An LA Lumber Yard Wants Us To Know Our Local Trees — Especially The Dead Ones

Jeff Perry envisions a world where we know where our wood comes from. He’s the founder of Angel City Lumber, a lumber yard and store in Boyle Heights that sources wood only from L.A. County.

The trees they mill into lumber are primarily those that have been felled by storms, cut down due to disease, or removed for development or construction across L.A. They then sell that wood to local designers and anyone else who could put it to use. (If you have a dead or diseased tree on your property, you can also donate it to the shop).

“We need to reconnect with trees, as not a product, but as a living being,” Perry said. “Utilizing fallen trees from the community — it's essentially to say, ‘I knew that tree, or I know a species of tree like that down the street.’ So it's this reconnection to our natural state that we're really trying to return to.”

He said the company aims to launch a project next year that tells the story of every tree they mill.

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Furniture instead of mulch

Jeff Perry (center) of Angel City Lumber.

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Adam Mefford

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Courtesy Angel City Lumber

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Most downed trees end up as mulch in parks and other green spaces around the city and county — there’s a large yard at Griffith Park for mulching trees, for example.

Through partnerships with cities such as L.A. and Burbank, Angel City salvages some of that local wood to be used for furniture, home building, and other projects.

Perry came up with the idea in 2014, when he was a struggling actor moonlighting as a bartender and carpenter. On a hike, he came across a huge oak tree that had fallen down across a trail in Eaton Canyon in Altadena and he wanted to do something with the wood. Park officials, though, said he couldn’t take it due to liability issues. The tree, he later found out, ended up chopped and mulched.

At that time, Perry had just commissioned a project to build an end table with wood he sourced from out of state.

“I'm like, I just bought all this lumber from Illinois and this oak is just getting mulched,” Perry said.

He soon realized cities were dealing with a surplus of downed trees that would most often end up as mulch, or even in landfills. So Angel City Lumber was born to find ways to repurpose them.

A new partnership

From its new partnership with the Angeles National Forest, the shop will also be milling dead or diseased trees that come from the forest, as well as trees that are removed to prevent fire, for example near power lines.

While dead trees are important for forest health — they improve soil and provide habitat and food for forest critters — more than 100 years of forest mismanagement has contributed to a buildup of fuel that’s supercharging wildfires (something my colleague Jacob Margolis has covered extensively, including in a podcast called The Big Burn).

In addition, the partnership is working with local nonprofit Would Works, which trains and employs people experiencing homelessness in woodworking.

“We are in the business of reconnection,” Perry said.