Walking east up the Allegheny River trail from the closed ballpark last weekend, my masked partner and I passed the great glass wall of the Alcoa building and soon came into a stretch where we were flanked by what looked like hundreds of shoulder-high birthday candles.
I didn’t know then that Paul O’Neill had died at 84 that morning at his home in Shadyside. But we’d just walked through a bit — a tiny bit — of the great man’s legacy to his adopted city. After a brilliant career at the helm of Alcoa, and just before a brief stint as a straight-talking secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Mr. O’Neill co-founded the Riverlife Task Force that has spent the past two decades prodding Pittsburgh’s riverfronts out of their centuries-long coma.
Mr. O’Neill is no relation. I didn’t know him well. But I admired him. We spoke only a handful of times, but I don’t recall him ever dodging a question and I never left any of our conversations having to wonder what he thought.
One of the things he said, 20 years ago this June: “I think the prospect of global climate change is something that needs to be taken seriously.” By then he was already doing that in the same way, as the old saying goes, you eat an elephant: one bite a time.
Take those hundreds of shoulder-high birthday candles, which on closer inspection are plastic sheaths for hundreds of plantings. The hidden shrubs and trees that went in last fall are part of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy’s Pittsburgh Redbud Project. Its principal players credit the task force, now simply called Riverlife, with helping this project get off, or rather into, the ground.
That’s admittedly a mere footnote in Mr. O’Neill’s story, but if ever there were a spring desperate for a splash of color, it’s this one. So I called Frank Dawson, the landscape architect behind Redbud, and a member of Riverlife’s design review committee.
He began this blooming thing because on any drive across Pennsylvania after a brown winter, Mr. Dawson would look forward to the bright early, blooms of the eastern redbud popping on the hillsides. “It’s one of those things that brings you out of that gloom.” He figured the tree, native to Pennsylvania, ought to be rising all over his hometown.
Through a mutual friend with Riverlife, Mr. Dawson was introduced in 2015 to Jeffrey Bergman, the conservancy’s director of community forestry and its TreeVitalize Pittsburgh Project. The conservancy had been doing large-scale tree plantings throughout Allegheny County since 2008, but Mr. Bergman and his organization liked the idea of adding splashes of red to the Golden Triangle. With funding from Colcom Foundation, plantings began in 2016.
Since then, about 3,400 trees, a third of them redbuds, have been planted by platoons of volunteers. To use the term favored only landscapers and bureaucrats, they’re all over the Downtown viewshed. Redbuds are flowering along the riverfront trails, in Point State Park, beside a handful of city streets, and even on the sides of Mount Washington, thanks to the rappelling efforts of volunteers. (Those wishing to know more about volunteering can email trees@paconserve.org.)
Not all the plantings are redbuds because monocultures are a bad idea. City foresters ripped out a wall of Asian honeysuckle and knotweed along that Allegheny River stretch of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail last year, so volunteers could plant roughly a dozen species of trees and shrubs last fall. They’ll not only beautify, they’ll help with erosion control, animal habitat and oxygen production.
There have been minor setbacks. Beavers felled a row of young redbuds east of the Carnegie Science Center a couple of Aprils ago, leaving 16 pointed stumps. And now the demands of social distancing mean no plantings this spring. There’s still hope of a fall planting.
The pandemic has brought new appreciation for this year’s redbud bloom. “I almost tear up when I see them,” Mr. Dawson said. Mr. Bergman, who says they’ll keep featuring redbuds in plantings as long as funding lasts, believes that one day they’ll be so common that Pittsburghers will think of them “like the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C.”
Matthew Galluzzo, president of Riverlife only since September, has spent time poring over the organization’s early documents. He says Mr. O’Neill’s vision of a world-class waterfront was clear from the get-go. “We stand on the shoulders of giants,” Mr. Galluzzo said, “and none larger than Paul O’Neill.”
And now Pittsburghers need only take a walk or hop on a bike to see the riversides of Mr. O’Neill’s dreams.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill
First Published: April 26, 2020, 8:45 a.m.
