Street Furniture Design Initiative

In September 2011, twenty custom-designed tree guards and twenty tree guard benches were fabricated and installed on Myrtle Avenue between Washington Park and Classon Avenue, courtesy of the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership. The overall design of the guards and benches is the result of a collaborative process with the Pratt Design Incubator, local community members, and the local artists who submitted winning designs for the individual, laser-cut panels.

We are serious about protecting Myrtle Avenue's street trees. Street trees not only bring an aesthetic appeal to the commercial strip, but also play an important role in filtering the air and providing shady respite from the afternoon sun. Myrtle's new tree guards are both functional and durable, provide opportunities to sit for the avenue's pedestrians, and also serve as our latest public art project, offering a 'canvas' that reflects Fort Greene and Clinton Hill’s creative spirit. Help us to maintain our new street furniture and our street trees by adopting a bench or tree guard!

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Click on the following links to learn more about the Street Furniture Design Initiative:

Project History
Project Funding
Adopt-A-Bench or Tree Guard
Street Tree Education
Tree Bed Plantings
Future Installations
Contact Us

Project History

The project is part of the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership’s Street Furniture Design Initiative, which first launched in summer 2007. Early outreach to local stakeholders and constituents had found a general desire for unique street furniture elements on Myrtle Avenue – pieces that reflected the neighborhood and leveraged local creative talent.

The Partnership approached the Pratt Design Incubator, and the project kicked off by initially collaborating with a studio class in Pratt’s Industrial Design Department in the fall of 2007. Students conducted field interviews and studied different user groups on Myrtle Avenue in order to determine the public’s priorities for street furniture, and facilitated a community workshop to present early concepts and request feedback. A compilation of all of the students’ final street furniture concepts was presented to us at the end of the semester, most of which can be seen here:

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The Partnership proceeded to hire the Pratt Design Incubator for an additional phase of design, whereby they further developed 10 street furniture elements. The Partnership then selected 3 street furniture elements – a tree guard, a bench, and a magnetic message board – to proceed to the soft prototype phase:

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Many design refinements continued to be made. After the soft prototypes were tested, we ultimately modified the bench and tree guard designs to be more modular and to have more similar structures, in order to reduce fabrication, installation, and maintenance costs. The message board was tabled due to installation restrictions with DOT. Hard prototypes were manufactured and installed – first the tree guard and then the bench – and additional design changes were made with the insights and feedback of the fabricator.

These are not your everyday, run-of-the-mill tree guards. The tree guards were created with a modular design that allows for customization – the four panels that make up the sides of the guards are unique to each piece and were designed by local artists. We sent out an open call for panel designs in 2010, and selected 20 artists (including the prototype designers) from the submissions to participate. Designs range from doilies to graphic patterns to skylines to maps, and some even reference the former Myrtle Avenue elevated train.

Project Funding

The design phase and the first phase of installation of the Street Furniture Design Initiative has been funded in part by grants from:

the New York State Division of Housing & Community Renewal's New York Main Street Program,
the New York State Environmental Protection Fund through the Urban and Community Forestry Program of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation,
the New York State Council for the Arts,
the Lily Auchincloss Foundation,
and from the operating budget of the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership Business Improvement District.

We are now working to raise funds to properly maintain the forty tree guards and their respective trees through our new Adopt-A-Bench and Adopt-A-TreeGuard program, while also applying for grants to design, fabricate, and install a second phase of tree guards.

Adopt-A-Bench or Tree Guard

Please consider supporting further efforts to green Myrtle Avenue, and to protect and maintain our street trees, by adopting one of our tree guards or tree guard benches. Each adoption commitment is for 5 years, and costs $2500 for a bench and $1500 for a tree guard. Sponsors will be acknowledged on bench plaques or guard signage, as well as on our website. Resources raised through this program will provide supplemental maintenance funding for the street furnitute, the tree bed, and the tree itself, including:

Replacement of damaged bench planks,
Painting of panels and posts,
Tree bed weeding and mulching,
Tree fertilizer,
Pruning,
Special tree care, as needed, and
Tree bed plantings.

This is a great opportunity to support our work on Myrtle Avenue, and to have your contribution acknowledged on Myrtle Avenue's street furniture. Full details of the program and a list of available tree guards and benches awaiting adoption can be found here.

Street Tree Education

Each of the 20 tree guards has a 4”x6” plaque, which contains a decal. Each decal provides the street tree's species, tree age, name of the tree guard's panel design, and the panel artist's name. Each decal also provides a fact about trees, in order to help our neighbors learn more about urban trees and their benefits. Following is a list of the tree facts on the twenty tree guard decals:

Trees help protect asphalt from sun and heat: a large tree saves 58% on repaving costs for the asphalt under its canopy (Center for Urban Forest Research)
Trees are good for business: one study found that people shop more often and spend more on streets with more trees. (Downtown Idea Exchange, 1999)
A full street tree canopy can cause automobile speeds to be 5-10 mph slower (Trees Atlanta)
Trees help keep our waterways clean by slowing down and absorbing stormwater runoff (New York City Department of Parks and Recreation)
Street trees provide shelter for birds, animals, and insects, which contribute to a healthy urban ecology (Trees Atlanta)
Street trees lessen the urban heat island effect by reducing the amount of sunlight that hits pavements and buildings (New York City Department of Parks and Recreation)
Some studies show that street trees are linked to lower crime rates. (Trees Atlanta)
One large healthy tree removes nearly 70 times as much air pollution as a small tree (New York City Department of Parks and Recreation)
Trees can increase nearby property values by 1% (New York City Department of Parks and Recreation)
If all NYC street trees stood 25 feet apart from each other in a single file line, they would stretch over 2,800 miles, from here to Las Vegas (New York City Department of Parks and Recreation).
The 2005 NYC Street Tree Census counted 592,130 street trees, an increase of 19% from 1995 (New York City Department of Parks and Recreation)
The Borough of Brooklyn has the second highest number of street trees, behind Queens (New York City Department of Parks and Recreation)
NYC street trees contribute $122,000,000 in annual benefits in the form of energy savings, air quality improvements, stormwater reduction, CO2 reduction, and increased property values (New York City Department of Parks and Recreation)
NYC has a total of 5.2 million trees, with a replacement value of $5.2 billion (Million Trees NYC)
The Asian Longhorn Beetle is an invasive species that could potentially destroy 31% of NYC’s street trees (New York City Department of Parks and Recreation)
The plastic bags you sometimes see around the base of small trees are used to slowly release water, ensuring that it reaches deep into the soil.
Using salt to de-ice the sidewalk can severely damage trees. Use sand instead (Brooklyn Botanical Garden)
A mature tree needs about 8-10 gallons of water per week during the summer (Brooklyn Botanical Garden)
Mulch, the material in this tree bed that resembles chopped up wood, helps trees by suppressing weeds, retaining moisture, and adding organic matter to soil (Brooklyn Botanical Garden)
Tree guards help protect trees from dogs, people, bikes, and cars (Brooklyn Botanical Garden).

Tree Bed Plantings

Immediately after installation, many of the newly protected tree beds received a layer of fresh mulch and new ornamental plants. Seven tree beds got liriope, a flowering grass-like perennial that is recommended for tree beds by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. A seasonal assortment of blooming mums was installed into seven other tree beds. Finally, four tree beds that did not have deep enough top soil for liriope or mums received the groundcover Vinca minor, sometimes called Myrtle. Vinca minor is also recommended for tree beds by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. We look forward to planting more ornamentals in our protected tree beds next spring.

Future Installations

With over 200 trees in the Partnership’s Business Improvement District boundaries, we were not able to provide tree guards for all of them in the first phase of installations due to funding constraints. We continue to fundraise for a second phase of installations, and hope to release another open call for panel art in early 2012.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about Myrtle Avenue’s tree guards or benches, or their sponsorship, please contact Daniel Scorse at dan@myrtleavenue.org or 718-230-1689.