SHERMAN OAKS : Residents Upset by the Loss of 9 Trees

Local residents are mourning the loss of nine stately trees along Dickens Street just west of Cedros Avenue that were cut down to allow the street to be widened.

The developer of a senior housing project at the corner of Dickens and Cedros, the Menorah Housing Federation, was required by the city to widen the street as a condition of project approval.

“We were opposed to it,” said Richard Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. “The Department of Transportation doesn’t care about trees and the aesthetics of a community--they just care about getting cars through the area.”

“It’s a shame that they removed the trees,” said Jeff Brain, chairman of the Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan Review Board. “The trees added character to the street.”

The trees, a carob and eight silk-oaks ranging in height from 25 to 52 feet, were cut down Monday. Although the tree removal generated shock and dismay in some quarters, community leaders had known for some time what the city had in mind.

A neighborhood group that targeted the project might have gotten better results if it had lobbied for a more sensitive development rather than no project at all, Close suggested.

The city Department of Public Works recommended Dickens Street be widened so that moving cars could pass parked cars more safely, and to accommodate the additional traffic that the housing project was anticipated to generate, said Roger Ketterer, a civil engineer with the department’s Bureau of Engineering.

Dickens Street is a designated collector street, meaning that it connects local streets to major roadways, but it is narrower than the standard width of a collector street, 44 feet.

According to Robert Takasaki, senior transportation engineer with the transportation department, city policy requires that when a proposed development is located on a collector street, the builder must bring the street up to the standard width, if necessary.

Howard Katz, a housing consultant for Menorah, said the development will replace the trees by next spring or earlier with 10 four-foot-box-size sycamore trees--meaning the bases of the trees are potted in four-foot-square boxes.