Alexandra Cole grew up with the perfect icebreaker to any conversation with a Western Pennsylvanian.
She was the young girl from Beaver County who dreamed up a new name for the famed six-story former Horne's tree that wraps around Penn Avenue Place in Pittsburgh's Downtown.
Gathering in front of the tree with 2,500 lights, gold garland and 2,000 ornaments to commemorate Light Up Night is a longstanding Pittsburgh holiday tradition. When people celebrated the holiday season kickoff at Light Up Night, Cole humbly told them, “Hey, I named that tree,” at Penn Avenue and Stanwix Street.
“‘Seriously?' People would ask,” she said. “Folks did not believe me.”
Little did Cole know that two decades later the name she came up with as a 9-year-old girl — Unity Tree — would become a source of frustration for some holiday revelers.
Even though the tree's name is 20 years old, many area residents sounded off on Facebook following a Tribune-Review story about the annual Light Up Night.
“It's a Christmas Tree, for Pete's Sake!” wrote one reader.
“What's a Unity Tree?” someone asked.
“Is it illegal to call it a Christmas tree?” wrote another.
“Of course it's a Christmas tree,” said Wendy Morphew, a spokeswoman for health insurer Highmark Inc., current tenant of the former Horne's building and caretaker of the electric tree. “Many people call it a Christmas tree. That's fine.”
The Unity Tree's name, in fact, has nothing to do with political correctness.
The name came from the mind of Cole, who was then Alexandra Kronstein. She thought it up as part of a 1996 regional contest that drew 700 entries from elementary school children. The challenge was to create a new theme for the tree in 25 words or less. Cole, then a fourth-grade student at Todd Lane Elementary School in Beaver County, said she was inspired by the unification of Pittsburgh's three rivers at Point State Park.
She thought about people of different religions and the concept that not everyone celebrates Christmas.
She wrote these words on her entry: “The tree would be a symbol of unity we hope to achieve as one city under God regardless of race, creed or social status.”
She named the entry: “Unity Tree.”
“I submitted the paragraph — it was pretty short,” she said. “I never thought I would win anything.”
Her words won her family a trip to Disney World in Orlando and a limo ride to Light Up Night, where she officially lit the newly named tree Nov. 22, 1996.
“When they called me into the guidance counselor's office at school, I remember thinking I was in trouble,” Cole said. “They told me I had won the contest and I would get to light the tree and go to Disney. I was jumping around and really happy.”
Her mother, Regina Kronstein, who lives in Center, Beaver County, has kept the Center Area School District (now known as Central Valley School District) announcement and write-up in a scrapbook for 20 years.
“Alexandra is an example of the quality of students in the Center Area School system ...” the announcement reads. “Congratulations to Alexandra and the entire Kronstein family. Say hello to Mickey for us!”
Cole went on to Carnegie Mellon University, where she majored in Linguistics and Russian Studies. She met her future husband, Nicholas Cole, at CMU.
“If memory serves, I told him the tree story when I first met him as well,” she said with a laugh.
The couple, now married for five years, lived in various East End neighborhoods including Oakland, Greenfield and Squirrel Hill. They relocated to Berkeley, Calif., about 18 months ago. Nicholas Cole is a fundraiser for the University of California, Berkeley. Cole is in the midst of launching her own marketing agency.
“We still love Pittsburgh, and I would love to move back to Pittsburgh someday,” she said. “We both miss Frick Park, where we used to walk our dog, Buddy. Buddy misses the snow.”
When it comes to the Unity Tree, Cole is thrilled Highmark kept the name.
“Even if there is backlash, I am so happy they haven't renamed it,” she said. “The concept is still very important, maybe even more now than it was 20 years ago. It's ironic that we have almost gone backwards as a nation in being respectful of other religions. This concept was never meant as an attack on Christmas.”
Ben Schmitt is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at 412-320-7991 or bschmitt@tribweb.com.
