Two elevations, one borough, two kinds of tree day

Down in the Bottoms, up on the bluff

Ask anybody around here where a job is and they will answer with an elevation before they give you a street. That is not a figure of speech in this borough, it is how the work actually divides. The flat along the river is its own world, and the streets that climb away from it are another one, and a crew that shows up geared for the wrong one is going to have a long afternoon.

Start on the flat. The Bottoms carried the railroad and the mills for a century, and where working ground has since gone quiet the volunteers moved in fast. Cottonwood, box elder, ailanthus, silver maple, black locust, all of it seeded itself along fence lines and back edges of parcels and behind older houses, and river-flat soil turns those species into serious timber inside of fifteen or twenty years. That is a real advantage when a property owner wants shade. It is a problem when a cottonwood that nobody planted is now sixty feet of soft wood leaning over a garage roof, because cottonwood sheds big limbs in summer storms and does it without much warning. A lot of our flat-side work is exactly that: getting volunteer growth off buildings, off fence lines and away from the parcels people are actively bringing back into use. Sometimes it is one tree. Sometimes it is a back half acre that needs real lot clearing before anybody can measure anything, and we bring the chipper and the mulcher for that.

The creek mouth deserves its own paragraph. Chartiers Creek finishes its run and hands off to the Ohio right here, and the ground where those two meet grows the biggest trees in the borough. Cottonwoods along that water get to a diameter you have to see to believe, with root plates sitting in soil that stays wet most of the year. Wet ground plus a top-heavy tree plus a good west wind is how a healthy-looking giant ends up on its side. When we get called out to something near the creek mouth we look at the base and the lean before we look at the crown, because down there the ground tells you more than the branches do.

Now climb the hill. Norwood and the Heights streets are steep and tight, the kind of blocks where houses nearly touch, the yard is a strip behind the kitchen, and the only vehicle access is a street that already has cars parked both sides. Nothing gets felled up there. Not one thing. Everything comes down on rope, piece by piece, lowered into a landing zone we pick before a saw runs, and plenty of days that landing zone is a patch of driveway the size of a dining table. The climber does the work and the ground crew catches it. It takes longer than the same tree would take anywhere flatter, and the number we hand you says so before we start rather than after. What you do not get is ruts across your neighbor’s lawn or a limb through a porch roof, and on those streets that is the entire ballgame.

The other thing about the bluff is what leaning means up there. On level ground a tree that leans is often just reaching for light. On a slope it can mean the soil under the root plate has been creeping downhill for years. Same species, same age, completely different conversation. Chris looks at the ground on hillside calls, not only the trunk, and he will tell you plainly when a tree is fine and just looks dramatic. Plenty of them are.

Then there is the borough itself, which is a lot livelier than people who have not been through lately expect. Chartiers Avenue has the Roxian pulling crowds again, storefronts are working, and there are landlords, small business owners and block groups here who take real pride in how their frontage looks. That work is straightforward and we like it: canopy lifted off signs and awnings, deadwood pulled from over the sidewalk, brush chipped as we go, walk swept clean before the doors open. Show up when you said, do what you quoted, leave it tidy. That is the whole standard, and it is the same one we hold everywhere in Allegheny County.

Storms are the wild card in a borough shaped like this. When a front comes up the Ohio, the flat takes the wind broadside and the bluff funnels it down the streets, so we get calls from both elevations within the same hour. We handle the dangerous thing first, photograph the damage for your insurance, and schedule the rest around you. And if the honest answer is that tree removal is not what you need, you will hear that too. Half the trees people call us about in a panic want a good prune and another twenty years, not a truck and a chipper.