Tree Service in Hewlett, NY

There are five Hewletts, and the tree rules change depending on which one your mailbox is in. We're about three miles away, so sorting out which one you're in is the first thing we do when you call.

Which Hewlett you're in decides the rules

Hewlett proper (11557) is an unincorporated hamlet of about 7,000 people under the Town of Hempstead. Town Chapter 184 covers trees in the curbside area only, the strip between the sidewalk and the street. That takes a $25 permit from the Commissioner of Highways, and the Town won't issue one to remove a healthy, growing tree. Trees fully on your own property, behind the sidewalk line, are about as unregulated as trees get around here.

Hewlett Harbor is a different world. It's an incorporated village, and its code makes it unlawful to remove, heavily cut back, or destroy any tree of 22 inches circumference or more, measured five feet above the ground, without a permit. And the rule that catches everyone: even a dead tree has to be reported to the Building Inspector, and it can't come out until he signs off.

Hewlett Bay Park, Hewlett Neck, and Woodsburgh are each their own incorporated village with their own tree chapters. Generally, you'll need a permit to remove a tree or do major work on one, even on your own property.

None of this should scare you. Permits for a tree that's dying or leaning at the house are routine in all of them. What it should stop you from doing is letting a crew start cutting on a Saturday because nobody checked. Tell us your address and we'll tell you which path applies.

Over-mature trees on lots that never got bigger

Hewlett built out early and never got rebuilt. Nassau County went from roughly 670,000 people in 1950 to over 1.4 million by 1970. This area filled in during that wave, then stopped. What's left is housing older than the county average, with trees that have had seventy-plus years to grow into it.

In the yard, that means big specimen trees close to houses, garages, and PSEG wires, with no drop zone. This is crane-and-rigging work, and nobody should be felling anything whole. The incorporated villages in particular have the estate-scale trees where one removal is a serious, permit-gated project that takes planning, not an afternoon with a chainsaw.

Salt, storms, and a slow decline

Sandy hit the Five Towns hard in 2012. Trees came down across North Woodmere and pulled service lines off houses, the Woodmere docks were destroyed, and salt water pushed up into the low-lying yards near the bay. Hewlett Harbor spent years and millions rebuilding its stormwater infrastructure afterward. Then Isaias came through in 2020 and uprooted thousands of trees across the region.

What people miss is the timeline. Salt getting into a root system doesn't kill the tree that winter. It shows up as thinning canopy and dieback years later, a little sparser each spring until one year half the crown never leafs out. A lot of the decline we get called about in the bay-adjacent sections traces back to a storm from over a decade ago. If a mature tree on your place has been getting thinner, have a look at signs a tree is dying.

What we do in Hewlett

• Tree removal - climbed and rigged, or craned, with the permit path sorted first.
• Emergency and storm work - trees on houses and wires first. Wires down: PSEG at 1-800-490-0075.
• Trimming and pruning - deadwood and weight reduction on over-mature specimens.
• Stump grinding - see the cost guide for what to expect.

Hewlett, Hewlett Harbor, Hewlett Bay Park, Hewlett Neck, Woodsburgh, and neighboring Woodmere and Cedarhurst. You'll get a written estimate with the permit, the removal, and the stump broken out separately, and a straight answer on which village office it goes through first: (516) 619-3667.