Two friends running a small development firm had finally cobbled together the perfect plot of land in Brooklyn. A string of narrow lots on Dikeman Street in Red Hook would give them just enough space to build four high-end townhouses, with room for the side yards and setbacks neighborhood zoning rules required.
But something else had gotten there first: a big old tree. It was a silver maple, six stories tall with a trunk five feet in diameter, its rough bark twisting in a spiral pattern as it reached toward the sky. The root system stretched 20 feet across the front yard, right where one of the townhouses needed to go.
Ben Krone, an architect and co-founder of the development company Hier, told his partner, Phillip Sulke, that the tree was nice. But it had to go.
“Ben’s reaction was ‘We can’t save that tree,’” Mr. Sulke recalled. “‘We cannot build what we want. It will cost you a fortune.’ And I said: ‘Then we’re not doing it. Because I’m not cutting down this tree.”
And so a most unusual development began, in which Mr. Sulke and Mr. Krone spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to save one maple tree.
