It’s just one Baltimore street tree in a city that’s got about 100,000 of them but it’s the one we happen to notice:

It’s dead and ugly and it’s been getting deader and uglier for months.

Located on University Parkway across the street from the Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus tennis courts, the tree’s raggedy tangle of bent-down and snapped-off branches seems to have attracted a bit of visionary art or perhaps protest:

A plastic skeleton, tied to one of its branches, dances eerily in the breeze.

Right down the street, meanwhile, just a block away, the city is currently in the process of removing about a dozen good-looking, living trees.

The tree cutting is part of the $25 million Charles Street improvement project, aimed at making the busy street at the University’s front entrance safer for pedestrians, better for traffic flow and more attractive.

A suggestion for Hopkins (a partner in the project) and the City: send a couple of those chainsaws and a wood-chipper up Charles Street to get that depressing, dangerous old tree out of there!

Of course, there are plenty more long-dead-or-dying-and-hazardous trees all across Baltimore – on streets that are not located in close proximity to a prestigious university.  For example, we’ve been watching this one over at Clifton Park for months.

No doubt the city Department of Forestry might say, at this point, they have a long to-do list and short budget – they’re welcome to chime in here and discuss it. Meanwhile, though, those Charles Street logging crews are going to be right there, right near that one bit of blight . . .