How many Christmas trees has Ridgefield supplied for Rockefeller Center?
As near as we can figure, three. But one of them was the very first official Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
The first tree at “30 Rock” was unofficial, erected in 1931 by construction workers before the center was completed. The 20-foot balsam fir was decorated with “strings of cranberries, garlands of paper, and even a few tin cans,” according to historian Daniel Okrent.
The first official tree was installed in 1933, just after the center was completed. According to a story in a 1933 Press, the Norway spruce came from Outpost Nurseries in Ridgefield.
Outpost, operated by Col. Louis D. Conley, covered many hundreds of acres in the Farmingville and Limestone districts of town, and included what is now Bennett’s Farm State Park. Most of the nursery was later subdivided by various developers, and many roads in town take their names from trees and shrubs that Outpost grew on neighborhood land, including Copper Beech Lane, Linden Road, Birch Lane, Cherry Lane, Dogwood Drive, Laurel Lane, plus, of course, Nursery Road.
Outpost was one of the largest retail nursery businesses in the East. Among its many jobs between 1925 and World War II were plantings for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair; the 1939 New York City World’s Fair; the National Art Gallery in Washington; parks along Riverside Drive and elsewhere in New York City; Harvard, Yale and Williams colleges; Narragansett and Monmouth Raceways; and the estates of such people as Cole Porter, Lowell Thomas, Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (at Hyde Park), Walter Winchell, Robert Montgomery, and the Buckleys at Sharon.
The 50-foot Outpost tree was decorated with 700 blue and white bulbs. Today’s trees carry some 30,000 lights and are up to 100 feet tall.
The next Ridgefield tree we could find was in 1994. The 85-foot Norway spruce belonged to Maria and Alan Egler, who feared it would one day fall on their house. However, “when my wife saw that tree going out the driveway in that 100-foot flatbed, she sobbed,” Mr. Egler told a reporter.
In 2006, an 86-foot Norway spruce was felled on the property of Robert and Deborah Kinnaird. With a 48-inch trunk, it was the heaviest tree the Rockefeller fellers had ever handled.
Mr. Kinnaird, a longtime Ridgefielder, took a bit of teasing for allowing his century-old spruce to be dispatched. Fellow longtime Ridgefielder David Gelfman claimed in a letter to the editors of The Press that Mr. Kinnaird was being considered by the “National Society of Deforestation and Destruction” for its annual award for “ultimate desecration of nature.”
At three, Ridgefield may hold the record for the largest number of Rockefeller Center Christmas trees supplied by any one town. However, we’ve been unable to find a complete list of all the contributed trees, so we can’t tell whether another community equals or surpasses ours, or whether Ridgefield may have supplied more than three.
