Trees of Bethpage

TREES- Terry Hunt

There used to be a lot more trees lining the roads of Bethpage in the days before road widenings.  I remember a copse of pine trees shading the sidewalk in front of the Rathcabbin Apartments (Broadway north of Powell Ave.) when I was a kid, before Broadway was widened.

When Central Ave. was widened in the late 1960s, we lost two of our most striking trees: a majestic tree towering above William Ahern's home on the corner of Central and Seaman.  His house dated to 1857 and was the first post office in Bethpage, and the tree -- he said it was a elm -- had shaded the house from almost the day it was built. 

If an elm, it had survived the blight which killed most American elms, only to be cut down to satisfy someone's idea of progress... i.e., the need to get cars from one place to another as quickly as possible, while destroying every trace of a village's character in the process.

The other major tree lost when Central Ave. was widened was the huge one -- a maple? -- on the northwest corner of Central and Stewart, adjacent to the Beau Sejour.  It was a giant; it would have taken three people to get their arms around the trunk. 

When it was felled, I went with my friend Henry to take a look and count the rings.  Studying it on the ground, the bark of this magnificent tree looked like the skin of some fictional prehistoric beast: it was studded, covered by hundreds of nails, the legacy of having had public notices posted upon it for scores of years.

On counting the rings, I found it had been planted in 1860 or '61, at the beginning of the Civil War and shortly after the Beau had been built.

The powers that be didn't even bother to plant a replacement, which 40 years later, might have been well on its way to becoming a new Bethpage landmark. 

Terry Hunt is a Bethpage native who is also a noted historian