Tree work sized for Aspinwall’s little grid

A borough you walk, under trees you look up at

Most of the places we work, people drive from the garage to wherever they are going and the trees are scenery. Aspinwall is not that. People here walk. They walk kids to school, they walk to the shops on Brilliant Avenue, they walk down to the riverfront park on a Saturday with a stroller and a dog, and they do all of it under a canopy of street trees that somebody planted a long time ago and that the borough has kept ever since. That canopy is a real part of what the place is. It is also directly over everybody’s head.

Which is why the single most common job on our Aspinwall schedule is not a removal. It is clearing deadwood out of a crown that overhangs a sidewalk. A dead limb in a mature maple can hang up there for two or three seasons looking like nothing, and then a gusty afternoon shakes it loose over a stretch of pavement where somebody is pushing a stroller. On a big suburban lot that limb lands in the grass and nobody ever knows. Here it lands on concrete that gets used every hour of the day. We take that work seriously and we schedule it before the storms, not after, because a scheduled prune is the cheapest thing on this whole list.

Small yards, no drop zone, one visit

The removals here are precision work. A typical Aspinwall backyard is maybe thirty feet deep, fenced on both sides, with a garage on the alley and a neighbor’s roofline within arm’s reach of the property line. There is no place to fell anything. Every piece gets roped from above and lowered by hand, the groundmen catch it, and it walks out through a gate or down the alley to the chip truck. Where a trunk section is too heavy to swing between two houses, we bring crane support rather than gamble on somebody’s slate roof or a hundred-year-old porch column.

The alleys are their own puzzle, and we spend time on them before the first cut. Some of them a chip truck fits down and some of them it does not, and knowing which is which ahead of time is the difference between finishing in a day and coming back twice. We look at that during the walk-around, tell you where the truck will sit, and warn you if we need a neighbor’s driveway for two hours. Then the whole job goes in one visit: takedown, chipping, wood hauled off, stump ground if you booked it, yard raked out. One and done is not a slogan on a lot this size. It is the only way it makes sense to work.

Stumps get the same treatment. When a tree comes out of a yard this small, the stump it leaves is a genuine nuisance, taking up a chunk of the only lawn you have. So the grinder goes in on the same visit and takes it below grade while the crew is already there. The same standard applies everywhere we work across Allegheny County, but on an Aspinwall lot you notice the difference the next morning.

The hill above, the river below

Aspinwall sits between two things that both put pressure on its trees. Behind the last streets the Fox Chapel hillside climbs steeply, and the big timber up on that slope leans out over the properties at the bottom. When a wet spring loosens a root plate up there, gravity is already pointed at somebody’s back fence. The other direction is the river, which means wind coming down the valley hits the taller crowns with nothing between.

After a storm the calls sound alike: a limb across a porch roof, a limb hung up in a neighboring crown over a sidewalk, a split at a union in a street tree. Call (412) 526-2028 whenever it happens, day or night, and we run emergency work the same way every time. Make the dangerous part safe first, photograph the damage while it is still where it landed so your insurance has something to look at, then clear the rest on a schedule that suits you. What we do not do is leave half a tree stacked in a yard this size for a week.

Plenty of trees here do not need to come out at all. A mature street maple with sound wood, a clean union, and a decent root plate has decades left in it if somebody keeps the dead material out and reduces the weight at the tips so it stops leveraging itself against the house every time the wind comes up. That is a pruning job, and when that is the honest answer we say so and the tree stays. In a borough where the trees are half the reason people moved here, taking one down should be the last option, not the first quote.