Connecticut Branch of Tri Lift Provides Genie Boom Lift for Rockefeller Center Tree Installation

REDMOND, Wash. — To metropolitan New Yorkers—and now the whole country, thanks to a yearly broadcast TV special—the holiday season arrives in earnest with the lighting of the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center. This year's tree, a 76-foot Norway spruce that will soon hold 45,000 LED lights, was moved by flatbed trailer from its home in Connecticut and set in place on Nov. 8. Just getting to that point is a fairly massive undertaking, and this year it included help from Genie dealer Tri Lift Inc., which provided a Genie S-85 telescopic boom manufactured in Moses Lake, Wash. for the effort.

According to Tri Lift Rental Manager Mike Degennaro, their involvement started with a phone call from one of their other branches.

“As a company, we"ve been doing regular business with Tishman Speyer, the NYC building management giant, since about 2001,” he says. “They have some of our equipment long term and rent other units from us on a yearly basis. They called into our Farmingdale (N.Y.) branch on Long Island looking for an 85-foot boom to assist in the tree erection process and, since we provide the aerial units for them, it got turned over to us.”
As luck would have it, the New Haven, Conn. branch had just taken delivery of a brand new Genie S-85 boom lift, so the call could not have been more timely.

Degennaro says they received the order on Tuesday of that week, and the unit had to leave their yard in Connecticut at 3:30 a.m. on Friday to be in Rockefeller Plaza for 5:30. Once there, the driver had to sit and wait until the crew's work was done and immediately bring it back.

“It was certainly not one of our standard rentals, but it was a great opportunity for us to be a part of something so high-profile and meaningful to people here and throughout the country,” he says. “The main part of the actual raising of the tree was handled using a massive truck crane. But the Genie boom was critical for the rigging crew who needed it to manage the guy wires which secure the 12-ton tree after it is placed in its pedestal.”

He adds that the entire tree-raising project was being streamed live through a New York City TV station's website so, for most of the day, everyone in their office was watching the live stream in a corner of their computers.

“It made us all feel like we were really a part of it all.”