“I [used to visit] Gary Panter a lot in his Brooklyn house/studio in a remote part of [the borough],” Santoro explains, adding that he liked how the area felt nothing like New York. “So I said, ‘That’s what I want.’” Upon his return to Pittsburgh, Santoro learned that his mother was preparing to rent his grandparent’s house, so he seized the opportunity and purchased the home from his family. At the time he also began work on Cold Heat , a collaboration with cartoonist Ben Jones, and a marked departure from the subject matter covered in Storeyville .

Today, as you enter the Swissvale row house where Santoro has centered his art practice for the last eight years, there’s almost a tangible sense of calm. To say that Santoro is relaxed would be misleading; Zen-like is more apt. And his disposition is reflected in the house. The rooms are dimly lit but inviting, lamps placed like beacons throughout the first floor—illuminating a chair and end table in the living room, his sprawling work surface in the dining room. Jazz instrumentals fill the air, as does the aroma of coffee. Sequential black-and-white sketches sit in a pile at one end of his desk, while stacks of comic book boxes populate the space beneath. Above his drafting table, built-in cabinets hold books by Alan Moore, Rachel Kushner, John Haskell, Paper Rad, Jack Kerouac, and Charles M. Schulz, to name only a few. It’s a space brimming with history yet firmly rooted in the present.

Situated on a dead-end street across from the former Union Switch & Signal building, now home to a strip mall, Santoro’s row house is hidden in the relative obscurity of Swissvale. With its squat and sturdy architecture, it’s a design ubiquitous throughout the city’s postindustrial expanse—from Swissvale to Wilkinsburg, Homewood to Lawrenceville. As de facto housing for generations of the city’s mill workers and laborers, the silhouette of a row house is easily just as iconic as Pittsburgh’s Point State Park or the Duquesne Incline. So perhaps it’s only fitting that Santoro, an artist so deeply informed by home and a sense of place, works out of a row house in the neighborhood where he was raised.