For as long as anyone in Burlingame has been alive, the town’s main thoroughfare has been lined with eucalyptus trees. They form a silvery canopy above 2.2 miles of El Camino Real, earning the stretch a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.
But in January, the state’s transportation department rolled cherry-picker trucks into Burlingame and began taking chainsaws to the 150-year-old trees.
Caltrans, which manages this section of state road, has already felled about 80 of the roughly 400 eucalyptus trees. Over the next two years, more than 80% of them will be removed and replaced by saplings…