The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Reclaiming the urban forest
Higganum brothers turn cut trees into furniture
NEW HAVEN — When Superstorm Sandy toppled the fabled Lincoln oak, planted on the Green in 1909 by a Civil War veterans group in honor of the 16th president, it was big news.
There was a time capsule underneath and the root ball brought up seven skeletons from the time when the Green was the city’s burial ground. But that wasn’t the end of the story. In the rear of the second floor of City Hall is a pair of rough-hewn benches made from the reclaimed wood of the Lincoln oak by City Bench, which transforms wood from the “urban forest” into everything from boardroom tables to benches for a New Haven school’s outdoor habitat.
While their showroom and office is in the Higganum section of Haddam, brothers and co-founders Zeb and Ted Esselstyn have a close relationship with the city and its schools, using wood from the hundreds of trees that fall or are taken down each year and making furniture, replacements for bench slats and other items.
In 2009, Ted Esselstyn “basically had this thought to reuse trees that have to come down,” said his brother. “But that evolved into trying to get a relationship with a city. That kind of started the conversation.” Zeb Esselstyn had been living in New York City but moved to New Haven, while Ted lives in Higganum and their shop manager, Ben Komola, lives in Hamden.
“We feel really lucky to be where we are,” Komola said. “One of our greatest achievements is our relationship with the city.”
“It’s a mutually beneficial relationship,” said Rebecca Bombero, director of the city Department of Parks, Recreation and Trees. “Our partnership with City Bench helps reduce the amount of tree debris that the city has to dispose of and instead it gets new life.”
The company specializes in fine furniture for both homeowners and organizations — a boardroom table at Newman’s Own in Westport was made from a sugar maple and a large table at Trinity College’s campus in Hartford started as an ash tree in Bushnell Park. Tables at Yale University’s two new residential colleges were each made from trees taken down from the colleges’ site.
Benches for a habitat
But along with the beautiful, some of the company’s creations are simply useful. David Weinreb, a sixth-grade bilingual teacher at Fair Haven School, has led the creation of an outdoor habitat at the Grand Avenue school, with nine vegetable garden beds and a habitat for birds and insect pollinators.
“We also installed two outdoor classrooms,” Weinreb said. “There were 11 very large pieces of tree that were taken from Edgerton Park, milled by City Bench and delivered by Parks and Rec.
“They went above and beyond because I then asked if they could …make stepping spaces made of wood” so the students can walk through the garden without harming the plants.
I was and am endlessly impressed by their generosity, with a large smile … [they] would consistently say, ‘Yes, let’s make it happen,’” Weinreb said.
Zeb Esselstyn “is a mission-driven person and sometimes he has to make money and sometimes he has to make magic happen, and we got some of the magic,” he said.
“It’s all urban wood and the urban forest [is] becoming a more known kind of thing because cities and towns take down millions of trees each year,” Zeb Esselstyn said. New Haven may cut 600 or more a year, unless they fall on their own.
“It’s this overlooked, underutilized resource that can provide a lot of hardwood lumber that has to come down anyway,” he said. “You’re just relieving pressure from the forests rather than tapping into it. It’s a small effort right now, but there are more entities that are tapping into it.”
A terrific aesthetic
“I do most of the design work and fabrication up at the shop with Ben,” said Ted Esselstyn. “Zeb does most of the milling and the front end of the work, talking to tree services, talking to clients.” Komola, he said, has “really become the backbone to our fabrication process. He’s got a terrific aesthetic, a nice eye for balance and things that will work aesthetically.”
Ted Esselstyn said they think of the business as having “three parts to its bottom line. One is doing social good, one is doing environmental good, and the other is making profit,” Esselstyn said.
City Bench has made benches for Gateway Community College and a 14-foot library table for the Corsair Apartments on State Street. The new Ronald McDonald House on Howard Avenue has City Bench-made oak islands in its kitchen. “And that oak had come down on Howard Avenue, so it’s a great full-circle story that we just love,” Zeb Esselstyn said. But the company has many residential customers too. “But then it’s very much of an individual story when it has meaning only for the person whose property that tree came down on and [we] make it have a separate life,” he said.
From log to bench
New Haven’s fallen tree trunks will be brought to City Bench’s mill on the city’s parks and rec property at the edge of East Rock Park in Hamden, behind the Pardee Rose Garden. Stacks of trunks, their ends painted green and labeled by their source, are piled up, awaiting their turn to be cut into usable lumber.
“You get to see this thing come in as a log and then after a year, however long it takes, we deliver that back as a piece of furniture,” Esselstyn said.
Last week, a walnut log from Branford was being cut to be made into a “float table” that also incorporates acrylic. Komola was cutting the top layer off the trunk, exposing the outer, lighter sap wood and the inner, dark heart wood, which is composed of dead cells.
“I worked for an art conservator in Hamden and I decided I didn’t want to fix things anymore; I wanted to make things,” Komola said. “For me the chance to work with my hands, work with interesting people and do something different every day is big for me. Have the creative freedom to do projects … It’s just a great opportunity and a privilege.
“Usually companies are either a lumber company or woodworking company and we do both,” he said. “Lumber companies don’t get to see it become a product and furniture companies don’t get to see it [as] a commodity.”
The company benefits too by the variety of hardwoods found in the Northeast, from oak to maple to ash to beech to elm, and the experience can be sensual, even as far as the odor the wood gives off.
“Cherry, maple, plum, anything that bears a fruit is nice,” Komola said. On the other hand, “red oak smells like a mix between spit and vomit,” Esselstyn said.
“Certain trees have different moisture contents,” Esselstyn added. “Walnut’s kind of in the middle; red oak, white oak’s on the drier side.”
“I couldn’t imagine buying wood from a hardwood distributor,” Esselstyn said. “It just seems more responsible to be using this wood that would be sent to rot somewhere. It’s just beautiful.”