Don Ware left Pittsburgh in the 1960s. When he returned to the South Side of his childhood in 2001 as the Rev. Don Ware, he recognized it the way a person recognizes someone who used to dress very differently: The face is familiar but the look takes some getting used to.

On his return, he settled in the South Side Slopes and became active in the neighborhood association.

"Density, architecture, parking volume," he said. "These weren't issues in the seminary."

Mr. Ware is one of 44 people who tell their stories in an exhibit being compiled by archivists from the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area. "Seeing Pittsburgh" opens to the public Thursday as a multimedia archive of personal histories and interpretations of place by Pittsburgh-area residents from age 8 to 70-something.

The exhibit -- a book, catalog of photographs, footage of interviews, video podcasts and cellular phone tours -- will be at the Rivers of Steel's Bost Building in Homestead. Eventually, it will be used to build lesson plans for teachers.

"Seeing Pittsburgh" is the brainchild of Ron Baraff and Tiffani Emig.

Mr. Baraff oversees collections and archives, and Ms. Emig is the collections curator. He's a Pittsburgh native who returned; she's an Ohioan who came for graduate school in 2003, expecting to leave two years later, "but I loved it," she said.

For the project, they picked their own neighborhoods -- his is Beechview, hers the Central North Side -- and nine others to reflect Pittsburgh's motifs, demographics and transitions. They gave their subjects disposable cameras and asked them to document people, places and events of their lives and their neighborhoods.

Christine McCray-Bethea, a fiber artist who lives in Shadyside, chose to document the Hill District, where her parents were raised.

"They [Mr. Baraff and Ms. Emig] told me what neighborhoods needed to be photographed, and no one had taken the Hill yet," she said. "I thought it was important to take pictures of places and folks and situations because I didn't know if anyone was documenting the changing Hill. It is changing so quickly.

"I went after the topography and landscape and the buildings. There's a wonderful old house that sits across from the Legacy Apartments all by itself. I called it the 'homestead holdout.' I love that building and wanted to know the story, but by the time I got to it, the door was boarded up."

Ms. McCray-Bethea spent most of her childhood in the Far East, where her family lived after her father joined the Air Force. She came back to Pittsburgh to attend college in the 1970s.

"I had never lived in the city where I was born, and that bugged me," she said. "Pittsburgh calls you, like Bali Ha'i. It's a city with the attitude of a small town, and while some people find that backward, I find it thoroughly engaging. Some people might seek a place more global, but Pittsburgh is global."

In Beechview, Samantha Franco sells groceries and other goods from Latin America. One day in the spring, between customers, she spoke on film for "Seeing Pittsburgh" at the store called Tienda Jimenez that she and her husband, Saul Franco, own.

She grew up in Lawrenceville and after high school went to Oregon. There, she "hung out in a barrio" and became friendly with an elderly woman whose large family spoke almost no English. Back in Pittsburgh, now fluent in Spanish, she met Mr. Franco, a native of Mexico, at a dance club.

"I asked him to dance with me," she said.

Their life in Beechview, operating a store that sells Latin American products, is a union of Pittsburgh's transitions: "My father was a steel worker and my husband grew up poor in Mexico," said Ms. Franco.

The couple opened their store six years ago, and it has already outgrown two places.

The photographs she presented for "Seeing Pittsburgh" include quinceanera parties for girls when they turn 15, a tradition in Latin America, and Mexican weddings and baptisms.

"You used to be able to count Hispanics on one hand," she said.

Ms. Franco said Pittsburgh should not be surprised to see an upswing in Spanish-speaking immigrants because "they are getting paid more here than in places where employers can just go to the mini mart" and pick up a van load of workers.

"When we moved here, we saw two Latino families," she said. "After we opened the store, we started seeing more. Our customers come from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Peru, a few Europeans, a few Africans."

With bilingual children and her own mother learning Spanish to help out at the store, "my father and I are talking about taking Italian classes. He's wishing he had grown up learning Italian" from his elders.

Mr. Ware remembers a smaller world in which white kids mixed with white kids, black kids with black kids and most people didn't venture far from home.

"My parents came through the Depression and they weren't travelers," he said. "Vacation was a week at home. One time we went to Lake Erie.

"At Christmas, Mom and Dad would say, 'Here's a catalog, pick two toys.' "

As an adult, he caught glimpses of Pittsburgh's decline during visits home from New York, Baltimore and Massachusetts. The shot-and-a-beer bars began to disappear. His own religious order, the Passionists, is declining, too.

But brownfields are sprouting green buildings, and bicycles roll on the Hot Metal Bridge.

"This city is a survivor," he said.