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If you can't stand the heat, stay away from the pool
(by David Linzee - April 22, 2008)
Summer’s coming, but my list of anticipated pleasures has shortened by one.
I’ve long been a fan of University City’s pool in Heman Park. Whenever friends in other suburbs bragged about their luxurious new aqua-centers with lazy rivers, 50-foot high corkscrew slides, wave machines and what-have-you, I responded that our pool, the oldest in St. Louis County, had something better: shade. The pool was surrounded by lawns and tall pin oak trees. We could retreat from the blazing sun to lie on deck chairs under the trees and watch the water splash and the young ’uns frolic.
Not anymore.
The trees have been cut down.
I heard the bad news from a reliable source, but didn’t want to believe it. I rushed out to see. The first signs were bad; crossing Heman Park I passed the mulch area, where the woodchip piles were as big as Sahara dunes, and a few dismembered trunks lay around forlornly. Reaching the pool, I found it surrounded by empty sockets, with only one of the tall oaks left.
At first I assumed the loss was somehow connected to our budget crunch. That’s the way we tend to think in U. City these days, as one amenity after another slips away. But the story turns out to be more complicated.
I called City Forester James Crow, who said no, the budget hadn’t been a factor, because his department did all the work in-house. The trouble started with the pool renovation of four years ago. “The decking area was expanded and when new pipes were put in, they cut the roots” of the seven trees around the pool, Crow explained. “The trees began to depreciate.” When the root system is damaged, the trees can’t get enough nutrients to their tops. Crow’s team tried to reverse the process with soil aeration and growth retardant. Then they trimmed the dead wood and hoped. But foliage became sparser and branches died and fell. This year, they found more dead limbs: “Two trees were gone, and two others were only one-third alive.” Since dangling limbs were a safety hazard, Crow took down six trees, reluctantly.
“I miss them,” he said. “They were good old citizens.”
The 2003-04 renovations were much needed. But it was foreseeable they would doom the trees, Crow said. “The people of U. City wanted to keep the architectural imprint of the pool,” he noted, meaning that they didn’t want to make it smaller.
Nancy MacCartney, director of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Forestry, wasn’t here when the plans were being made, but her understanding matches Crow’s. She noted that the trees were planted in the 1930s and the location is tight. “It wasn’t a choice so much as an acknowledgment of the inevitable,” she said. “The community wanted what they had in the past — with a few new amenities. Loss of the trees was one of the impacts of that decision.”
So we have only ourselves to blame, is the message of our public servants. They have a point. I should have bestirred myself to attend the public meetings on the renovation project, because I couldn’t have found out about the tree hazard from the press.
A Post-Dispatch story from spring 2004 praises the completion of the $1.7 million renovation. “U. City is about to add to its collection of big cats,” it begins cheerily, referring to the lion sculpture in the kiddie pool and the lion logo on the bottom of the main pool. Way down in the story comes mention of the concrete decks around the pool being extended. The effect on the trees is not mentioned, only that most people would rather sit on concrete and bake in the sun than sit on the grass under a tree.
I can’t challenge that assertion. In a society where the tanning industry flourishes, you’ve got to admit there are a lot people who like to court melanoma. Still, it was nice when the rest of us had a choice.
I found an earlier story that said, as Crow recalled, that while the renovations were going on, residents were mostly concerned with retaining the traditional architecture of the pool. Maybe we just didn’t consider the trees part of the architecture. Though we ought to know better by now, we still have the tendency to see only the obvious when it comes to nature. We like the branches and leaves, but don’t remember that we need room for the roots.
For Crow, there’s some consolation. He has already replaced the pin oaks with maples. Maples will be better in the long run: they’re lower maintenance, and bare feet will no longer tread painfully on acorns in the grass. But that “long run” is the tricky part. It’ll be 10 or 15 years before the trees are tall enough to cast appreciable shade.
In the meantime, remember to bring your sunscreen.
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