Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World by Sara C. Bronin

Author:Sara C. Bronin [Bronin, Sara C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393881660
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2024-10-01T07:00:00+00:00

Part III

__________

DESIGNING

FOR DELIGHT

8

The Force of Nature

At noon on August 22, 1856, not far from the State Capitol in Hartford, the Colt Armory Band played a woeful dirge before a large crowd that included “Chief Justices and Reverend Doctors intermixed with sturdy laborers,” according to the Hartford Daily Courant. Hours later, at sundown, the bells of the city tolled a requiem, and in the following days, newspapers from New York to London covered the fateful loss—not of a great man, but of a monarch: the Charter Oak, thirty-three feet around and perhaps eight hundred years old, felled during a violent storm.

The Charter Oak holds an exalted place in Connecticut’s history. Its name refers to a royal deed that King Charles II granted to the colony in 1662, acknowledging the rights to self-governance established in a constitution written twenty-three years earlier. Connecticut, the Constitution State, claims this constitution as the first in history ever to be written by “the people” themselves. Legend holds that in 1687, a prominent Connecticut resident hid the royal charter in the cavity of the Charter Oak, shielding it from the soldiers of the new king, William III, who demanded that it be relinquished. The tree went on to become a cherished symbol of Connecticut, the subject of books, museum exhibits, a monument, poems, songs, and paintings—including one that I frequently visit at the Wadsworth Atheneum (the country’s oldest art museum, located in downtown Hartford) and another, by Frederic Church, that I traveled to the Hudson Valley to see. Carved from the felled tree itself were intricate pieces of furniture, including a cradle made for the Colts—also exhibited at the Wadsworth—and a chair on display at Church’s Hudson Valley estate. In 1935, the adoration became official, as the U.S. Mint issued a half-dollar commemorating Connecticut’s three hundredth anniversary with the Charter Oak on the back, followed by a state quarter of similar design in 1999.

My desk in Hartford overlooks the Scion of the Charter Oak, a first-generation descendant that occupies a prominent place in Bushnell Park, the country’s oldest publicly funded park. “My” oak was planted over a hundred and fifty years ago. Since then, significant investments have gone toward pruning, fertilizing, and protecting it from disease. It’s a virtually perfect specimen, full and beautifully formed, and it has brought me great joy and calm as the seasons change around it while I work and write. My vista owes its preservation to the tree’s historic significance, its association with patriotism and self-determination. The Scion must endure.

From a zoning perspective, Hartford uses many tools to ensure that its trees do, in fact, endure. The city needs all the healthy trees it can get, as like many urbanized areas, it has lost much of its canopy to development, neglect, disease, and pests—and over the years, hasn’t planted enough trees to replace that canopy. To restore some of the look and feel of a city shaded by trees, the zoning code starts by trying to prevent the loss of the city’s largest and most significant trees—those with a diameter of thirteen inches or more.

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