Pine and dandy

The latter is an annual dilemma for John Egan, whose family has owned Egan Acres Tree Farm since 1945. Truly a family affair, Egan has indoctrinated his three sons into the “arbor” of love that is supplying, setting up, and decorating some of the largest Christmas trees in the country. Not to be left out, his daughter and wife help with the paperwork and run the family’s office in Riverdale.
Egan, who was born in the Bronx and now lives in Westchester, has a tree farm in upstate New York’s Columbia County where the company sells a small number of retail trees. Most of their energy goes into supplying the big trees that sit in public plazas and shopping centers every holiday season.
Egan is not immune to the frenzy of the holiday season. Being jolly all the time is, after all, Santa’s job.
“It gets tiring, but I like it,” Egan said, speaking from Bowling Green in lower Manhattan, where he and his team were setting up a 64-foot tree. “It’s just that everyone wants it done at the same time. Between Nov. 1 and Dec. 25, everything has to be squeezed into then.”
During the rest of the year, the Egans are busy scouting trees for the upcoming season.
Some landowners make the job easier for them by calling Egan Farms when large trees on their property begin to encroach on the house or start to break through foundations or sidewalks.
The Egans gladly take those trees off their hands, and most times end up paying the owners for the chance.
Egan will survey trees for use in New York and Pennsylvania, and has looked in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Massachusetts as well.
Egan also keeps contacts in the Northwest, for any jobs he gets on the West Coast. That makes it easier for delivery, as otherwise the cost would be prohibitive, and the tree would most likely die during delivery.
“Wherever they want a tree, we try and supply it,” he said.
Egan has been inundated with local jobs this year, and he can rattle them off from memory. There are 50-foot tall Colorado Blue Spruces in Lincoln Center, South Street Seaport, and Brooklyn’s MetroTech Plaza. And don’t forget and the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, where Egan builds two identical pyramids of trees made up of 91 trees each, something he has done for years.
The crown jewel on Egan’s list this year is the 91-foot tall Norway Spruce in Uniondale, Long Island’s EAB Bank Plaza. With more than 40,000 lights and three miles of electrical cable, Egan said proudly “it’s more lit than Rockefeller Center’s.”
He has also seen one of his trees travel to Dallas this year, where an 80-foot tall Norwegian Spruce sits outside the City Hall. Dallas’ mayor, Laura Miller, told the Dallas Morning News of the “great glee” she felt at beating out Rockefeller Center’s 71-foot tall tree.
For two years beginning in 2002, the city of Miami also decided to give New York’s most famous tree a run for its money with a 110- and 120-foot spruces. However, the transport and logistics of a winter tree in a hot climate presented its own problems. Egan believes this year Miami opted for a fake tree.
Perhaps farthest afield the Egans have taken their wares was in 1998, when Telcel, a cellular company, commissioned the company to bring a 52-foot Douglas Fir to Caracas, Venezuela. It had to be delivered by cargo place and panels were taken off of the buildings skylights so it could be lowered into place.
No matter where the order, the process is all about manpower and timing. Egan estimates his crew is made up of 20 to 30 employees along with his family.
Before the trees can go anywhere, they have to be cut down and the branches secured with ropes, which can take anywhere from three to seven days.
Then comes the process of loading it onto a flatbed truck, which more often than not has to be an extended flatbed because of the size of the tree being transported. Once the tree is delivered, a crane is used to hoist it upright. Finally, it is decorated. The entire process takes a week at the very least, but Egan prides himself on doing a complete service.
“We do everything — from the soup to the nuts,” he said.
And what exactly does one do with a 91-foot tree when its Christmas duty has been fulfilled?
“It’s like a cycle,” Egan said. “We remove it and make it into mulch to refurbish the new trees.”
With the season so busy, many jobs overlap. That is where Egan’s three sons come in to supervise when he can’t be everywhere at once.
“One of us is present at all times,” Egan said.
Egan’s father, James, first entered the Christmas tree business after stints as a fireman and a lawyer. Along with his brother-in-law, the elder Egan began selling Christmas trees on a corner of Madison Avenue, where the well-heeled clients included the Kennedys and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Egan, whose family has roots in Tipperary and Galway, was just 13 when he first joined his father in the business, and since then the Egan family has been responsible with bedecking some of Manhattan’s best-known landmarks. From 1945 to 1988, the family put up the Wall Street tree, and in the 1950s and ’60s they placed smaller trees that dotted the greenery along Park Avenue.
After James Egan died in 1993, the family business carried on, but the concentration has been on larger jobs.
As getting the biggest and best tree has been the key to bragging rights from city to city, the Egan family is happy to keep up. As the holiday season seems to stretch longer every year, Egan hopes his trees do the same.