For as long as there have been people alive in Burlingame, the town’s main thoroughfare has been lined with eucalyptus trees. They form a silvery canopy over 2.2 miles of El Camino Real, earning that section a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.
But in January, the state’s transportation department drove cherry-picking trucks into Burlingame and used chainsaws to cut through the 150-year-old trees.
Caltrans, which manages this stretch of state highway, has cut down about 80 of the approximately 400 eucalyptus trees. Over the next two years, more than 80% of the trees will be removed and replaced with saplings.
While many Bay Area cities continue to struggle with inevitable problems from new housing to rising sea levels, Burlingame, the self-proclaimed “City of Trees,” is finally making peace with the fate it has long tried to avoid. The project ends decades of tense negotiations between Caltrans and Burlingame officials over the trees that have slowly taken over the roadway. Their roots have split and rippled the pavement, making them impassable for wheelchairs or walkers, and their overgrown branches make them difficult to see for drivers. Many trees are unhealthy and can sway dangerously above nearby power lines during storms.
Even for people like Jennifer Pfaff, president of the Burlingame Historical Society, who were once staunch opponents of tree removal projects, the rising risks are persuasive. But losing them is still painful, Pfaff said. She has always considered the trees as landmarks growing up in Burlingame. Now that some of them have moved on, she feels “lost.”
“Especially the big ones, they’re always embedded in your mind when you’re driving,” Pfaff said. Now, she says “it’s like going to a small town where I don’t know where I am. It’s like I need a map.”
This eucalyptus grove was planted in 1870 by horticulturist John McLaren, who later designed San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The trees, now officially known as the Howard-Ralston Eucalyptus Row, were designed to form a scenic windbreak along the approach to the peninsula’s historic homestead.
The car drives past the eucalyptus trees lining El Camino Real in Burlingame. This section is famous for its 150-year-old trees and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. (Lea Suzuki/SF Chronicle)
McLaren’s original corridor extended to San Mateo and Millbrae, although many of those cities’ eucalyptus trees were uprooted to make way for road widening. Burlingame’s long history of tree activism began in 1908, when the city’s then-mayor signed an ordinance protecting trees at the urging of the Burlingame Woman’s Club.
“‘El Camino Real’ – the King’s Highway, if you will,” Pfaff read aloud from a 1913 edition of the local newspaper at a community meeting this month about the tree removal. “Take away the trees and it’s no longer the King’s Highway but a regular country road.”
In the decades since, the town has struggled to protect the trees from slowing development, passing zoning ordinances to prevent stores from opening along road edges. At the same time, trees became increasingly bulky, with many crowns reaching more than 100 feet.
Burlingame Mayor Michael Brownrigg said the city and Caltrans had been arguing for “30 or 40 years” over the best way to repair the road as its condition deteriorated.
“Everyone who drives the El Camino knows it’s in terrible condition,” Brownrigg said. “But there’s a real impasse between the city and Caltrans, where the former wants to preserve all the trees and then fix the roads, and Caltrans is saying, ‘Well, if we leave all the trees, we can’t fix the roads.'”
The turning point came about a decade ago: Under mounting pressure from Caltrans, the city commissioned the El Camino Reality Task Force to decide the trees’ fate. Pfaff is one of several members of the committee determined to find a way to repair the road and protect the trees. Meetings sometimes ended in tears, she said, as the working group gradually realized it was impossible.
The compromise reached by the working group was to plant more than 400 new eucalyptus and elm trees along the road. Brownrigg said the new eucalyptus will be a leaner variant that sheds less bark on the road. While eucalyptus trees grow faster than most trees, it will still be decades before bright, bare roads are once again obscured by a canopy.
Caltrans, which manages this stretch of state highway, has cut down about 80 of the approximately 400 eucalyptus trees along El Camino Real. Their roots have split and rippled the pavement, making them impassable for wheelchairs or walkers, and their overgrown branches make it difficult for drivers to see. (Lea Suzuki/SF Chronicle)
“For all of us who have been living here, it’s going to be difficult visually for a while,” Brownrigg told a room packed with mostly elderly Burlingame residents at a community meeting this month. “But they say you plant a tree not for yourself, you plant it for your children.”
Brownrigg told the Chronicle that just six months ago, people told him “it was best not to be in town when the job started.” But his constituents have generally been receptive to tree removal since it began in January.
Now, Brownrigg said, Burlingame residents are even more upset about the traffic chaos the project will create. Construction is expected to wrap up in the fall of 2029, with crews removing and replanting trees, repaving roads and moving street wires underground.
Brownrigg said the city’s goal is to keep at least one road open in both directions over the next three years, although he acknowledged that sometimes residents have to detour the entire road while crews cut down trees.
Former Burlingame Mayor Terry Nagle said the first few months of construction forced Burlingame residents to take routes through residential areas, clogging streets that had never had traffic problems before. Despite the headaches it caused, she thought the city and state had done a “fantastic job” of adapting to the city’s attachment to its tree-lined road in rebuilding the stretch.
“This is by far the largest project we’ve done in the city since I’ve been here,” Nagel said. “I think we have to accept it.”
This article was originally published on Hundreds of historic eucalyptus trees are being cut down in the Bay Area’s “City of Trees”.
