Monroeville runs two kinds of tree work at once

The plans behind the shopping

Most people picture Monroeville as Route 22: the mall, the car dealerships, the hotels, the medical buildings. The tree work is mostly in the other Monroeville, the one you only see if you leave the highway. The plans that went in between the early sixties and the mid eighties climbed the wooded hills behind the corridor, and the builders left a lot of the original hardwood standing between the lots. That was a good decision at the time and it is why these streets still look the way they do. It also means a sixty year old red oak that was already mature when the foundation was poured is now leaning over a family room addition that went on in 2009.

Those leftover oaks and maples are the bulk of our residential Monroeville calls. They were forest trees before they were yard trees, which is a real distinction. A tree that grew up in a stand put its energy into height, not into the thick low branching that a field grown tree develops, so when the neighbors on either side got cleared for lawns, that tall skinny trunk was suddenly holding a crown up in open wind with no company. Some of them adapt. Some of them start dropping the upper third across a driveway every time a summer front comes through, and that is when the phone rings.

Deck and pool additions have made it more interesting. Half the homes on these streets have added something out back in the last twenty years, and the tree that was thirty feet from anything in 1975 is now eight feet from a hot tub pad. That changes the rigging completely. We do not have a clean drop zone on most of these jobs, so the wood comes down in short roped pieces and gets walked out to the chip truck at the curb. Slower, and the deck boards stay where they are.

Commercial work on your clock, not ours

The other half of Monroeville is property managers, and that job has different rules. Nobody wants a lift and a chip truck sitting in front of a tenant entrance at eleven in the morning. So our commercial tree work here mostly happens between about four and eight in the morning, or on a Sunday, with the lot coned off in sections so the rest of the parking stays open the entire time. Cones move as we move. By the time the first employees pull in, the debris is gone and the only sign we were there is a cleaner canopy.

What we get called for on those properties is fairly consistent. Parking lot island trees that were planted too close together and are now rubbing and shading each other out. Canopy over drive lanes that has dropped below truck clearance and is getting scalped by delivery trailers. Dead ash along a campus edge where a wooded property line meets a walkway, which is a liability question long before it is a landscaping one. And limbs over light poles and building entrances that an insurance walkthrough flagged. We handle all of it, document what we did, and give the manager one point of contact instead of a subcontractor chain.

When a Route 22 front comes through

Storms track along the corridor and hit these ridges hard. A line will come across the parkway, catch the high ground behind Northern Pike, and take out the tall exposed crowns first, which are exactly the forest leftovers described above. Those calls come in bunches: a limb across a driveway, a split fork hanging in a neighbor’s yard, a whole crown down across the back fence line. Call (412) 526-2028 whenever it happens, day or night. We make the dangerous part safe first, photograph everything for the insurance claim while it is still where it landed, and then clean up on a schedule that works for you rather than leaving a pile in the yard for a week.

Monroeville sits toward the eastern edge of our circle, so we tend to route several jobs here together on the same day. That is worth knowing if you are considering work: a neighbor booking with you often means both properties get done back to back. It is the same crew and same one and done promise we bring anywhere in Allegheny County, whether the work is a single backyard maple or a full round of pruning across a business campus. One visit, wood hauled, stumps ground if you want them ground, lawn raked before we pull out.