Tree decapitation on Fifth Avenue at 60th Street is not some headless Halloween prank

The weekend's snowstorm downed a lot of trees in the New York metropolitan region, but created the most havoc at the epicenter of Manhattan, the plaza on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street.

It did not knock down one tree but decapitated all ten trees in the semi-circle at the north end of the block that extends to 60th Street behind the gilded statue of General Tecumseh Sherman by Augustus St. Gaudens, probably the city's most visible public sculpture after the Statue of Liberty.

The storm was not particularly ferocious but it occurred early in the season when most trees still retained most of their leaves on which wet snow, unaccustomed to such large landing areas, accumulated.

The plaza is surrounded by some of the world's most prestigious and valuable real estate: the Plaza Hotel, the Sherry Netherland Hotel, the apartment building at 785 Fifth Avenue, the Metropolitan Club, the Pierre Hotel, the General Motors Building and Bergdorf Goodman and Trump Tower.

The damage was especially dramatic because it did not seem random and the virtually identical semi-circle of similar trees behind the graceful statue of Venus atop the Pulitzer Fountain on the southern block of the two-block-long "plaza" was virtually untouched.

Presumably the Bloomberg Administration that earlier this month celebrated the planting of its 500,000th tree in the city in its "Million Trees campaign" will find a way to replace the loss of the beautiful, old trees that were a very important ingredient of the city's most elegant public space.

Apart from their good looks, threes make the city more sustainable by absorbing carbon dioxide, lowering ambient temperatures and helping fight asthma.

In their great book, "New York 1900, Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism 1890-1915," Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and John Massengale noted that New York formed a commission in 1893 to erect a memorial in its own Grand Army Plaza at Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue.

"Almost from the first, the New York Federation of Fine Arts and the Municipal Art Society object to the site, which they felt was inappropriate because the 'skyscraper hotels' (the twelve-story Savoy Hotel and he fifteen-story New Netherland) that surrounded the plaza would dwarf the memorial. Seven architects were invited in 1897 to compete for the commission in association with a sculptor of their own choice. Stoughton & Stoughton and Frederick MacMonnies, their collaborating sculptor, won the competition with a design for a column topped by Victory and flanked by equestrian groups. But the argument about the site raged on for three more years, with increasing concern for the Monument Commission's failure to consider a comprehensive scheme for the entire plaza until 1900, when it agreed to move the site to Riverside Park."

Eventually Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher, commissioned Carrere & Hastings to design a fountain topped by Karl Bitter's statue of Pomona for the southern half of the two-block-long plaza to join General Sherman on the northern half that was placed on its pedestal in 1903.

The plaza has not been known as one of the city's windier places such as the northwest corner of 89th Street and Madison Avenue or some stretches of Riverside Drive. Urban aerodynamics at street-level is not widely considered an exact science, but then neither is weather forecasting.

Tree-lovers, however, know a disaster when they see one.