Tree Service in Elmont, NY

Elmont sits right on the Queens line, and Valley Stream borders it, so we're a few minutes away in the truck. It's also a hamlet rather than a village, and that changes what you need in hand before a tree comes down.

What unincorporated means for your tree

There's no Village of Elmont. It's a hamlet in the Town of Hempstead, so there's no local tree code of its own. The Town's Chapter 184 is what you're working under, and it draws the line at the sidewalk:

• Curbside strip (between sidewalk and street): the Town's. Removing a tree there, or altering it in any serious way, takes a permit from the Commissioner of Highways. $25 residential, $150 where the tree abuts commercial property, and the Town won't issue a permit to remove a healthy, growing tree.
• Your own property, behind the sidewalk line: generally not permit-controlled the same way.
• Chapter 184 also puts obligations on the abutting owner. Don't assume the street tree is entirely somebody else's problem.

Getting this backwards costs real money. One call to the Highway Department at 516-489-5000 settles it, or we'll confirm it as part of the estimate.

Post-war lots, century-old street trees, and wires

Elmont started growing when Belmont Park opened in 1905 and the old Foster's Meadow farms got cut into lots, then filled in hard with a wave of post-war Cape Cods, the brick-veneer ground-story houses you see all over the streets around Dutch Broadway.

So you've got street trees seventy to a hundred years old on modest lots with tight setbacks, growing hard against the houses and straight up into the overhead PSEG lines. Removals here almost always get climbed and rigged down in sections, or lifted over with a crane from the street, and the wire clearance is usually the first conversation we have, not the last.

What Isaias did here

August 2020, gusts over seventy miles an hour. More than a thousand trees and 338 wires down across Nassau County, roughly 135,000 customers in the dark, and Elmont streets blocked for days. It was a wind event with almost no rain, and that's how an over-mature canopy on small lots fails. The tree doesn't need a flood. It needs one good gust and a compromised root plate or a weak fork.

The ones that fail around here are the usual suspects: Norway maples with shallow roots, silver maples shedding big limbs, and the Bradford pears that split at the trunk right around twenty years old. Our signs a tree is dying guide covers what to look for from the ground, and most of what it turns up ends in a prune, not a removal.

What we do in Elmont

• Tree removal - sectional rigging or crane, with PSEG coordination when the wires are involved.
• Emergency and storm work - trees on houses and wires first. Wires down: PSEG at 1-800-490-0075.
• Trimming and pruning - deadwood and clearance from the service drop.
• Stump grinding - priced by the inch; cost guide.

Elmont, and the streets running toward Franklin Square, Valley Stream, and the Queens line. If something's hanging over the service drop, or the maple out front looks a little worse each time you pull in, call (516) 619-3667. We'll look at it this week, tell you whether it's a prune or a removal, and hand you an itemized price before anyone starts a saw.