Tall Tales : Building’s Rooftop Treetops Are the Height of Urban Nature

The tallest tree in Los Angeles is a palm that hangs 250 feet over the corner of 7th and Irolo streets.

It needs pruning. And finding someone to do it is a high priority for Gary Jayne.

“I’m not afraid of heights. But don’t ask me to trim it,” says Jayne, who lives beneath it.

The 30-year-old palm is part of the city’s most unusual urban grove: 40 trees on top of a 22-floor apartment building.

Ficus, laurel and pine are also rooted in about 15 inches of soil on the high-rise’s concrete roof.

Residents of the 236-unit Mark Wilshire Apartment Tower say their trees are head and shoulders above the street-level variety.

That’s because their foliage has survived gale force winds, rains that turn the thin layer of soil into mush and summer heat that bakes branches dry. Its worst enemy is earthquakes.

Last year’s Northridge earthquake caused a 20-foot palm to topple after the building’s shaking loosened its roots. The tree fell against a guardrail at the edge of the roof and crushed it.

Workers chopped the palm into pieces and hauled it down in the building’s elevator.

“Our trees are sturdy,” said John Stevens, a retired accountant who has lived in the building 15 years. Good thing, too. “If they were to ever blow over in a Santa Ana wind, 7th Street would be in bad shape.”

The tiny grove has grown into a Mid-Wilshire landmark, said Dick Perkins, a retired newspaper printer who lives on the 17th floor. He directs visitors to his place by telling them to look for the tower that is tree-shaded.

The trees--the oldest were planted as seedlings and saplings around a rooftop swimming pool when the building was constructed in 1966--are trendsetters, too.

Other gardens and boxed trees have popped up since then on roofs and balconies of trendy new office and residential buildings in places such as Bunker Hill in Downtown Los Angeles and the Long Beach Civic Center.

A carefully landscaped roof at the New Otani hotel in Little Tokyo, said to be reminiscent of a 400-year-old Japanese garden, is promoted as “a haven of tranquillity” and “the symbolic relation of man and nature.”

Irolo Street apartment dwellers say the same thing about their shady aerie.

“The trees mute the noise of the city,” said Maurie Fischer, a 25-year resident. “They’re one of the reasons I moved here. You could see what was going to happen up there as the decades went by and they grew.”

Building owner William Heine of Philadelphia was drawn by the rooftop when he purchased the structure in 1971 in a foreclosure sale. He said the original owner lost the place after discovering a hidden underground stream during construction that required expensive reinforcement of its foundation.

According to Heine, the roof grove won a landscape award a few years ago from city officials and a beautification group.

But “we don’t care whether anybody else likes the trees or not. We like them,” he said. “I’m an outdoorsman. I think nature’s pretty important.”

Still, Jayne--who manages the building for Heine--acknowledges being “totally flabbergasted” when he came from Philadelphia. He could see the rooftop trees from the Santa Monica Freeway as he arrived from the airport.

“Back there you worried about snow on the roof,” Jayne said. “Here, you worry about roots.”