A college dropout moves back to the North Side from Cincinnati, takes a wife, moves in with his parents, and spends most of his time writing songs and drinking.

This happens in a brick home just across the park from my house. I'd complain about this layabout, but this occurred in the 1850s and, besides, the guy was good.

The songsmith is the original King of Pop, Stephen Foster, who wrote "Oh! Susanna," "Camptown Races," "Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair," "My Old Kentucky Home" and hundreds more.

I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't realized Mr. Foster lived just a short walk north of the Allegheny River, and that he and I walked the same streets, knew the same greenswards. Sure, I knew Foster was from Pittsburgh, but I'd always pegged him as a Lawrenceville boy. I knew that his father, William Barclay Foster, founded Lawrenceville as a Pittsburgh suburb.

But I never got the memo that the bank foreclosed on the elder Mr. Foster's Lawrenceville property in 1826, while Stephen was still in his mother's womb, nor that the Foster clan moved to the little, independent borough of Allegheny in 1832. The old man got a job as a toll collector on the canal, and even got elected mayor of Allegheny for a couple of one-year terms after it became a city in 1840. But his money troubles never ended and, like father, like son. Stephen won some fame but never fortune and died a lonely and premature death in New York City at the age of 37 in 1864.

That's all in a fascinating 1997 biography of Foster, "Doo-dah!" by Ken Emerson. I came across it in the Woods Run Library while my daughters were loading up with books and DVDs just before a recent vacation and I couldn't put it down.

Mr. Emerson shows how this river city, its steamboat culture and his family's tribulations informed Foster's immortal songs. Although he never penned a lyric about Pittsburgh, "Stephen Foster would compose so many songs about home in part because he seldom knew one for long," Mr. Emerson wrote.

Foster's legacy is complex. He often romanticizes America's slaveholding era even as he borrows from black musical traditions (a century before Elvis.) He could be at one moment sympathetic to the heartbreak of an enslaved people and at other times callous. The music's meaning can be argued into the night, but when I returned from vacation my question was simple: Where, exactly, did the man live? All the book says is "East Commons," which is now a public park that fronts Allegheny General Hospital.

I knew who to call: John Canning, a retired Mt. Lebanon High School history professor who's now a research workhorse for the Allegheny City Society, and Carol Peterson, who has written more than 1,300 house histories hereabouts and is working toward co-authoring a book on the North Side.

You know you have good (and odd) friends when they agree to meet you in front of the Allegheny YMCA on a rainy Friday morning just for the purpose of walking to what's not there anymore. Stephen Foster "would have seen houses along here, smaller than what you're looking at,'' Carol said, pointing toward North Avenue as we crossed Federal Street.

The Fosters were "an impoverished elite," still having their portraits done in the midst of their financial woes, John said. He showed me where Allegheny's mid-19th century churches would have been (although Stephen was baptized, married and had his funeral in Trinity Episcopal Church across the river, Downtown). And soon we were standing in front of a plaque for Stephen Foster, which went up in East Commons a couple of years ago.

Well, duh. Or maybe doo-duh. It had been hiding in plain sight.

"As a young man, Stephen Foster lived opposite this site on Union Avenue, and, with his family, regularly enjoyed the park," the plaque began incorrectly. This was no park in Foster's day. It was a common pasture and dump, which could be why Stephen Foster never wrote, "My Old Allegheny Home." (Nor did he start the banjo club at the Elks Club on Cedar, though Carol had me going on that one.)

Foster's songs still can rock this town. I heard Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band belt out Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More" as their first encore this past May at the Mellon Arena. Foster wrote that in 1854, less than three-quarters of a mile from my house, in a year when hundreds of locals died of cholera and unemployment was unprecedented.

"Hard Times" still suits our times. And it suits me to think of America's first great songwriter as a neighbor.