where once the sweet birds sang

Michael Sedano

There’s a triangle of cement near the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Here East Third Street crosses Main Street and veers sharply south toward J-Town and the river. And pa’lla, Boyle Heights and East LA. The Bradbury Building and Wayne Healy's Anthony Quinn "Pope of Broadway" mural are a few blocks West. If ever a spot deserved a magnificent tree, it's this hard monotonous slab of cement. A tree grew here, once.

Unknown souls live around here, spillover from adjacent skid row. Tourists like me pass en route from Pershing Square Metro to J-Town Metro. This is LA’s most interesting section for discovering architectural exemplars while immersing in LA’s rich cultural diversity and hard-ass struggle.

At one time, this now cyclone-fenced plaza grew trees. At the apex of the triangle grew a tree that must  have been a thing of beauty, this tree. A Coral Tree is my guess, Erythrina x bidwillii, whose scarlet-flowered spiny branches grow and twist into picturesque natural sculpture supporting a canopy of deep green curved triangular leaves. 

An early summer bloomer, Coral Trees are in season now. This one would have been approaching full flower. Pedestrians would have hitched a step, taken selfies, rested in the shade eating a paleta from a nearby vendor or shared a bottle with a fellow wino. Honeybees would have packed leg pouches with pollen and filled the air with their happy buzz. Colibríes would have browsed across the blossoms chirping and micturating and pooping like they do, before flitting away to plot returns that will never be. Not to be, like all the things that are absent when a tree is removed.

Hummingbirds and photographers love Coral Trees. Landscape designers love its natural shape but also its trainability into shapes and planted in rows forming traffic barriers, a shady promenade, a seasonal garden highlight, a shady respite on this anonymous urban street corner where trees belong. Where trees shouldn't be killed.

The Coral Tree at the corner of E Third and Main St had been managed. City workers pruned it into a sturdy upright trunk that rose high before branching toward the sun, its canopy cantilevered overhead making merciful shade.

Disused real estate in DTLA is not long for this world. This triangle of land where that wondrous tree--the last of its tribe in DTLA--grew, must occupy dreams of monied interests somewhere, waiting for the smoke to clear.

This Coral Tree was forced to die. And die it did. It has. It’s gone now

I passed the tree on May 22. I nodded my respects to its spent remains, its protected status. Cyclone fencing saves the skeleton from the ignominy of spray can taggers. Or conversion to leña by unhoused locals whose winter trash fires ravaged neglected fiberglass planters, burning them down to the dried fill dirt. Fires didn't last the night but they must have given a lovely light.

I passed again on June 7 to see a two-foot stump where once the sweet birds sang. Pa’lla, over by the parking lot, next to the massive Agave, sole survivor of landscape dreams, the decayed Coral Tree trunk reposes.

A Coral Tree takes a long time to die. It takes a lot of nerve to let it. But die it has. So it’s been a long time that birds nested in the crooks, colibríes hovered at the tree’s tubular flower clusters looking like deep sea petrified coral. It been a long time that people found respite from punishing glare and pavement heat in the Coral Tree’s shade. Now, ya stuvo for that Coral Tree.

So it goes.

Goodbye, Coral Tree at E. Third and Main. Ave atque vale.

Who can make a tree?