The tree — visible in photos circulating on local social media — fell with enough force to leave a root disk the size of a small room, a pale dirt circle exposed to the sky now where the base had been. The trunk lay across the grass in sections by the time anyone was photographing it, bark still intact, the interior wood a clean, unrotted tan. Whatever took it was weather, not age.

The Panhandle is a particular kind of park: a long, skinny corridor that doesn't invite lingering the way Dolores or Alamo Square do, but accumulates daily use the way corridors do — dog walkers, cyclists treating it as an on-ramp to the Wiggle, kids from the nearby schools cutting across after the bell. The trees there do most of their work silently, as canopy.