Oh, my goodness. You are cursed with looking at that all winter!

(Though I personally think they could have pruned lower - much, much lower.)

Not uncommon to see that here, except the trees are relatively flat topped rather than pointy. Sometime they are left to grow for two years, sometimes cut every year. Most don't bloom much because young wood doesn't have many blooming spurs. Pretty ugly if you ask me.

Another establishment with the curse of the Bradford pear. :+

How much better would've been some good shade trees that you could park/pinic under.

Edit: Looking more closely at the pictures, it appears that the overhead wires were a limiting factor in how big of trees could be planted. :(

"Looking more closely at the pictures, it appears that the overhead wires were a limiting factor in how big of trees could be planted. :("

Yeah, the overhead wires were likely the reason for the forced pruning, and the best thing under the circumstance may be pruning the poor trees in a Christmas tree shape.

In a relatively short time they will regrow back to their oval/circular shape.

They also have a fairly thick trunk so they must have been pruned before.

Next thing that's going to happen is whip-like, fast-growing replacement shoots exploding out of the nubs at the branch ends like antennae or hairs.

This is not a restful effect.

And will have been happening every year that the pollarding has been undertaken.

You see the same kind of thing (pruning into artificial shapes) rather often here. There is consistent budgeting for aggressive pruning (or shearing) of what planting happens to be present but little interest demonstrated in actual nurturing of the landscape, of gardening it as in planting it fully and caring for the plantings in a way that encourages plant health. In fact the Seattle area is where a membership organization founded to do something about bad pruning originated:

Plant Amnesty

http://www.plantamnesty.org

They will have the whip like shoots but they will not be messy or out of control.

These trees always make just enough(weather a lot or a little) shoots to form their circular shape. I think its kind of neat how they do that.

Actually the appearance produced is quite messy looking, as the whips grow out of the nubs in all directions.

They may look messy at first but in my experience they always resume their original shape. They will look kind of ratty for 2 or 3 years.

All the whips make it very dense.

They look like those cell phone towers designed to look like trees.

I think a problem is landscaping often involves a lot of mindless manual labor...raking, mowing, etc.. This makes it tempting to go for the cheapest option...paying for a skilled person to spend that much time is expensive. Thing is, every so often a task comes up that requires skill, like pruning or choosing plants or telling what isn't a weed. The teenager or recent immigrant who's language you don't speak (and thus can't give instructions) may not do such a good job when those tasks come up.

Yes, those beautiful "Mcpears" LOL. At least they won't flower. As kentrees said, they are typically flat topped which probably looks even worse than this. A classic case of wrong plant, wrong place (This is the wrong plant for ANY place). Another question, does that food sicken you the way it does me? No reason to fund the McPruners.