North Side

And where did you go after that?

After that, I was transferred for two years to what had been my second assignment, St. Peter's on the north side.

At that time, we began our first reorganization during a time in which we went from 320 parishes to 212.

The parish the bishop put me in, I had served as assistant at for five years, but it had been a cathedral of the Diocese of Allegheny, which had been suppressed.

And the Diocese of Allegheny had become a... titular seat.

The north side was famous because that was the home of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The parish church, which was a titular cathedral, was the church that all the sports people went to.

And so as they went into the organization, that church at that time was deeply in debt, had fallen off, had less than a couple hundred people going to it regularly.

Yeah, definitely.

But even within those 90 neighborhoods, there's unofficial ones like the Four Mile Run in Greenfield or Mexican War Streets in the central north side.

And then there's Regent Square, which I think people think is a little bit bigger than it actually is.

This neighborhood, it intersects where different communities meet.

And that's why you should know them.

Well, and I think that's why the vigilante ones are also like important to know, like the War Streets.

The North Side, I think, is particularly good at doing this, like where one part of town will declare that they are now, in fact, a part of a different neighborhood.

I'm looking at Perry South mostly for this one because they put up that beautiful mosaic mural declaring themselves Perry Hilltop, but you are actually Perry South.

I was covering the Pittsburgh Steelers at the time for the Pittsburgh Press, and she had died while we were in Seattle.

And a couple days later, they had a funeral at what they called the Rooney Church, which was St. Peter's on the North Side of Pittsburgh.

The reason they called it the Rooney Church was for twofold.

One is Mr. Rooney was always seated in one of the first pews in that church on a daily basis.

And secondly, no one in the community gave more money to St. Peter's than did Art Rooney.

So his wife Kathleen dies, and the funeral was held at Devlin's Funeral Home, also on the North Side of Pittsburgh.

And just about everybody in Pittsburgh showed up for the funeral, and just about every priest, when they had the mass at St. Peter's, just about every priest showed up for the funeral.

George Young, a good friend of the Rooneys and at the time the general manager of the New York Giants, said that nobody in Pittsburgh, no Catholic, should be dying at that particular time because there wouldn't be any priest to offer the last rites.

And y'all please stick around.

Our executive producer, Mallory Falk, is gonna be here with a sponsored interview in just a second with Fulton Commons, all about their co-working space and their shared commercial kitchen over there on the North Side.

[upbeat music]

Hey, executive producer Mallory Falk here with Irwin Mendelson, the owner and co-founder of Fulton Commons.

We love to do our work there.

Describe the space for folks who haven't seen the space.

It's a 19,000-square-foot converted schoolhouse from the 1940s in a historic building in, or the largest historic district in Pittsburgh on the North Side in the Manchester neighborhood.

And what we did is we converted what had been the floor of classrooms into a shared co-working, shared office space.