Manhattan's Street Trees: An Unfinished Public Health Story

Abstract

Stephen Smith launched a 40-year effort to bring trees to New York City streets in 1872, the year he founded the American Public Health Association (APHA). Smith argued that street trees would mitigate the adverse health effects of Manhattan's summer heat and help purify the air. The young APHA endorsed Smith's position and gave trees a prominent role in urban sanitation, but public health turned away from trees and urban reform movements as it adopted a biomedical public health model in the late 19th century. Nevertheless, Smith wrote and campaigned for a successful 1902 law requiring the New York City Parks Department to assume management of street trees in the name of public health. He then led a 1914 campaign to force the department to uphold his law. New York's street tree program has had an erratic trajectory, but it now generally follows Smith's vision. Public health could play a bigger role in creating greener cities and mitigating climate change with more field research and the health in all policies approach that Smith used to bring trees to Manhattan's streets in 1914. (Am J Public Health. 2025;115(1):66-74. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2024.307856).

FIGURE 1—

Stephen Smith in 1873 Source. National Library of Medicine, public domain.

FIGURE 2—

Stephen Smith in 1914 Source. Library of Congress, public domain.

FIGURE 3—

Pitt and Rivington Streets in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1909 Source. Library of Congress, public domain.

FIGURE 4—

Pitt and Rivington Streets in 2023 Source. Author’s collection.