Here’s a blight shot from the City of Detroit that I took from the now-defunct SeeDetroit.com website (I hope they don’t mind). It features a line of ailanthus growing almost like pickets along the facade of the building.

In Vancouver there is a proposed Ailanthus Building. It will serve as a community space with a performing arts theatre and more. Their website does not elaborate on the choice of name.

Thank you to Michael B. who wrote to say that Ailanthus shows up in the novel “The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem, a novel about growing up white in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn. Until I can track down a copy of the book for an excerpt, I’ll make do with Michael’s words that the author uses Ailanthus as “shorthand for hell”.

The Element of Lavishness: Letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1938-1978
Maxwell to Warner, March 15, 1940:
I have all but one foot out of the office, but continue to work a little each day on manuscripts, and will for another month and a half, with the mornings free to work out my own salvation. Your last letter couldn’t have pleased me more if it had been printed on Joseph Smith’s golden plates instead of grey stationery. But you must not grow anxious about The New Yorker. I’ve been eating …

Ailanthus shows up in Don DeLillo’s book Underworld. It is a very bleak chapter, describing two nuns distributing alms in a bombed-out area of the South Bronx filled with abandoned cars, cripples, utter desolation. The landscape and the people who live in it are vividly described through the eyes of the senior nun, Sister Edgar. At one point, Sister Edgar glances out the window of the tenement.
Edgar looked out a window and saw someone moving among the poplars and ailanthus trees in the most overgrown part of …

The great poet TS Eliot uses Ailanthus altissima in his poem “Four Quartets”.  Here is the opening stanza of the third Quartet, The Dry Salvages:
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men …

These entries are dedicated to chronicling the growth of Ailanthus altissima in cultural consciousness. Simply put, I’m collecting any reference to the tree in art, literature, movies, music, etc. and putting it on the web. I also may include ecology of the tree, but it’s not my principal focus.
Why am I doing this? People have in their contact with nature developed sets of ideas related to many different trees. Individual species of trees represent different things to us, and have wound up in our cultural memory. …

Little Odessa’s an older movie (1994) that I just picked up on VCD a little while ago. It’s not a particularly interesting drama, but the setting is. It’s filmed in a part of New York city called Brighton Beach. It’s a decaying industrial sector with a large Russian immigrant population. The climax scene in the movie uses Ailanthus altissima to great effect. The thug (Tim Roth) has taken his victim to an abandoned factory to assassinate him. The victim stands at his grave. As Roth …

Ghetto Palm pops up in Detroit again, not surprisingly. This time it is the subject of a painting by Clinton Snider, a CCS grad into found object art and Detroit desolation. You can see a thumbnail of his painting, Tree of Heaven, at the link above. The article picks up on the dual meanings of the tree:
Melancholy seems to be the pervasive mood here, but not entirely. After all, it was a tree of heaven that grew in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. So on one level …