The SouthSide Works Gallery Made From Old Mill Patterns Is Open Through the Holidays

Cory Bonnet bought his first big collection of steel-industry foundry patterns without seeing it. A scrap metal dealer named Chip Barletto told him about a barn in Youngstown, Ohio, full of old industrial material. The seller wanted to sell all of it or none of it. "To buy it, it was an all-or-nothing situation, and I said yes, sight unseen," Bonnet told Rivers of Steel.

The collection filled ten 26-foot box trucks with patterns, blueprints and drawings. The heaviest pieces were stored on the barn's upper level. Today some of the art that came out of that barn is on the walls at 2708 Sidney Street in SouthSide Works. That address sits on the same ground where a steel mill once ran. The collective that runs the space, Patterns of Meaning, opened The Shop in May and has announced it will stay through the end of 2026. That leaves the rest of November and all of December.

A foundry pattern starts the casting process

Most people in the Flats have walked past mill relics without knowing what made the parts. A foundry pattern is the first step in casting a part. Rivers of Steel describes the process this way:

1. A pattern maker carved a wooden form in the exact shape of the part.
2. Workers pressed the form into sand, then lifted it out, leaving a hollow the same shape.
3. Molten iron or steel was poured into that hollow.
4. Once the casting cooled, it was machined and fitted with other parts.
5. The finished parts ran boiler rooms, power stations, rolling mills and transportation equipment.

So every gear housing and lever in a working mill started as a piece of hand-shaped wood. Bonnet said in the same Rivers of Steel profile that many were made without electricity: "The processes to create one part that then fits into the larger scheme and mechanism just to power the steel mills that built everything, it almost seems impossible what past generations built from nothing."

The collective's own description says its work pairs original foundry patterns from the late 1800s and early 1900s with the blueprints that went with them. The artists reinterpret those pieces through new paintings and sculpture. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in 2021 that the Youngstown haul alone held more than 6,000 patterns and templates.

The second collection had no elevator

The barn collection has an unknown source. The second collection has a known one. It came from U.S. Steel's National Tube Works in McKeesport, and its patterns were used to build and maintain that mill. The Regional Industrial Development Corporation had been storing the collection. RIDC worked with Rivers of Steel and the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office to decide which pieces were historically significant.

Ron Baraff, Rivers of Steel's director of historic resources and facilities, chose select patterns for the organization's archives. He then alerted Bonnet to the chance to save the rest. Bonnet described the warehouse to Rivers of Steel. "Everything was stored on the third, fourth, and fifth floors, and there was no power, no windows, no elevator. They walked us in and said, 'Can you get this stuff out?'" When Rivers of Steel published its profile in January 2024, a Rivers of Steel mini-grant was helping pay to move the collection to the group's studio at the Energy Innovation Center for storage and cataloguing. Baraff said the goal for the McKeesport patterns was to teach the public about the pattern makers and foundry workers of southwestern Pennsylvania.

The Energy Innovation Center remains the collective's base and has a permanent display of the work. The Sidney Street space is the temporary one, which is why the end-of-year date matters.

Why this block fits the work

SouthSide Works calls itself the former J&L Steel Works site on its own About page. The Shop's page goes further and says the gallery stands "directly on the historic site of a former LTV Steel mill." LTV is the company that later took over J&L. A Carnegie Mellon brownfields case study dates steelmaking on the property to 1893. It also records that Pittsburgh's Urban Redevelopment Authority bought the site in 1993.

So the ground at 27th and Sidney held a mill for roughly a century before it became the shops, offices and Town Square that people in the Flats know today. Many of the parts that kept mills like that one running were cast from wooden forms like the ones this collective now paints and sculpts. At 2708 Sidney Street, work made from those forms hangs on the land that mill occupied.

What's inside through December

The Shop is a gallery and a working studio. Its October 5 announcement says Bonnet and Mia Tarducci paint on site. New pieces keep going up, some finished and some still in progress, so the walls look different from one visit to the next.

The collective's artistic team lists Bonnet with Andrew Jowdy Collins, Brian Engel, Nate Lucas, Angela Tumolo Neira and Tarducci. When the space opened, NEXTpittsburgh's gallery roundup also listed guest artists Jason Boone, Colin Carrier, Paige Henry, Ed Parish Jr., TJ Porfeli, Louis Venturelli and Sophie Zeman-Hale. Rivers of Steel's earlier profile described the team working in glass, wood, sculpture, oil paint and ceramics. In one piece, Bonnet gilded and lit the inside of a hinged mold so it glows like molten steel in a ladle.

Everything in The Shop is for sale. The collective says it stocks large paintings, ceramics, small framed works and prints. That range covers both a statement piece for a rowhouse wall and a small gift.

• Address: 2708 Sidney Street, SouthSide Works
• Hours: Thursday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
• Off-hours visits: You can arrange one through the collective's contact page.
• Events: The collective's events page says new events are coming soon. Its last listed gatherings were an artist talk on June 13 and a happy hour on June 18.

Holiday hours often change, so check the Shop page before planning a visit around the last weeks of December.

Pairing a visit with the 27th and Sidney calendar

The Shop is a short walk from Town Square, where SouthSide Works holds its seasonal events. Several dates this season fall inside the gallery's hours.

So far SouthSide Works has posted only the date, time and place for each of these. Programming details for the 2026 Holiday Glow and the market's vendor list have not been announced.

Coffee is close by too. Opa Fé Bakery held its grand opening on October 22 at 2720 Sidney St., according to NEXTpittsburgh. That puts it on the same block as the gallery. We wrote about how the neighborhood's mornings have been shifting toward this end of the Flats in our South Side Flats coffee map. For more on the blocks around SouthSide Works, see the South Side Flats neighborhood page.

Many South Side homes still have the hand-built details that came from the steel era: original trim, stair rails and brick. Whether to keep, restore or replace them affects both how a house feels and what it's worth. If you'd like a straight answer on what your home's details add to its value, Michele Leone is glad to walk through it with you, and you can start with an instant home valuation.