By Kate Pastor

Schervier Nursing Care Center’s plans to build a parking lot — which required chopping down mature trees on the Palisade Avenue border of its property — is not sitting well with neighbors.

Several Palisade Avenue and Kappock Street residents called The Riverdale Press last week distraught and angry after three trees were felled.

“They came in with this huge machine with a claw-like shovel and they started hacking at them,” said Sister Kathleen Maire, who lives at 775 Kappock St. in a house rented from Schervier.

In a press release, a Schervier spokeswoman insisted the trees were cut down “as of right,” and noted that one of the three was split and unhealthy.

“We don’t need a permit to cut them down,” said the spokeswoman, Nadine Baker, adding that the property does not fall within a Special Natural Area District, which requires a review process and special permit before a homeowner can cut down a tree.

A city Department of Buildings spokesman said the city is awaiting the owner’s plans. The agency will then determine if the loss of trees will cause run-off problems. If that’s the case, Schervier will be required to install a drainage system.

The new parking lot, set in from the nursing home’s western edge along Palisade Avenue, will be about 21-feet wide and 180-feet long and will accommodate 18 cars. Joe Gordon, engineer and former aide to City Councilman Oliver Koppell, was hired as the project manager.

Ms. Baker said part of the impetus for the project is the lack of parking spaces in the area — something she says is an inconvenience to the entire community.

With a good number of nursing home visitors each day and more than 500 employees, Schervier needs to provide more spots, she said. The company also recently added transit checks as an incentive for employees to take public transportation to work.

Stephen Murrell, director of facilities, said the project was designed “so that there would be minimum destruction on the lot,” but admitted that he had made no effort to reach out to residents because, “I wasn’t instructed to and I didn’t think of it.”

Ms. Baker assured that, “once we put in the parking lot and the staircase it will be landscaped and lovely.” It will include a “retaining wall that will be as lovely as the landscaping created around it,” she said. “We do everything we can to get along in Riverdale because it’s our neighborhood as well.”