Swissvale curb maples, taken down block by block

A grid on a slant, and the maples that came with it

The thing that makes 15218 its own kind of job is the combination. Plenty of places around Pittsburgh are steep. Plenty of others are packed tight. Swissvale is both at once, and it is laid out on a grid on top of that, which means the streets do not wander around the grade the way a hill borough’s usually do. They march straight up and down it. Stand at an intersection here and you can see four blocks of pavement dropping away in front of you like a ramp. Every log we cut on those blocks wants to go the same direction, and it is not the direction of our truck.

That single fact runs the whole day. On a flat lot a groundman rolls a heavy round of maple to the chute and that is the end of it. On a Swissvale street a loose round is a bowling ball with a whole block of parked cars set up at the far end. So we cut short, we tie off pieces that a flat-ground crew would let drop, and we stage wood uphill of where it lands rather than below it. Rigging on a slope is not harder because of the tree. It is harder because gravity gets a vote on where the tree ends up, and the answer has to be worked out before the saw runs, not after.

Then there is the curb maple situation, which is the other half of what defines this borough for us. Somebody planted maples down these tree lawns roughly a hundred years ago, and they did a thorough job of it. Whole blocks of them, evenly spaced, all the same age. For most of the last century that was a gift. One old maple here shades three houses at once and knocks ten degrees off an August afternoon on the porch. But a hundred years is a long life for a street maple squeezed into a four-foot strip between sidewalk and curb, and that population is aging out together, block by block.

What you see from the ground is the sidewalk. The roots ran the only direction they could, which was flat and sideways under concrete, and now the squares are heaved into little ramps that everybody in the neighborhood has learned to step over. What you do not see is the part that decides whether the tree stays. Old curb maples very often go hollow from the middle out. The outer wood keeps growing and the tree keeps leafing out beautifully every spring while the heartwood behind it quietly turns punky. A tree can be two thirds hollow and look completely healthy from the porch. We look for the tells instead: a seam of bark that never closed over an old pruning wound, a bulge at the base where the trunk is trying to compensate, shelf fungus at the root flare, a limb that came down in an ordinary wind for no obvious reason. Any of those and it is worth a closer look before somebody guesses wrong about it.

We are honest in both directions on this. A lot of these curb trees have another twenty years in them and only need the deadwood pulled and the crown lifted off the sidewalk and the parked cars. Nobody at Triple T sells a takedown that is not needed, and we will say so plainly if that is what we find. But when the shell is thin and there is a house on one side and a street on the other, that is a removal conversation, and putting it off through another few winters does not make it cheaper or safer.

The alleys are what make it workable. Most of these blocks have a rear lane with garages coming off it, and half our access here comes from behind rather than from the street. A back alley usually gets the chipper closer to the work than the front curb does, and it keeps the street open for the neighbors. It also comes with its own rules: those lanes are narrow, they are often the only way three or four families get their cars out, and a garage roof at the bottom of a sloped back yard sits directly in the path of anything that gets away from you. We stage so the alley stays passable and rig so the roofs stay boring.

Garage roofs are the storm call around here, incidentally. When a summer line of wind comes through and an old maple sheds a big limb, it does not usually land in the yard. It slides downhill and finds the garage. Those calls come in the same night, and we handle them the same night when they need it.

The last thing worth mentioning is that no two lots on a block are in the same shape. Swissvale has grand old doubles up near the Edgewood line with mature yards somebody has tended for forty years, and tight worker housing further down where a rental has sat empty a while and the back lot has gone to volunteer trees. Often they are next door to each other. That means the tree we are hired to work on frequently has an untended neighbor hanging over it, and we will tell you what we see even though it is not our job that day. If a dead ash on the vacant side is going to come down into the yard we just cleaned up, you should hear that from us up front.

Every removal here can finish with the grinder the same visit, which matters more on small sloped lots where a leftover stump is in the way of everything. Same crew, same insurance, same standard we hold everywhere in Allegheny County. Just performed on a street where everything rolls.