Pittsburgh Neighborhood Guidebook

Part of Belt’s Neighborhood Guidebook Series, a probing look at the Steel City’s diverse locales.

Pittsburgh is made up of more than ninety different neighborhoods. And while The Pittsburgh Neighborhood Guidebook can’t detail every last one of them, it does its best, exploring the contrasts and contradictions that define the city’s neighborhoods and how they play out through the personal narratives of those who live there. Edited by Ben Gwin (Clean Time), in these pages you’ll find stories about:

- Old Lawrenceville, Garfield, and Squirrel Hill

- Swisshelm Park and Oakland in East Pittsburgh

- Crafton-Ingram, Thorn Street, and the bars of Dormont.

In over thirty poems and essays by lifetime residents, transplants, and transients, The Pittsburgh Neighborhood Guidebook offers a portrait of a city that’s constantly being hailed for its renaissance but that is still marked by the old remnants of wealth inequality, gentrification, and racism.

The newest installment in Belt’s Neighborhood Guidebook Series, The Pittsburgh Neighborhood Guidebook is a book for anyone who thinks they know Pittsburgh, or just wishes they did.

Ben Gwin is the author of the novel Clean Time: The True Story of Ronald Reagan Middleton (Burrow Press). His writing has appeared in Belt Magazine, The Normal School, Gulf Stream and others, and anthologized in The Pittsburgh Anthology (Belt Publishing) and Voices of the Rust Belt (Picador). Ben grew up in Titusville, New Jersey. He lives in Pittsburgh with his daughter, and is currently working on a nonfiction book about parenting and the opioid crisis.