Allison Park addresses, Route 8 trees, one crew

Working a tree with traffic forty feet away

The corridor jobs are the ones that separate the outfits up here. Route 8 does not slow down for anybody, and a fair number of 15101 properties front it or sit one lot back from it. When a maple by the driveway apron needs to come down, the tree is honestly the easy part. The staging is the job. We set the chip truck and the loader so nothing has to back blind onto a fast road, we keep the drop zone on the house side rather than the road side, and we time the noisy hours around the morning and evening rushes so nobody is threading a chipper hose past commuter traffic. Homeowners along that stretch have usually watched somebody do it badly before, cones in the berm and a groundman waving cars off, and they notice when it is handled differently.

Sightlines are the other corridor problem, and it is the one people put off. A driveway that empties onto a road where cars run fifty needs a clear look both ways, and the shrub row or the low limbs that seemed fine when you bought the house have added fifteen years of growth since. We get called for that after a close call, almost never before. Half the time the fix is a real pruning visit: raise the crowns, cut the sight triangle back to the pavement edge, and suddenly you can see what is coming. The other half, the tree is planted in the wrong spot and no amount of trimming makes it right, and we say so.

Then there is the screening question. Plenty of people along the corridor planted a row of spruce or arborvitae in the seventies specifically to put something between the living room and the noise. Fifty years on, those screens have become a different animal. Norway spruce that went in as four foot balled stock are now seventy feet tall with dead lower thirds, leaning away from the road because that is where the light was. They still block the view, but they also lean over a bedroom. Taking a screen row down entirely is rarely the right answer since the noise comes right back. Usually we thin it, take out the two or three that are actually a hazard, and leave the rest of the wall doing its job.

Over on the west side, the properties that touch Allegheny County‘s North Park have their own situation. Park edges grow park trees. A tulip poplar or a red oak on private ground fifty feet from the park boundary got to grow up in continuous forest, straight and tall with no lower branches and a crown that starts at sixty feet. Take out the woods next door and those trees are suddenly standing alone with a trunk built for a canopy that shelters it. Those are the removals that need real rigging and the loader, not a rope and hope, and they are also the ones most worth a serious look before anybody decides they have to go. We have talked people out of taking down park-edge giants more than once. A tall straight tree is not automatically a dangerous one.

The neighborhoods off Duncan Avenue and Middle Road are where most of our routine work sits. Those streets got built out between the mid sixties and the early eighties, and the shade trees went in the same season the pavement went down. Fifty years later, an awful lot of them have never had a single professional cut. Nobody was neglectful about it. Silver maple, pin oak, Norway maple, they just grew and nothing happened and the tree got big. What you end up with is a mature canopy full of stubs, rubbing limbs, deadwood collected over decades, and codominant stems that have been quietly grinding at each other since the Carter administration. First real structural work on a tree that age is a bigger visit than most homeowners expect, and it is also the one that buys the most years.

We are honest about what that visit can and cannot do. On a fifty year old tree we can pull the deadwood, cut the end weight back off the long limbs, clean up decades of rubbing, and take a hard look at the union where two stems meet. What we cannot do is undo fifty years. If the seam between two leaders is already packed with included bark and there is a crack running down from it, the pruning conversation is over and the removal conversation starts. Chris will stand under it with you and point at the thing he is looking at, so you are not taking anybody’s word for it.

Stumps finish on the same visit unless there is a reason they cannot. Corridor lots are usually tight between the driveway and the property line, and leaving a stump in that footprint means you cannot replant, cannot regrade, cannot do anything with the spot. We grind below grade, chase the surface roots out far enough that a mower deck will not find them, and leave the chips or haul them, your call. Same truck, same day.

Storm work runs all year here and it clusters where you would expect. Wind that comes up the corridor hits the screening rows and the park-edge trees first because they are the ones with nothing upwind to break it. We answer the phone at any hour, make the dangerous part safe before anything else, photograph the damage for your insurance while the crew is on site, and put the rest of the cleanup on a schedule that fits your week rather than ours.