Our streets need purple canopies—and purple carpets. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images) For a better part of a century, we placed palm trees in our most prominent lands, the tree we now ...

City officials say they don’t know how many palm trees have been lost. In 1990, a city tally put the number of palms on L.A.’s streets at 75,000. That number has declined, officials said, but ...