Naked City: How an Alien Ate the Shade

By Wendy Cole/Chicago

Less than 24 hours before the whirring chain saws and chippers descended upon Kathleen Winebrenner's street in the leafy Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago, the desperate homeowner was buttonholing government officials, pleading for clemency. Her 30-year-old Norway maple did not deserve to die, she insisted. "I thought this can't be. Where's the Pope when you need him?" she said, staring forlornly at the sprawling branches framing her living-room window for the last time. "It had to be a mistake since it wasn't on the original list."

But there was no 11th-hour reprieve. Her tree was among the first of 470 maples, ashes, elms and horse chestnuts to be cut down, chipped up and burned in an effort to stop the spread of a new and unwelcome Chinese import: the Asian long-horned beetle. It's the first infestation since the pest was originally identified in the U.S. in 1996, when 2,400 trees in Brooklyn and Amityville, N.Y., were lost. But the fast-moving critters could be anywhere. "It's quite possible that other places have them," says Joe McCarthy, Chicago's senior forester, "and just don't realize it yet."

There is nothing cute about the 2-in.-long black-and-white beetles. They pose no risk to humans, but their larvae, living just underneath the bark, deny a tree vital nutrients and essentially starve it to death. After finishing with one tree, adult beetles move on to the next, often flying hundreds of feet at a time. Getting rid of the trees is the only way of eradicating the beetle. Since August officials in Chicago have been spraying infested trees with purple and green fluorescent paint, marking them for doom. In the hardest-hit parts of the 14-sq.-mi. quarantine area, covering about 5% of Chicago, 80% of the trees will vanish over the next several weeks.

Agriculture officials think the beetles originally landed in Chicago after stowing away in the wood packing material of shipments from China to an ironworks factory adjacent to the most infested area, referred to as ground zero. To prevent future infestations, the Agriculture Department has stepped up its inspections of shipping crates from China and instituted new rules banning the use of untreated lumber shipped to the U.S.

It's too late, however, for Chicagoans surveying the devastation outside their front doors. Maria Conde, 33, and her brother Baltasar, 30, took a melancholy stroll through the neighborhood with their video camera the day before the saws arrived, eager to preserve on tape the neighborhood they have known for 25 years. "It will be a part of history," said Maria. "This is one way we can participate." In October, soon after residents learned of the planned annihilation, Lutheran pastor Karen Parsons hosted an art day at her church, which sits in the heart of the infested area. About 70 adults and children made sketches and paintings of the tree-lined neighborhood as a form of catharsis. The pictures may be used in greeting cards to raise money for tree replanting in the spring--this time with varieties the beetle is not known to infest.

Nearby, Lucille Hermann, 76, who remembers vividly when the doomed maples were planted a few months after she and her family moved there in 1966, assumes it will be too sunny to sit on her front porch this summer without the protective shade of her 35-ft. tree. "I'll never see a full-grown tree on this street again," she lamented. "I'm too old." As for Winebrenner, she found it too painful to watch the final execution of her beloved maple. "It's an extremely big hurt," she said. Before the chain saws reached her house, she left for work.