Will Meyers' Blog
New York City's tallest carefully measured tree is the Queens Giant (according to Wikipedia). It was measured at 133.8 feet (40.8 m) tall and a 19-foot (5.8 m) circumference IN 2004! More than 20 years ago. It's time to find some other candidates for the tallest carefully measured tree in New York City.
I started going down this rabbit hole when working on a much larger project around New England (to be announced soon) and when I was taking a walk in Inwood Hill Park. I was just looking up and wondering how tall the tulip trees get in our park. LiDAR was also on my mind as my current project uses a lot of it. LiDAR has allowed for incredible new perspectives on land, terrain, and (in this case) tree canopies.
I've identified a few good candidates that the parks department should go out and maybe carefully measure.
I got the data from New York City's May 2021 airborne LiDAR flight, published by The Nature Conservancy and the University of Vermont as a citywide layer of estimated tree objects, with the raw classified point clouds from NYS GIS. Earlier numbers are from the 2013-14 survey described in Ma et al. (2023). In addition to that, aerial imagery is NYS orthoimagery from summer 2025, and USDA NAIP 2019 for Alley Pond.
Here are the candidates, tallest to shortest:
candidate crownsurrounding canopyground
Feel free to explore this interactive plot of the observed canopies:
drag to turn, two fingers or right-drag to pan, pinch or scroll to zoom
candidate crownsurrounding canopyground133.8 ft (40.8 m)
This isn't a definitive report on the tallest trees in New York City, but more of a suggestion for whoever is in charge of measuring trees in the city to maybe start looking for a new tallest tree.
I live a block away from Inwood Hill Park. A few trees were cut down due to branches falling. They were big tulip trees, probably a few hundred years old. Is it silly to find the tallest tree in NYC? Yeah, it's pretty silly. But would you want the tallest tree to be cut down by accident? I'd like to point out "Hey, that's the tallest tree in the city" if I ever walked past it.