"That's our playground, where our son is going to play," Bill Brocco tells me.

He points to a photo of a basketball court that not only lacks hoops and nets, it has no backboards. Just beyond the chain-link fence is a public swing set -- without swings.

Brocco lives in Stowe but I'm in his art gallery, Rebellious Nature, just off Penn Avenue in Garfield. It's a modest space on North Graham, in a brick building with the Jolly Roger flying out front and "Rebellious Nature" artfully drawn in bright, light blue chalk on the side of the stoop.

Brocco, 36, is a soft-spoken guy. Tall and lean with a shaved head, mustache and goatee, he wears a black T-shirt designed by his company, AnarchTee.com.

"Hood Robbin" the shirt says over an image of a corporate-looking Uncle Sam carrying a bag of money and a bow, a quiver of arrows over his shoulder. "Stealing From The Poor To Give To The Rich."

Brocco is friendly but doesn't say all that much. He lets the photos in his gallery speak for themselves. He and his wife, Christine, and a friend, Stacy Bodow, shot all the photos last month, visiting 20 neighborhoods that the G-20 folks are unlikely to see.

The visual tour starts with photos of four grand riverfront buildings that the city's movers and shakers like to show off: the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Heinz Field, the National Robotics Engineering Consortium in Lawrenceville and the new slots parlor on the Ohio. From there, all the photos are of places far from anyone who knows his way around a luxury box.

"This is all around us," Brocco says.

The photos don't bear captions, but nobody has to look very hard in Western Pennsylvania to find their like:

• A string of five two-story homes with porches. It has the look of a street that was once solidly middle-class, but now four of the five houses have for-sale signs and three haven't seen a painter in decades.

• A row of boarded-up storefronts. I guessed correctly that it was Eighth Avenue in Homestead, but it could have been any number of places in the Mon Valley.

• Weeds and spare tires taking over a vacant space, with a tall abandoned building behind it. A verdant hillside is in the distance.

Staring at that one, I said it looked like a building not a half-mile from my own, prosperous North Side neighborhood.

"Yeah," Brocco said.

"Is it?" I asked.

"Nope," he said.

That's the point of going without captions. There are so many abandoned buildings in metropolitan Pittsburgh, it could be any one of dozens or even a hundred places.

I'm an inveterate optimist about Pittsburgh, but it's good to be reminded now and again how far we have to go, how much is left to do. I was reminded recently of how oblivious some are to America's class divisions when I read this from Michael Novak in the National Review:

"The great class division in American life is no longer between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (since there is no longer any proletariat, only one huge middle class.) It is now between the highly educated elite and the ordinary people of family and neighborhood and common work."

Well, no, Mr. Novak.

We may not use words like bourgeoisie or proletariat much because they have an archaic, moldy, or Marxist feel. But Mr. Novak writes as if nobody has ever emptied his office wastebasket or cleaned his toilet, and who does he think washes the dishes when he dines out?

It would be nice if every American were safely in the middle class, forever and ever amen, but these are precarious times. The stock market is up but paychecks are down. You'd have to have a very short memory in Pittsburgh to believe that the people who run the world have ordinary people uppermost in their minds.

Another AnarchTee shirt quotes Jay Gould, the 19th-century robber baron whose son George had the bad idea of the Wabash Tunnel through Mount Washington, a bigger flop than the Edsel. Surrounding a portrait of the elder Gould is his infamous quote:

"I Can Hire One Half of the Working Class ... To Kill the Other Half."

It should be noted that AnarchTee is an equal-opportunity offender. Take the T-shirt with a laughing President Barack Obama.

"Thanks For The Vote," it says above the president's head. Below that, "Here's Your Change," as the president drops a handful of coins.

Brocco is a struggling small business owner, not an anarchist, but you don't have to be an anarchist to have a healthy wariness of global finance.