South Side, Pittsburgh

PITTSBURGH’S EVOLUTION FROM “HELL WITH THE LID OFF” to America’s “most livable city” can be traced in this neighborhood across the Monongahela from the city’s downtown. The area closest to the river, called “The Flats,” was home to the industries—glass, iron, steel—that provided much of that famed heat. The factories’ employees, many of them immigrants from Eastern Europe, built small houses for themselves on the South Side’s “Slopes,” the hillside that rose above the industrial area. There is no hyperbole in that name: Some residents of the Slopes live on “paper streets,” streets that appear on maps but are in reality very steep stairways with houses on either side. Most of the mills closed by the 1980s; since then, South Side has reinvented itself as a hip place to live, shop, and dine, aided, perhaps, by the best view in town.