PHOTO BY ANNA FAILLA

About 40 stairs separate my front door from the street. At the bottom, my house looms overhead; at the top, I can peer down onto the roof of each passing car.

I never thought much of it. This is Pittsburgh; it’s perfectly natural that more than two stories of elevation would separate a mailbox from a doorbell.

Such terrain has, however, made Pittsburgh the hot subject in one online space: The Facebook group “Death Stairs,” a forum for sharing photos of particularly vertiginous sets of steps from the world over. The group has no home base; both moderators and members hail from around the globe. Yet the main subject in the group, which claims more than 250,000 members, has for weeks been the shocking quantity and frequent decrepitude of Pittsburgh’s stairs.

Several recent posts depict Rising Main Way in Fineview, a lung-busting stretch of 371 public stairs. A collection of “vintage Pittsburgh death stairs” photos shows steelworkers scaling Mount Washington. Landmarks — the Mattress Factory, Lawrenceville bar Remedy (with its pitch-black stairs in low lighting), Canton Avenue — have been recognized. Some members even post the ankle-testing steps leading to their own basements or cellars.

Just wait until the group hears about Pittsburgh toilets. Sometimes there are even stairs to those.

I reached out to group moderator Duffy Toler, who says the proliferation of Pittsburgh posts is the latest geographic fascination for group members.

“It was popular with San Francisco a few years ago, and the Netherlands … Also for a while people were finding abandoned stairs in the woods, so that was a thing.” Pittsburgh, however, has a particular confluence of factors that make it just right for the Death Stairs community. “Pittsburgh has a good balance of too-many-steps, stairs crumbling apart and ones that are just covered in weeds.”

I asked Toler if he’s observed an explanation for Pittsburgh’s apparent indifference to potentially deadly climbs. “My theory [is that] putting french fries in the sandwich leaves you one hand free to hold onto the railing,” he posits.

Efficient lunches aside, however, I see Pittsburgh’s many stairs as a testament to both our remarkable geography and our blue-collar history. We are a region of hills and valleys, and at no point — from the earliest settlements through the most modern developments — have we been hesitant about placing a home or business atop a nearby mountain (or at the bottom of what our Mountaineer neighbors would call a “holler”).

It’s a curious place to deposit a city — and landslides are a concern. Then again, this elevation makes for our ubiquitous breathtaking views. All those stairs between my front door and the street below let me see for miles when a clear day rolls around.

And many of those city steps are a testament to our hardworking past. After a day in the mill, a grizzled steelworker would think nothing of climbing a few dozen steps to his house — or a few hundred to his neighborhood. We’re tough — and, judging by the number of people in the Death Stairs group who report these terrifying climbs as part of their daily routine, we’re inclined to stay that way.