The Tree, The Table, and The Tuesday Morning Structures Crew
by Claire Brennan, FOW Communications Coordinator
In 2018, an employee of the Cedars House Café called the café’s then-operator Mary, with what sounded like a classic “my dog ate my homework” excuse for not being able to open the popular eatery. But this time, it was real. A massive cucumber magnolia tree fell alongside the Cedars House, missing the building by mere inches.
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- Photos: John Dixon
The prize-winning tree thankfully left the historic building relatively unscathed, except for damage to the side of the Café. With the unearthing of the mighty tree’s roots, it pulled up the concrete walkway along the building, puncturing the stucco and completely blocking access to the side entrance.
Philadelphia Parks & Recreation was on the scene to remove the tree and return Cedars House to business as usual—minus one gorgeous cucumber magnolia tree.
Thanks to FOW volunteer John Dixon, we received a five-foot section of the trunk, which was then milled into slabs and sat in our field team’s HQ until this year. Now, we’re excited to share with you the new life the Cedars House cucumber magnolia tree has taken on.
Every Tuesday morning, the Structures Crew, FOW’s longest standing volunteer group, meets to repair fence posts, benches, and other park structures (hence the name). The crew is made up of volunteers with backgrounds in carpentry, construction, and even photography.
Like Joe Mikuliak, who joined the structures crew in 2014 and worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for more than thirty years across many of their departments, but mostly in photography and framing.
These volunteers bring their unique expertise, specialized tools, and love for the Wissahickon together to improve and repair the park’s standing infrastructure and even create new additions, like the live-edge benches around the Valley Green Inn, which they installed last year.
For this project, they lovingly made a picnic table from the salvaged wood of the cucumber magnolia. Over the next year, they plan to make three more to find homes throughout the park.
John, better known as JD to Structures, has been a member of the crew since 2017. John secured the salvaged wood, spearheaded the project by creating preliminary drawings for the tables, and served as project lead, working with his fellow crew to bring the sketches to life.
To transform this rustic piece of wood into a piece of park infrastructure, they filled and reinforced any cracks or divots to ensure it wouldn’t crack due to seasonal changes and pressure fluctuations, using butterfly joints.
This required chiseling the tabletop by hand and retrofitting a piece of wood to fill the hole using a band saw.
The crew also ran into the issue of creating a flat table for uneven ground, requiring some trial and error. They assembled each piece to John’s specification, adjusting on the fly to accommodate any unforeseen problems.
Finally, they oiled the bench with boiled linseed oil so it shined like new. Can you believe the only thing that the crew bought for the project was the hardware? That’s what we call sustainable DIY.
We’re grateful to collaborate with such a storied and experienced crew. They bring decades of knowledge from an array of industries to instill efficient solutions to complex problems in the park.
Keep an eye out this year for the locations of the three prize-winning benches!
Structures Crew and all our volunteer programs, like our Trail Ambassadors and Crew Leaders, are core programs that are supported by our generous membership.
If you’d like to support work like this, consider becoming a member today: fow.org/member