If the gypsy-cab drivers who work out of the storefront office at 2046 Wylie Avenue are hungry, they can fill up on prime rib at the Red Bull Inn. The Super 71 drive-in is a hot spot for the latest disaster movie. For something more racy, there’s the L’amoure Theater (“It’s Better Than Burlesque”). And of course a Pirates game and an Iron City beer make for a perfectly Pittsburgh pairing.

That, at least, is how the created world of August Wilson’s “Jitney,” now on Broadway, looks through the eyes of its set designer, David Gallo. The 1982 play, running through March 12 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, takes place in 1977 inside a car-service dispatch in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, the vibrant but troubled black neighborhood where most of Mr. Wilson’s plays are set. (“Jitney,” directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, is the last of Wilson’s 10-play cycle about African-American lives in the 20th century to make it to Broadway.) It’s a run-down place where the drivers sit on a worn couch to gossip and wait for fares, and where family demons between the company’s owner and his ex-con son come out to play.

Much of Mr. Gallo’s back story for the office is based on his own conversations with Wilson, who died in 2005, for the original 2000 New York production of “Jitney,” which he also designed.

“It’s a storefront that has been many things in the past: a butcher shop, a barber shop, a beauty salon,” Mr. Gallo said. “August and I spent a lot of time talking about what this place is, and what it was.”