There’s a canine tree killer on the loose in *Harlem.

Forester Coleman Frick is walking along 137th Street in his dark green City Parks poncho on a rainy Wednesday morning, pointing out several mutilated Japanese pagoda and pin oak trees. The city foresters have been planting trees on 137th and Lenox over the past two years. But when they came back to survey the area this summer, they noticed damaged trunks. Asking around, they quickly learned that a resident’s dog was attacking the trees, biting off and sometimes clawing off the bark.

“We could plant so much more trees in this street,” Frick said, touching the harsh scrapes on a tree trunk. “But we won’t if people have dogs attacking them.” A few blocks away, foresters are filling up East Harlem with trees.

The Million Trees Program has targeted El Barrio as one of its “public health neighborhoods.” Launched by the Parks Department and the non-profit New York Restoration Project, the program aims to plant a million trees in the city, 220,000 of which will be street trees, over the next ten years.

The program gave East Harlem priority because of its high asthma rate among children. East Harlem has consistently had the highest rate of asthma hospitalization for children under 14 among all Manhattan neighborhoods, according to data the City Health Department collected from 1994 to 2004.

The other factor was the neighborhood’s low “tree stocking level,” explained senior forester Michael Vacek. The area could accommodate a lot more trees, a characteristic of uptown compared to downtown Manhattan.

Trees absorb a lot of particles, Vacek said, and in doing so “they are sort of cleaning the air so that we are not breathing the pollution.” His team surveyed East Harlem throughout the summer to mark spots for potential trees by painting big white dots on the sidewalks.

The planting process can take weeks. Utilities mark gas and electricity lines to avoid damaging them. Then the contractor cuts the sidewalk, then uses a jackhammer to excavate the pit and put new soil back into it. Finally, the team comes back to actually plant the trees. “There are so many steps in the process that we run into residents several times,” Frick said. He finds it hard, when residents excitedly call to ask when a tree will be planted, to answer, “in the next couple of months…”

Vacek and Frick recently attended a 32nd Precinct community meeting and a meeting held by Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement to educate residents on the benefits of street trees, and to warn them about the dog tree killer. They hoped that the community members would alert the dog owner if they stumbled upon him or her. “Pastors told us they would take that message to their congregation as well,” Vacek said.

While the 137th Street example is extreme, not everyone is delighted by street greenery. Some people are concerned that tree pits will encourage dogs to relieve themselves on their streets, said Frick, or that trees will block sunlight in their apartments. He responds that it’s illegal not to pick up dog waste, and that “this is your community, your neighborhood, so hopefully if you see someone do that, you’ll let them know.” As for other concerns, he argues with them that “it’s for the greater community good,” and that as the street is actually city property, locals can’t stop him from planting.

That doesn’t mean people won’t try. Across Marcus Garvey Park, which separates Harlem from East Harlem, some residents refused to have a tree planted in front of their building. “They protested by getting into the pits,” remembered Vacek, “so we had to stop.” The foresters talked to the protesters, he said, but in the end had to come back another day to plant.

But having spent a lot of time walking the streets of East Harlem, Vacek said, “people are generally excited. They come walk around with me and I tell them what kind of tree we’ll be planting where.” A lot of thought goes into the types of trees, the foresters explain. For example, Frick plans honey locusts and pin oaks in the harshest areas, usually on avenues, because these are some of their toughest species. As Frick watched contractors plant trees on a recent morning, a man walked up and asked why, since there was a park across the street. “I explained to him we were not worried about having too many trees!”

Later in the day another resident who had heard the exchange told Frick he was happy; he hadn’t seen trees planted in his neighborhood since the ‘70s. “I feel like some people see it as ‘We care about their neighborhood’,” Frick said.

*The story originally misstated the location of the mutilated trees. They are in Harlem, not East Harlem.