it. But they said that the tree was healthy, and added that the crews on the day in early June were there to prune the tree.

“We had our fingers crossed,” Mrs. Melamed said.

Mr. Synnott, of the Tree Fund, said he would monitor some rot on the tree’s base. “It’s become a neighborhood icon,” he said.

--
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/nyregion/20journal.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-FA.jgge.Cf-RMHW45Hpx&smid=url-share .

A mulberry tree is something constant in a neighborhood where the pace of change seems to accelerate daily.

09/02/2026

Twenty Six Years and Growing
(written by Bill Epes in 2006)

About the time Cobble Hill became a historic district, resident George Polimeros began a tree-planting campaign. According to Tom Synnott, current Chair of the Cobble Hill Tree Fund, George had a way of being insistent. “He arrived and informed us that we would of course be planting a tree in front of our house.” Dick Van Bolt, current Treasurer, remembers him this way: “He was Mr. Tree. He never lost an opportunity to see another tree planted. If it had to do with trees and Cobble Hill, it had to do with George.”

After George’s death in the mid 1970s, a like-minded group began to form in the community to offset the loss. Formalized by the Cobble Hill Association in a 501C3 charitable trust, this group laid the foundation for the greening of Cobble Hill.

Since its creation in 1981, the Cobble Hill Tree Fund has been responsible for planting more than 200 trees. It has raised tens of thousands of dollars for planting and maintenance. Thanks in part to its work, the compact twenty-square-block area of Cobble Hill now has on average thirty trees per block.

Over the years, it has became clear that the Cobble Hill Tree Fund’s fund-raising and planting work would need to be augmented by other activities. Many of its members have become Citizen Pruners, licensed city volunteers who maintain street and park trees. Beautification projects have included extensive anti-graffiti plantings in front of 250 Baltic Street.

In the past two years, in addition to planting trees, Cobble Hill Tree Fund members have built tree pit surrounds; helped fund and staff the Neighborhood Tree Chipping event in Cobble Hill Park (to recycle Christmas tree mulch for street tree pits and two local community gardens); and have begun to work with the Court Street Beautification Committee. Today, the Fund sponsors Street Tree Talks to focus attention on local tree maintenance issues.

New challenges face Cobble Hill’s “urban forest,” and the Cobble Hill Tree Fund has begun to discuss ways of addressing them. As Cobble Hill’s tree stock ages, it will underscore the importance of long term planning for replacement. The mortality rate of newly planted trees citywide continues to challenge groups like the Cobble Hill Tree Fund to improve methods of providing maintenance. Finally, a growing body of evidence suggests that there are substantial, measurable environmental and economic benefits to planting street trees. The Cobble Hill Tree Fund hopes to broaden the appreciation of these benefits, through outreach and education.

We invite all interested citizens to join us.