Oakmont work gets done to Oakmont’s standard

A borough where the tree is the curb appeal

Walk any block off Allegheny Avenue and you can see what the town decided a hundred years ago. Somebody put oaks and elms along both sides of the street, spaced them evenly, and left them room to arch over the pavement. Then generations of owners kept up the houses underneath them. The result is a borough where the canopy is not decoration sitting next to the property. It is the reason the street looks the way it does, and everyone here knows it.

That changes what people want from us. In a lot of places a homeowner calls because a tree scares them. In Oakmont people call because a tree has gotten shaggy, or lopsided, or is throwing enough shade to kill the lawn, or has one dead limb hanging over a walk where the whole neighborhood can see it. Those are appearance jobs as much as safety jobs, and they are the ones where sloppy work shows for years. A flush cut leaves a wound that never seals. A topped crown grows back as a fistful of weak shoots. Neither can be undone once it is done.

So the pruning we do here is deliberate and unhurried. We take deadwood out of the interior, lift the crown off a roof or a walk to a height that still looks natural, thin where a canopy has gotten dense enough to catch wind, and reduce a heavy lateral at a lateral rather than cutting it off in the middle. The shape you are left with should look like a tree that grew that way. When somebody stands across the street a month later and cannot tell where we worked, that is the job done right.

Removals here get treated as an event, because they are. When a street oak that has been in front of a house since the twenties finally goes hollow at the base, taking it down changes the whole block’s view. People come out on their porches to watch. We work accordingly: the property gets protected, the pieces come down on ropes rather than dropping, the brush goes into the chipper instead of piling on somebody’s tree lawn all afternoon, and the truck leaves the street the way we found it. Where the trunk is too big or the target underneath too tight to rope safely, we bring crane support and handle it as a large tree removal instead of improvising.

Then there is the part people forget until the crew is packing up. A removal leaves a stump, and in Oakmont a stump in a front lawn is a problem in its own right. Ours get ground well below grade the same visit, the chips get hauled or backfilled the way you want them, and the ground gets raked out so grass will take. Nobody schedules a second appointment for it and nobody looks at a stump all summer. It is the same one-and-done standard we hold across Allegheny County, and this is a town that notices whether we actually mean it.

Slate roofs and the storms off the river

The other Oakmont constant is the housing stock. A lot of these early-1900s homes still wear their original slate, and slate does not forgive. A limb section that would bounce off modern asphalt shingle will crack four tiles and start a leak that shows up in a bedroom ceiling two weeks later, and matching old slate is a project of its own. So on any tree overhanging a slate roof, nothing gets dropped. The climber ties in above the work, cuts short pieces, and every one of them rides a rigging line down to the ground crew.

Weather that comes up the Allegheny valley finds these tall street trees first, since they clear the rooflines with nothing to break the gust. What usually fails is not the whole tree. It is one heavy limb, or an old union that has been quietly cracked since the last big blow. If a storm has gone through and something in your crown looks wrong from the ground, a phone call costs nothing. Call (412) 526-2028 any hour. We make the dangerous part safe first, photograph the damage while it is still where it landed so your insurance has what it needs, and then schedule the rest around you rather than leaving a wrecked yard sitting for a week in a town where the yard is the point.