All hail Regent Square!

In this city of 90 neighborhoods, in this county with more splits than an anarchists' convention, this neighborhood lounges over the city's eastern edge into three neighboring boroughs, and thrives.

I found myself there late Thursday afternoon because I'm determined to walk the city in all directions this year, and Tom Armstrong, of Squirrel Hill, suggested we take this journey due east to complement the five-mile stroll I'd taken from Bellevue to the Golden Triangle three weeks ago. That way we could end on South Braddock Avenue with something a two-hour, seven-mile evening walk all but demands: cold beer.

Sometimes the reward is in the journey itself, sometimes it's the destination. We reached D's SixPax & Dogz right at 5, ordered a pair of Commodore Perry pale ales from Great Lakes Brewing in Cleveland, and raised our glasses to Rust Belt solidarity.

Patrick Fallon, a resident of the Square for over three decades and Mr. Armstrong's co-worker in selling municipal bonds, came in a few minutes after us and led us through the establishment as locals and other regulars arrived. Think of a beer and it's probably in D's. In its back room, you can assemble your own unique six-pack of bottles from Belgium, the United Kingdom and about any other country with a word for "hops.''

In a sense, beer brought Fallon to Regent Square. In 1974, he was in graduate school at Pitt, having an extracurricular beverage with his professor at a campus hangout, when the guy said he'd be leaving for Germany in six weeks and needed to sell his house.

Fallon and his wife were looking. So he and his prof drove down Forbes Avenue, hung a right on Braddock, made another turn or two, and entered a house with a sagging porch. The price for the four-bedroom home was so good, they shook hands on a deal though Mr. Fallon never got higher than the first floor.

"I took his word the bedrooms were upstairs.''

His wife, Patricia, was, as you might expect, interested to hear that her husband bought their home after such careful research. The next night, after a wrong turn or two, he managed to find the place. She saw he'd done OK.

"I paid the mortgage off in about an hour and a half and we have been living here ever since.''

They have wavered. In the late 1980s, he was making good money and figured he was supposed to move his family to the North Hills and get one of those McMansions on a cul de sac.

"I tortured an army of real estate agents."

But his sons, Timothy and Dan, then in grade school, said they didn't want to leave their St. Anselm's basketball teams. Talk of moving faded and died. The boys went on to Central Catholic, then college, and are now in Manhattan and Denver, with their father swearing Dan lives in "the Regent Square of Denver,'' a description you probably don't hear much in Colorado.

As Fallon described the Square, I was struck by how his neighborhood had played within the rules to craft a commercial corridor greater than the sum of its parts.

We were sitting in Swissvale, and across South Braddock Avenue was Edgewood. That borough is dry, as is Wilkinsburg, and so there are no bars in those slices of Regent Square. But three BYOB restaurants stand blessedly across from four Swissvale bars. Patrons carry unopened bottles in brown bags from one place to the other, and owners of all the establishments benefit.

Likewise, every resident is close to Frick Park and the movie theater up the street. Fallon can give you 10 minutes on the neighborhood deli, the bakery or who's currently filling the pizza niche. He says Regent Square is not so much a neighborhood as "a feeling that encompasses all four municipalities.''

That wasn't his Belgian beer talking. He was only on his first and we left after two, with him less than 100 steps from home. By then, I was not at all surprised that the Fallons have purchased spots in nearby Homewood Cemetery.

"I'm not leaving the Square.''

I was reminded that no community is more democratic than a neighborhood. Its boundaries are whatever the residents think they are, and they shift with time. Its casual meeting places can be bars, diners, coffee shops or playgrounds, but they need to be there for a real neighborhood to form, as Regent Square has. Every Parkway exit should be so lucky.