Joni Mitchell wrote “Big Yellow Tax” in 1970. It should be Lakewood’s City anthem.
Joni Mitchell described the inspiration for the song in a 1996 interview with Robert Hilburn:
I wrote Big Yellow Taxi on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart…this blight on paradise. That’s when I sat down and wrote the song. When it first came out, it was a regional hit in Hawaii because people there realised their paradise was being chewed up.
Lakewood used to be paradise, it is now being chewed up by developers. Garry oaks are being torn down to make way for warehouses and their parking lots. Woodbrook has been destroyed, and 114 Garry oaks are about to be cut down in Springbrook. As the song goes:
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
If you complain to the City about the loss of Garry oaks, you’ll be directed to Fort Steilacoom Park, where there are plenty of them. Or perhaps to one acre of young oaks behind St. Clare’s hospital.
However, what the City in effect seems to be doing is creating reservations, or tree museums – and outside the tree museums it is a free-fire zone. At the moment you don’t have to pay to visit the trees, but it could happen. As Joni Mitchell put it
They took all the trees, and put em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them
No, no, no
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone
They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot