Skokie’s tallest tree came down in 2024. Here’s to the new canopy kings.

In the northeast corner of Skokie’s Laramie Park, towering above the nearby homes and telephone poles, stand a pair of cottonwood trees. 

The two are likely the tallest trees the Skokie Park District oversees, said Jim Hallm, the park district’s horticulture supervisor; the approximately 100-year-old poplars rise more than 60 feet in the air and boast over 4 1/2 feet of trunk diameter. 

But these are the new kings. The pair took the proverbial crown for Skokie’s tallest trees only after the park district in March 2024 cut down an even larger cottonwood in Pawnee Park that was in poor health — a decision that lends insight into how the district manages the health of the village’s canopy. 

“A tree takes forever to get to a mature height and the last thing you want to do is see 30 years of work on the tree’s part go away, but sometimes things get hurt, things get sick and it’s for the best,” Hallm said of the cottonwood removed from Pawnee Park.

“But it is painful to watch a beautiful tree have to come down for any sort of reason. You always want to save every sort of tree you can,” Hallm added. 

Hallm estimated that the cottonwood with a canopy stretching almost completely over Pawnee Park was between 100 and 120 years old. It rose more than 70 feet in the air and was nearly 5 feet in diameter. The giant was struck by lightning during the summer of 2016.

The strike sent a large chunk, about 30% of the tree’s mass, crashing down on top of the park’s playground, Hallm said. The lightning also created an approximately 15-foot long cavity along the length of the cottonwood’s trunk, according to a report completed by SavATree, a consultancy group. 

A certified arborist, Hallm said he and other staff kept an eye on the giant poplar for years, hoping it would recover. The park district contracts an outside company to inspect and prune all its trees on a five-year cycle, while district staff monitor specific trees every year or six months. 

Hallm typically has final authority on what park district trees are cut down and the Pawnee Park cottonwood continued to show signs of distress. But given its substantial age and size, he sought outside analysis from SavATree to confirm the prognosis: It was decaying and a “high risk” to parkgoers.

The old playground was torn out of Pawnee Park in December 2023, and the park district found a contractor willing to take down the behemoth tree. But that wasn’t easy. Most contractors, Hallm said, balked at the big job. In the end, it was the largest tree they had ever taken down, he said. 

After growing for more than a century at Skokie’s Pawnee Park, the huge cottonwood came down in the spring of 2024. Hallm said he “felt horrible about it,” especially as it was a beloved tree in the neighborhood — but he knew it was a necessary call to make. 

Cottonwoods tend to grow into very large trees, which helps explain why Skokie’s tallest trees today are the cottonwoods in Laramie Park, and the likely runnersup are two cottonwoods in Schack Park, Hallm said. 

For Skokie residents wondering about the health of other legacy trees in the village, Hallm noted he’s keeping an eye on a number of mature oaks that are approaching the end of their 200-year life. 

A couple of oaks in Lockwood Park have large wounds beyond recovery but are not hazardous at this time, Hallm said.

Still, one of the oaks in Lockwood Park is on the docket to be cut down this upcoming spring as a preventative measure, and another fell down on its own a few years ago after it was struck by what Hallm suspected but cannot confirm was the raised bed of an errant truck.

Fortunately, the two tall cottonwoods at Laramie Park are both healthy and thriving — the current kings of Skokie’s canopy.

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