Mighty Oaks - and Very Old Ones - Are Among Sandy\'s Victims in Central Park

Central Park Conservancy Remains of the 550 trees destroyed in Central Park by Hurricane Sandy lay piled up on the 102nd Street drive within the park. The dark building in the center background is the Annenberg Building of Mount Sinai Hospital.

More than 550 trees in Central Park were destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Sandy, the Central Park Conservancy said on Wednesday, even as it prepared to meet an advancing nor'easter. The park is closed to the public for now.

Among the greatest losses was a pin oak from the Adir ondack-like North Woods cascades. By counting its rings in cross-section, conservancy officials determined that the tree was at least 160 years old, meaning that it may have been among the first trees planted in Central Park.

Central Park Conservancy Hurricane Sandy aftermath.

Perhaps it was a tree in this scene described 20 years ago in The New York Times by Anne Raver: “Up in the woods, other sounds rise out of the silence: water tumbling over rocks, a leaf falling, a cardinal chipping in a bronze-leafed pin oak that could be a century old.”

Another significant loss was a 120-year-old swamp white oak that was toppled along the Mall. These magnificent trees, which have been used at the National September 11 Memorial, can live up to two centuries, meaning that this specimen might otherwise have been in its healthy middle age.

The conservancy, a nonprofit organization that manages Central Park for New York City, collected the overturned trees and severed branches and piled them along the drive at 102nd Street. According to Dena Libner, the spokeswoman for the conservancy, the pile rises up to 20 feet high and stretches about two avenues in length (roughly the distance along 42nd Street between the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Times Square at Seventh Avenue).

The lumber will be chipped down by tub grinders to create mulch for use in Central Park and other city parks, she said.

Central Park Conservancy An overview of the pile of damaged trees and branches, with the twin-towered Eldorado apartments in the background on Central Park West, gives some sense of the storm's destruction.