A mulberry tree (left) and a crab apple tree on 16th Street near Union Ave. in Chicago. According to the website neighborhoodfruit.com there are only 2 edible fruit trees registered on public property in the city of Chicago, the second tree, which is also a mulberry, is located on the Burnham Greenway bike path at 108th and avenue D.
John Konstantaras/Chicago News Cooperative
For many city dwellers — dependent as they are on flown-in supermarket produce or temporary farmers’ markets — fresh, seasonal fruit and vegetables feel like an unaffordable luxury.
Enter NeighborhoodFruit.com, the Bay Area-based Web site launched in 2009 to steer people to the location of fruit trees on public and private land. The idea is to give them access to free food, but the trees will not show up in the site’s maps unless they are identified and registered by local users. A recent search of a 30-mile radius around Chicago turned up exactly two fruit trees — both mulberry.
“Chicago is one of the cities we targeted,” said Kaytea Petro, one of the Web site’s co-founders. “I did a fly-over with the Google map and I just thought, ‘Wow, it really is a concrete jungle.’.” The site’s users get much better results in other areas. Is Chicago just a decidedly un-Green city?
Because it involves city government, the answer is complicated — enmeshed in zoning restrictions, union contracts and endless bureaucracy.
Chicago, like most cities, strictly regulates the types of trees that can be planted on public parkways — the spaces between buildings and the sidewalk, and near streets or crosswalks. According to Matt Smith, spokesman for the Streets and Sanitation Department, fruit-bearing trees are messy, attract pests and interfere with power lines and transportation.
But given the mayor’s Trees Initiative and the environmental benefits of urban agriculture, surely it’s just a matter of time before the city’s public spaces bear fruit trees, right?
Maybe. Some city officials like the idea of fruit trees — Harold Washington was “very interested” in planting them on parkways, according to Edith Malka of the Morton Arboretum. There are also foundations and nonprofit groups working toward self-sustaining, community-run orchards. But the bureaucratic process involved in planting fruit trees can be daunting.
“In one respect, I think the ideas in Chicago are very liberal, and well ahead of the rest of the country,” said Chad Bliss, executive director and founder of Cob Connection, a sustainability group that maintains community gardens. He said implementing their latest program, “CommuniTree,” in Humboldt Park, has been more challenging than any garden project.
“Once you start talking about anything that involves zoning, you’re going to get stuck,” he said. And forget about planting the trees yourself, he said. Streets and Sanitation has a contract until 2011 with a union that plants all of the city trees.
Even if the city signs off on a fruit tree, Mr. Bliss said, you can count on years of analysis and planning by a dozen city departments. “By the time you actually plant the tree,” he said, “it’s dead.”
There’s a mulberry tree in Welles Park along Western Avenue.
Did the editor cut out the rest of your credible first person interviews?
And a “fly over” google earth? Come out and visit with the actual organizations
that are working daily to bring fruit trees to Chicago.These organizations would have been happy to speak with you and are completely separate from community gardens.
This is truly such a a sad and misinformed article.
There are dozens of mulberry trees along the railroad track on Ravenswood Ave. through Edgewater.
How can you not see these things?
The streets are stained purple every May through June, along with purple bird shit everywhere!