Yup - I went to Temple University and the whole sidewalk from the train station to campus was lined with these. The leaves are beautiful but the berries are just horrendous. We called them shitberries. It was really hard to avoid them and sometimes you'd step on one, and end up apologizing the rest of the day because that stench sticks around.

I think they got rid of those trees. The students now don't know what they're missing out on!

Ginkgos are dioecious, so there are boy trees and girl trees. The girls produce the fruit, so they are rarely planted.

My college had a single female ginkgo tree, known sort-of-affectionately as The Poo Tree to most on campus.

Im still baffled that Seoul in South Korea has so many fruiting Gingko trees. They make the whole city smell like an open sewer and I couldn’t stand it.

This unintended consequences aspect is rearing its head where I live - they planted hundreds or thousands of gum trees that are now mature and each one drops shittons and shittons of spikey gum balls every fall - but about 20% don't come out of the trees and just rot on the limb. You can't even rake them out. And the 80% that do come down kill the grass and clog the gutters and drains. It's a real shit show.

It should be "horror they would wreak", but honestly yours fits the context pretty good too!

The ones in my local park fruit and it does smell super bad. The trees also take like 20 years before they can start fruiting.