The Champion European Hornbeam of Arsenal Park

Pittsburgh's tree program reckons this hornbeam is good enough for Pennsylvania's state champion register, and has never published a number to back it up. The city's Shade Tree Commission listed it in March 2023 as a Pittsburgh Champion, the commission's own category for the largest, or one of the largest, trees of a species on public property. The Remarkable Trees program goes further: it calls this likely one of the biggest European hornbeams on city land, if not the biggest, and a possible nominee for the state list. That is the program's judgement, not a measurement anyone has released. Hornbeam is a European tree with a reputation for the hardest wood in the forest. It was turned into butchers' blocks and the cogs of mill wheels, and the old English name says as much: horn for hard, beam for tree. The trunk is smooth and grey and ripples like flexed muscle, and many of the dry brown leaves hang on through the winter. It stands in Arsenal Park in Lawrenceville, opened on 4 July 1907 on the grounds of the former Allegheny Arsenal. About twenty metres away is a bald cypress listed the same day as a Specimen Tree, so one stop by the 40th Street entrance gives you both. No age, height or girth has been published. A tape measure would settle the state question; if you bring one, tell us what it says.