Tree crew for Wilkinsburg’s big old canopy

Great trees, great houses, and a lot of catching up

Wilkinsburg was built rich and built well. The Victorians and the big early-1900s foursquares went up with deep porches, slate roofs and carved cornices, and the street trees went in to match. Those trees got planted with real intent, on generous tree lawns, in an era when a borough put in oaks and sycamores because it expected to still be here in a hundred years. It was right. The canopy on some of these blocks is the finest thing within ten miles of downtown.

What changed is who has been looking after it. There were decades when nobody had the budget to prune a seventy-foot oak, and trees do not pause while the money is gone. They keep growing, keep shading out their own interiors, keep pushing limbs over roofs and wires. So most of what we do here is catch-up work on trees that are structurally fine but two or three decades behind on maintenance. Deadwood out. Crown weight pulled back off the house. The one bad union cabled or the one bad limb taken before it takes the porch cornice with it. Nothing dramatic, just the care the tree should have been getting all along.

The people calling us reflect where the borough is going. Plenty are renovators who bought a shell on a good street, spent a year on the roof and the plaster, and have now looked up and realized there is a fifty-foot silver maple leaning over all of it. Others are families who have held their house here through everything and want the big backyard tree handled properly for once. Same work either way. We walk the property, tell you what actually needs doing and what does not, and give you the number up front before anything starts.

The tree on the empty lot next door

This is the Wilkinsburg call we take more than any other, and it is the one nobody else wants to explain. You live in a well-kept house. The property beside you has been vacant for years, and a volunteer tree has come up through what used to be a side yard: usually a tree of heaven, sometimes a mulberry or a wild cherry, always growing fast and always growing badly. Now it is up over your garage, into your gutters, and dropping limbs in every storm because that species never developed decent wood in the first place.

Straight answer on how this works. We can cut anything hanging across your property line back to that line, and we can take out anything rooted on ground you own, no permission needed. Going onto the vacant parcel itself takes the owner’s say-so, and depending on the lot that owner might be an out-of-state investor, a bank, the county, or the land bank. Sometimes we can reach whoever it is. Sometimes the borough is the right call because the tree is genuinely dangerous. And sometimes the honest fix is that your neighbor on the far side has the same problem, and one visit with the truck parked once handles both sides at a price that makes sense for everybody. We have done that on these streets more than once.

Side lots, back lots, and buying the ground next door

A lot of people here have picked up the empty parcel beside them, through the side-lot program or straight from the owner, and inherited fifteen years of whatever grew there unattended. That is lot clearing work, and it is a real category of what we do in this borough. Knotweed, brush, volunteer saplings crowded together into a thicket, a few genuinely large trees hidden in the middle of it, and usually the buried remains of a garage slab or a foundation nobody mentioned.

We clear it and grind the stumps so the ground is actually usable afterward, whether you are putting in a garden, a garage, parking, or just grass you can mow. What we do not do is level everything on sight. If there is a healthy oak or a decent hardwood in the middle of that mess, we say so, because a mature tree on a lot you just bought is worth keeping and no amount of new planting replaces it in your lifetime. You get told what is worth saving before the machines start, not after.

Slate roofs, cornices, and why the work goes slow here

The housing stock changes how we rig. Original slate does not forgive a dropped limb, and neither does a hundred-year-old wooden cornice or a porch column somebody just had milled to match the original. A piece of wood that would bounce off modern asphalt shingle punches straight through slate, and slate repair costs more than the tree work did. So on these houses nothing gets dropped over the structure. The climber ties in above the work, cuts short, and every piece comes down on a rigging line to a groundman. When a section is too heavy to lower safely between the house and the fence, we bring crane support instead of gambling on somebody’s roof.

Access is the other slow part. These are deep, narrow lots with the largest tree almost always in the back, reached through a gate or a shared drive. Getting equipment to it is half the day. When there is a stump to grind afterward, the grinder goes back through the same gate on the same visit, because making you book a second appointment for a thirty-minute job is not how we work. Same standard we hold anywhere in Allegheny County, applied to properties where the details matter more than usual.

Storms and the trees that were already tired

When a hard line of storms comes through, the calls out of Wilkinsburg tend to be serious ones, because the trees here are big enough that anything they drop is heavy. The failures are rarely a surprise in hindsight: a limb that had been dead three seasons, a codominant union with a crack running down it, a root plate that gave way on ground that has been holding a lot of water. Call (412) 526-2028 whenever it happens, day or night. We make the dangerous part safe first, photograph everything for your insurance while it is still where it landed, and then schedule the rest of the cleanup around you. If a tree came apart because it was genuinely finished, we will tell you plainly and talk through removal of what is left rather than patching something that will fail again next summer.