Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll find out about an ailing tree with a meaningful history. And, it’s Fan Week at the U.S. Open. We’ll get details on whether you can get in.
Kim Simons and her husband-to-be, visiting Manhattan from the Netherlands last week, went to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum and then to Liberty Park across from ground zero. She had a particular interest in one tree in the park — and was dismayed when she found it. The tree looked terrible. “It was obvious,” she said a couple of days later. “All the other trees are really green and have beautiful leaves. This tree had three leaves, and they were brown. Other than that, no leaves.” Simons’s aunt, Yvonne Simons, said that the couple’s assessment when they returned from the park had been more ominous. “They said it’s dead,” Yvonne Simons recalled. The tree, an English horse chestnut, is not just another tree in a park. It was grown from a cutting of the Anne Frank tree in Amsterdam, the one that she famously described in the diary she kept while hiding from the Nazis. Kim Simons’s interest in the tree had to do with her aunt, a former executive director of the Anne Frank Center U.S.A., who had arranged to receive 20 cuttings from the tree in Amsterdam in the early 2000s. One of them was eventually planted in Liberty Park, which the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey oversees. The agency’s landscaping contractor, John Mini Distinctive Landscapes, has been keeping a close eye on the ailing tree. Andrew Engel, the director of horticulture and research for the firm, said that he was “concerned.” “There’s no value that you can put on a tree like this,” he said, “so there’s no stop that we won’t pull out to understand what’s happening.” One day in May 1944, Anne Frank wrote in her diary that the tree she could see through her window was “thickly covered with leaves and much more beautiful than last year.” The tree in the park did not fare that well this year: Engel said that it had had a weaker-than-normal spring. “It didn’t come back as vigorously as you would like it to,” he said. That “doesn’t by itself indicate that there is going to be a decline,” he added, and June was encouraging: The tree “showed a very nice trend toward recovery.” But in July, there was “sort of a sharp decline,” Engel said. Mark Mini, the president of the firm, said that the sudden slump, coming after the tree had appeared to bounce back, “definitely caught us off guard.” Engel said that he had reached out to other experts and enlisted the Plant Disease Diagnostic Clinic at Cornell University. The tree has long had a fungal infection called horse chestnut leaf blotch, which Mini said could cause it to lose its leaves sooner than if it were completely healthy. But horse chestnuts can live for decades with leaf blotch, Mini said. “It’s an aesthetic thing and an additional stressor,” Mini said. “It was the ups and downs of the tree throughout the growing season that prompted us to think there might be other things we need to take a look at here.” Tests from Cornell showed that the tree was afflicted by two other fungal pathogens. More troublingly, the tests also pointed to potential damage to the roots. Engel sent off more samples in an effort to pinpoint what might be at issue. Lauren Bairnsfather, who became the chief executive of the Anne Frank Center U.S.A. in 2024, said was impressed by how much attention the tree was getting. “There are very, very few living links to Anne Frank,” Bairnsfather said, “and that’s what the tree is and represents.” (Other cuttings taken from the tree in Amsterdam gave rise to saplings that have been planted around the U.S., including one at Wagner College on Staten Island.) Mini said that if a tree he and Engel were struggling to diagnose was in someone’s yard, they might advise cutting it down and planting another. But the Anne Frank tree is different, and he and Engel are proceeding with caution. “We cannot distress the tree more by sampling too aggressively,” Mini said, “because we have hope that it has a chance of coming back strong next season. Whatever percentage chance that is, we want to hold out hope on that.” WEATHER Expect increasing clouds with a high near 80 and possible showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Tonight will be mostly clear with a low around 65. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Sept. 7 (Labor Day). QUOTE OF THE DAY “Staten Island may be smaller in population than the other boroughs in our city, but it is every bit as important.” — Randy Mastro, a lawyer in cases opposing a rent freeze endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a second-home tax, on why the lawsuits were filed there. On Friday, a judge granted Mamdani’s request to move the rent freeze case to Manhattan. The latest New York news
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Confusion about Fan Week at the U.S. Open
Week 1 of the U.S. Open — Fan Week, when admission is traditionally free — began yesterday and continues through Saturday with qualifying rounds and practice sessions. My colleague David Waldstein says that Fan Week is one of the best spectator hacks in sports. But even Fan Week regulars might get shut out this year. A new policy requires adults to register online for a “fan access pass.” It’s free. But people who get passes may not get in. The United States Tennis Association, which runs the U.S. Open, in Flushing, Queens, is prepared to close the gates if the grounds become too crowded. Many fans were locked out on Thursday, when registration for the passes was abruptly closed because demand was heavy. The tournament reopened registration on Friday, cautioning on its website that admission would be “granted on a rolling basis subject to real-time capacity.” Brendan McIntyre, the spokesman for the U.S. Open, said the tournament had adopted the new policy because Fan Week attendance had exploded in recent years: More than 239,000 people showed up for Fan Week events last year, almost two and a half times the number recorded in 2018, the first year the week was called Fan Week. For years before that, fans had simply strolled in to watch the qualifying rounds. The poster for this year’s tournament was designed by the illustrator Eugenia Mello, who doesn’t play tennis. She took lessons when she was a child, but stopped playing after the instructor said she didn’t run. She does now: When the tournament asked her to do the poster, she had just completed the New York City Marathon in 5 hours 2 minutes 58 seconds. METROPOLITAN DIARY Moths
Dear Diary: In 2024, I arrived back in New York City after six years away. My 19-year-old car was filled with boxes of rugs and textiles and other things I had kept from my old apartment. I met a friend of a friend who had an entire basement where I could store the rugs while I tried to sell them on Facebook Marketplace. After a few months, I was relieved to finally sell the biggest rug I had. The relief faded quickly when I got a text from the buyer: “We found a moth.” I took back the rug and looked through everything in my friend’s basement. It was all infested with moths. My husband and I drove toward our Bed-Stuy apartment as he spun plans that required garbage bags and mothballs. After getting the supplies, we were ready to forge ahead, but my foul mood had officially set in. My husband tried to cheer me up. “Give me a kiss,” he said. Grumpily, I obliged. “And another.” With a huff, I gave him another kiss. “One more for good measure.” Now, with my smile starting to peek through, he got his third kiss. I started to pull out of our spot when a man who was nearby started to gesture wildly and shout at us. I looked around confused. Was I about to hit something? What was he saying? We rolled down the window. “Give us another!” he said with a smile. “One more time for Bed-Stuy!” — Karen Barnett Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
