Explore Pittsburgh neighborhoods with this handy guide

When you graduate (hopefully four years from now), if some colleague in the tiny cubicle… When you graduate (hopefully four years from now), if some colleague in the tiny cubicle next to yours asks you what Pittsburgh is like, chances are your answer will somehow involve the word “neighborhood.”

With 88 separate and distinct neighborhoods, Pittsburgh falls into an entirely different category than other big East Coast cities. Whereas Philly’s grid pattern blurs neighborhood borders together and much of New York features the neighborhood-inside-another-neighborhood construction, the urban landscape surrounding Pitt’s campus is best characterized by severance.

Just ask any native Pittsburgher how to get from one place to another. It’s likely he’ll forget that most directions involve street names and instead revert to something like, “Oh, you know, just head over to Squirrel Hill, turn down through Oakland, past the Hill District, until you hit Downtown.”

The neighborhoods are such an integral part of the population at large that many locals who live in these enclaves end up personifying their native haunts. Just check out all the Italian pizza shop owners on Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield. Or the elderly Jewish man with the Whitman-esque beard who sits outside The Coffee Tree greeting passers-by on Forbes Avenue more days than not. Over the years they have built up a fierce amount of local loyalty to their home turfs that influence the characters of their communities.

So whatever you do, don’t spend a second cooped up in your congested dorm room when you could be out on a gallery crawl in Lawrenceville, discovering your own hip coffee shop in Squirrel Hill or dancing it up in the Strip District. Grab your Pitt ID and see what the ‘Burgh has to offer!