Photo Gallery: 150-year-old Tree Topples at Lanterman House

It was as lucky as an unlucky happening could be.

Lanterman House, a favored La Cañada tourist spot, was closed when the 60-foot-tall, 150-year-old native oak tree toppled to the ground and landed on its branches, sparing the next door neighbor’s property.

“It’s heartbreaking, but the funny thing is, it landed on its elbows, so when it fell over, it didn’t damage anything,’’ said Melissa Patton, Lanterman’s executive director. “It was an amazing thing to see.’’

High winds Sunday night, preceeded by torrential weekend rains, proved more than the century-old oak could bear. The giant tree succumbed to the elements about 3:30 a.m. Monday, Patton said. The enormous branches and foliage consumed the parking lot, on the south side of the property, and blocked the driveway.

If it had fallen a day earlier, when a large group of Cub Scouts and their parents visited the historic Craftsman home, the cars would’ve been certainly stranded and probably obliterated.

West Coast Arborists, who contracts with the city for tree removal, had to “surgically’’ remove the branches to keep from harming the fence it straddled, said Gonzalo Venegas, facilities and maintenance  superintendent for . Venegas said the intensive operation took two days, and included lumberjack chainsaws to slice the trunk and branches into movable chunks.  

“We were already in the process of removing four or five other downed trees, but the way this one fell, it was amazing,’’ he said.

All that’s left of the oak, which predates the 1915 building of Lanterman House, is a leaning, 5-foot wide stump. Venegas said the city will return to pluck the stump and its massive roots from the ground.

As for a replacement, Patton said she is going to consult an arborist for which kind of tree would be the best to plant in the gaping space.