How did Christmas trees first pop-up on New York City sidewalks?

It is long believed that a woodsman from the Catskills by the name of Mark Carr was the first to sell Christmas trees in New York — in 1851. A couple of weeks before Christmas Day that year, Mr. Carr loaded two ox sleds with “thrifty young firs and spruces” and headed for the city, according to an 1878 New York Daily Tribune article.

He paid a silver dollar for the right to sell his lot of trees on a strip of sidewalk at Vesey and Greenwich Streets in TriBeCa. His evergreens quickly sold out. He returned the next year and other peddlers followed his lead, establishing the prosperous holiday sidewalk tree industry.

By 1880, more than 200,000 trees were being shipped to New York each year.

In the 1930s, the former Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, seeking to reduce street peddling, established regulations that would require vendors to apply for selling permits. After much public outcry, the City Council in 1938 adopted what has been called the “coniferous tree exception,” which allows vendors to sell and display Christmas trees on a sidewalk without a permit in December as long as they have the permission of owners fronting the sidewalk and keep a corridor open for pedestrians.

The rule has brought flocks of vendors from across the country and the pleasant smell of pine trees to New York City ever since.

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