Trading olive trees for live oaks

To help keep things quaint and charming, new trees would be planted along both sides of Las Olas. Options recommended by the consultant include Cathedral live oaks, Spanish stoppers, silver buttonwoods, pink and yellow trumpets, crepe myrtles and silver palms.

The plan does have its defenders, including Tom Godart, a real estate broker and vice president of the Las Olas Isles Homeowners Association.

“We deserve something we can be proud of,” Godart said. “And that’s not what we have today.”

Godart praised city leaders for moving things along.

“The commissioners did the right thing,” he said. “Las Olas Boulevard belongs to everyone in the city. All the residents would like to see Las Olas become the beautiful iconic segue between the beach and downtown, to have an area that looks like Worth Avenue in Palm Beach or Fifth Avenue in downtown Naples.”

The original plan created by the consultant divided the 2.4 mile boulevard into five distinct neighborhoods: Downtown, the Shops District, the Colee Hammock neighborhood, Las Olas Isles and the beach. To simplify the commission vote on Tuesday, the plan was split in two: a western corridor for the area between Andrews Avenue and Southeast 12 Avenue and an eastern corridor for the area between Southeast 12 Avenue and the beach.

Both plans won approval Tuesday night.

The next day, downtown resident Debbie Picker shipped off a fuming email to City Hall.

“The trees in the median of Las Olas … are what gives our street character and differentiates it from other South Florida downtowns,” she wrote. “This is the historic view of Las Olas Boulevard and we simply cannot understand discarding this legacy of our community because … developers want more traffic. Come on!”

Picker, who splits her time between New York and downtown Fort Lauderdale, says she participated in a community zoom call with the consultant just two months ago.

“There were people who wanted to get rid of the trees and the median and there were people who wanted to keep them,” she said. “So that was up in the air. There were so many residents who felt strongly about the trees remaining, it was not clear they had decided to remove the trees.”