NYC property owner hit with $230K fine — for chopping down his own tree, bizarre suit reveals

A “tree of heaven” turned into hell for a Brooklyn man who chopped down one of the pesky nondescript species on his vacant lot — and ended up fined a whopping $230,000 by the city.

The man is now suing, and his lawyer says the bizarre case is as clear-cut as the felled tree — it’s just a twisted attempt by the Parks Department to try to stick it to the little guy as part of a “moneymaker” grab.

“Parks did not plant the tree, has never performed any work on, nor took care of, the tree, nor has even registered it on its on-line resource called NYC Tree Map,” according to the lawsuit filed by attorney Mikhail Sheynker on behalf of perplexed plaintiff Theodore Trachtenberg.

An incredulous Sheynker added to The Post that the city “never had access” to the tree of heaven, part of an invasive species native to China.

“You typically don’t have people climbing over walls and fences to plant trees,” he quipped.

But Parks still took an ax to the property owner’s wallet after he removed the tree, valued at about $207,000, to build housing on a long-vacant Crown Heights lot, the suit says.

“The city is trying to claim that the tree is a city tree,” Sheynker said. 

In February, a city Parks forester said three trees in all had been damaged during excavation of the lot to make way for a new 10-unit residential building on St. Johns Place and Classon Avenue and issued a whopping $230,400 fine in total to Trachtenberg. 

The largest one, a tree of heaven responsible for 90 percent of the lost tree area as calculated by the forester, was on the inside of a chain-link fence around the property that was actually installed by the city itself nearly 40 years ago when the vacant lot was in public hands. The other two allegedly damaged trees are still located in sidewalk tree pits.

“In the 1990’s, you didn’t see much litigation over trees — the Parks Department didn’t really issue fines over trees,” Sheynker said. “But they figured out this is a moneymaker.”

Typically when a city-owned tree is damaged, most often in a sidewalk tree-pit, the party responsible will pay a fee calculated by the diameter of the tree’s trunk, and the money goes toward replanting new trees in the city. 

The forester’s notification states the two small trees had diameters of 5.8 inches and 6.7 inches, while the fenced-in tree had a 28-inch diameter.

Sheynker doesn’t dispute that the city owns the two small trees, which clearly show up on the city’s massive tree map.

“The ownership of those two trees is not being contested — but the damage is,” Sheynker said, claiming that he hasn’t seen evidence of what the report describes. 

What’s not on the map is the fenced-in tree chopped down by his client to make way for a new six-story, 10-unit building in a neighborhood desperate for new housing. A top-floor three-bedroom unit in the building is currently listed for a monthly rental price of $5,400.

The city had owned the lot after foreclosing on its previous owner in 1979. Before the site re-entered private ownership, a building there had caught fire and was ordered demolished by the city’s Housing Department, which then erected the chain link fence, behind which the tree grew, according to court papers. 

Sheynker said courts have previously upheld that city-owned trees must be publicly accessible on what is called a right-of-way. Since the tree has never been accessible, the claim that the tree is a city-owned entity is “unusual,” he told The Post.

Since the current owner purchased it in 1999, the lot had served as private parking, with the large tree towering over the cars below, before the apartment unit was built.

But if the owner doesn’t pay his outstanding fine, it could prevent him from obtaining a final sign-off for his building, the suit claims. 

City officials did not respond to a Post request for comment. Trachtenberg did not return a Post request for comment.