Good catch, Dr. Bill. Googling, I found this about Betty Smith and her wonderful novel:


The Real Tree That Grows in Brooklyn

There were some aspects of the novel that Smith would not change. When Smith submitted her novel, the title was They Lived in Brooklyn. Harper & Brothers was not satisfied with this, so Smith discussed it with her associates in the playmaker group. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was probably suggested by Josefina Niggli, a writer and friend of Smith's. Although at first Saxton [her editor at Harper] was against using a full sentence as a title, he finally agreed. It was a wise decision since it set off a chain reaction of imitative headlines in the press; even today, most people are familiar with the title. Then Smith wrote a preface that made the metaphor, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, distinct:

There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . . survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.

She was also very specific about what tree it was: when she first received a copy of the dust jacket, the artist had painted a generic city tree. Smith made him change it to the ailanthus tree, that ubiquitous growth visible on railroad trestles, in empty lots, and in any crack that has accumulated dirt in New York city. Then the artist painted an ailanthus, but it was surrounded by an iron fence. Smith wrote:

Brooklyn trees are considered noxious and people chop them down, burn them and put poison on them to kill them off. No one would ever put a guard around one of those trees, no more than would fertilize a field of dandelions . . . . it grows on neglect the way the children of my neighborhood do in the book .

Smith was firm in her commitment to this metaphor. Her instinct on this matter was correct: the tree that grew in Brooklyn became an American icon.