When Brittani Murray moved to Mount Oliver in 2021, her block on Amanda Avenue boasted one single public tree. It stood in a vacant lot owned by the borough, surrounded by masses of disorderly weeds, its roots resisting confinement, cracking the concrete like Godzilla breaching the surface of the sea. Genus uncertain, in and of itself it was nothing noteworthy: not the oak famed for mightiness or the willow fraught with emotion.
Still though, it was a tree. “This was a big, beautiful tree,” Murray said. “It was our only real shade.” Residents catching buses at nearby stops with neither shelter nor seats waited it out beneath its branches, resting in chairs Murray placed there for that purpose. The tree served as backdrop for her daughter’s first- and last-day-of-school pictures.
In 2023, the borough cut it down. Murray asked the worker tasked with the chore why. They didn’t know. The tree had been the only one nearby, save a couple in private yards sticking to themselves behind fences. So Murray decided to replace it, maybe even expand upon it, by securing some sidewalk plantings.
“It feels like, as a citizen, as an owner, I should be able to make this happen,” said Murray. How hard could it be?
Two Mount Olivers and an avenue that’s also a street
Murray’s home is not far from Brownsville Road, and is located in Mount Oliver – the borough.
The borough is encircled by Pittsburgh’s Mount Oliver neighborhood, plus the city’s Arlington, South Side Slopes, Knoxville and Carrick sections.
Governmentally, the borough is an independent municipality. It was originally part of Pittsburgh proper, then did its own thing in 1892 by incorporating. The city proposed a merger in 1927, but the borough rejected the overture. The same-named city neighborhood is a piece of former St. Clair Borough.
Mount Oliver Borough has a mayor, elected council, police force, fire department and public works. Residents pay 3% income to the city, but two-thirds flows to the Pittsburgh Public Schools and the rest goes to the borough. Property tax is paid to the school district, county and borough.
When it comes to the streets that create its boundaries, like Murray’s, the sidewalks to the east are part of the borough. There it’s Amanda Avenue, proclaimed by a green sign. Step off the curb and into the street: boom, no longer in the borough. Do so in front of a car and the ambulance that picks you up will be provided by the city. Back your vehicle out of a driveway and get in a collision requiring police assistance, technically you’re in Pittsburgh but Mount Oliver has its own police so you might be on hold for a minute while they figure it out. If you make it to the other side, you’ll be on Amanda Street, rather than avenue.
‘The least of the problems’
The Amanda Street side of the line is where the last officially planted trees were. Two once grew in front of Tire and Brake Outlet, an auto repair shop and U-Haul rental agency on the Knoxville side. “The roots were pushing up against the sidewalk from under, and the city told me I was responsible for them,” said shop owner Michael Terreri. “I wasn’t the one who planted them, but I was the one who cut them down.”
For Terreri, a born and bred Mount Oliver resident who also owns TC Candy and four houses in the community, replanting is off the table. Tree maintenance, he said, is “too much.” Perhaps most important to him, though, is the perspective that they’re not important in the larger scope of the neighborhood’s needs.
“Trees are the least of the problems,” he said. “I don’t think we need to spend time on that.”
More important, he believes, are loitering and littering, which he feels “destroy this entire neighborhood.” There’s also the weeds that often overtake the vacant lot and sidewalks; the debris they hide; a vacuum truck that discharged raw sewage over a hill; broken glass; trash.
As he lists one infraction after another, sharing comprehensive photo documentation from his phone for each, he seems resigned to an absence of structural support.
“I’ve lived here my whole life, she’s new,” he said of Murray, who reached out to him when she started investigating. “I understand what she’s trying to do. From being here, I know what problems she’s gonna have trying to do it.”
‘How do I get trees?’
Historically, the borough has collaborated on planting before. In an email statement, manager Rick Hopkinson wrote, “Mt. Oliver Borough is very supportive of expanding our tree canopy where conditions allow. In 2024 and 2025, the borough partnered with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy’s TreeVitalize Program on two significant planting efforts that added approximately 35 trees along Hays Avenue, Penn Avenue, Ormsby Avenue, and within Ormsby Park.”
Wrote Hopkinson: “We would absolutely like to continue planting additional trees throughout the borough.”
In autumn 2023 after the vacant lot tree was removed, Murray started by reaching out to the city’s 311 response center, which referred her to the city website. She next turned to social media and a considerable network of contacts, making the first in a series of what she calls her “how do I get trees?” posts.
Responses overflowed with good intentions, but no solid leads. Someone mentioned Tree Pittsburgh, an environmental nonprofit dedicated to the urban forest, and she began investigating, exploring their website to figure out how to begin. In other, more timbered neighborhoods, leaves fell, snow followed, tree planting season ended. Murray, while also raising a family and working full-time for the United Steelworkers, veered to other, more manageable community projects.
When a neighbor’s son was hit by a car, she petitioned city and state officials for improved traffic signage, and got it. An abandoned house caught fire, not once, not twice, but three times, and Murray said its wreckage became the location of a few non-fatal overdoses, as well as a dangerously attractive exploration site for children. Her campaign to have it leveled eventually resulted in a walkthrough by Corey O’Connor. “Mayor was up there walking around, first time I ever saw anything like that,” Terreri noted. The grass that grows where it once stood is green and healthy.
Mount Oliver Borough by the numbers
- 3,319 residents
- 52% of residents are non-white (vs. 25% in Allegheny County)
- 0.3 square miles
- 36.1 median age (vs. 40.7 countywide)
- $52,297 median household income (vs. $81,071 countywide)
- 15% in poverty (vs. 11.8% countywide)
- 41% of housing units owner-occupied (vs. 65% countywide)
Source: American Community Survey data analyzed by Census Reporter
This summer, after seeing a post from Tree Pittsburgh which seemed to depict sidewalk planting, Murray jumped back in with both feet, reaching out again through every possible avenue. “I am yet again being the Lorax,” she said of her activity. Posts were shared, connections made, people tagged, and this July they led her to Clara Kitongo.
Kitongo began at Tree Pittsburgh in 2020. Now the tree equity manager, she addresses canopy deficiencies in underserved communities. “It’s an opportunity to be able to go deeper, create relationships,” Kitongo said.
Less than two days after their first conversation, Kitongo was on hand to meet Murray for a site visit, representatives from the city’s Forestry Division in tow, including Utility Coordination Arborist Michael Kelley.
The Forestry Division had visited not too long before. Grant funding for hazardous tree removal supported the extraction of Terreri’s stumps. “It’s a location on our radar, but we haven’t done plantings yet,” Kelley told Public Source. Both Tree Pittsburgh and the Forestry Division partner with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy’s TreeVitalize program in Allegheny County.
The group spent two hours walking, observing, brainstorming areas where trees could go and challenges with the traffic. One issue created by the lack of canopy was evident at noon as the sun of mid-July became relentless and inescapable. Murray remembered one Forestry Department representative observing, “It gets hot out here.” “Yes,” she replied.
“It’s only gonna get hotter and hotter and hotter,” she told Public Source. “The Black community deserves trees.”
Three options, none easy
The cooling effect is maybe the most obvious benefit of introducing a tree canopy into a concrete jungle. There’s plenty of others, as Kitongo will enthusiastically share. “They build a sense of community,” she said. “They speak to our love of beauty. They house birds, which bring music. People receive calm in connection to the nature around them.”
The advantages trees bring to cities are clearly documented: the Environmental Protection Agency, Arbor Day Foundation and U.S. Forest Service are just a few advocates of urban planting. That applies to “boroughs” as well. Gaining those advantages gets complicated when the street in question is both.
To officially make a tree planting request, Murray needs to become a Tree Tender by completing Tree Pittsburgh’s course. And she’ll be joining Knoxville Community Council’s Zoom meeting in September to try to connect with city homeowners who might support the initiative, maybe subsequent council meetings as well.
That networking applies to whatever action is taken next.
“They build a sense of community. They speak to our love of beauty. They house birds, which bring music. People receive calm in connection to the nature around them.”
Clara Kitongo
One possible option is exploring the tricky prospect of city-borough collaboration.
The sidewalks of Amanda Avenue are too narrow to incorporate plantings while leaving enough room for a wheelchair for Americans with Disabilities Act compliance. If Mount Oliver wanted to extend the sidewalk into a road on the boundary, they would need to have permission from the city, and the two entities would have to work in tandem.
Another option is attempting to enlist the assistance of owners of residential properties on the city side of the street, in Knoxville, where the sidewalk is already the required width. “I think a raft of tree planting applications would be ideal,” Kelley says, and approval of neighbors is necessary. “We do not plant trees where people do not ask for them.”
But Murray is an anomaly as an owner-occupant, while most other residents rent their homes. Reaching and enlisting across-the-street titleholders has so far been a snipe hunt. “They don’t live here,” said Murray. “They live in the suburbs. Or Florida.” Places with trees.
A third, and the one Murray likes best, is the reconfiguring of the street to include a median, which would additionally help with both speeding and wrong-way traffic issues. Best of all, it makes it a project of the city only.
What’s clear: Nothing will be happening this year. The fall season is already scheduled, Kelley said. As we head into fall and winter, it gives more time for education, research and support, according to Kitongo.
“It’s developing as we go,” said Kitongo. “We’re trying to bring the right groups into the conversation, getting the right people speaking.”
In months to come, Amanda Street and Amanda Avenue and every other road in the city and borough will become leafless. In the meantime, Murray will be learning, advocating, enlisting. Spring will come in time and hopefully some answers with it.
For now, shortly up the street where Amanda meets Brownsville, a breeding pair of raptors draws attention from folks waiting for buses, coming out of stores, older gentlemen shooting the shit. In front of the candy shop, a trio argues about what kind of birds they are; one man is insistent that they are hawks, explaining the difference between red-tailed and red-shouldered. They take turns soaring and screeching, one aloft and the other vigilant upon a nest the sidewalk birder says is full of babies.
It’s built on a telephone pole.
Lissa Brennan is a Pittsburgh-based writer and theater artist partial to Norfolk pines and sugar maples and can be reached at lissabrennan.lb@gmail.com.
This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.
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