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Was it arborcide? Man fingers workers in tree death

By Emilia Brock
for The Brooklyn Paper
The Brooklyn Paper / Emilia Brock
The horror: Louis Formisano shows off hole where his family’s 120-year-old tree once stood — until it was murdered in yet another case of arborcide.

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The winds that slammed into Brooklyn last Thursday knocked down a beloved 120-year-old tree in Carroll Gardens — but it wasn’t the gusts that committed the crime; it was arborcide, the tree’s owner claims.

Louis and Regina Formisano, who live on Woodhull Street, are mourning the loss of their 65-foot evergreen this week, and are blaming VAB Construction and Development Corporation for severing the tree’s root system while excavating the neighboring yard.

“You don’t know how devastated I am,” Louis Formisano told The Brooklyn Paper this week. “I told them that day, ‘You’re … killin’ my tree!’”

The tree has weathered through the worst of storms — including blizzards and, Formisano claims, tornadoes — yet it couldn’t make it through the strong winds last week.

That’s because the winds were not the root of the problem.

“This tree would have held it, but the roots were loose,” he said.

The 2007 construction work also damaged the Formisano home, but the couple said it is only interested in replacing the tree.

For Regina Formisano, the loss deprives her of a little piece of nature and the enjoyment of watching squirrels play and hearing blue jays and robins sing while she did her laundry.

“I always thought I was in the country,” she said. “And the privacy was great. My husband wouldn’t even let us swing from the tree. It was his baby.”

VAB Construction did not return calls.

— with Ben Muessig

©2009 The Brooklyn Paper

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