The Front Porch is a love story to Swissvale, Pennsylvania, a borough in Pittsburgh, and to the people Mary Lou Tancraitor Wilson knew while growing up in the 1930s and 1940s. The title references the way neighbors learned news, checked on and in with each other, and conducted business long before the proliferation of televisions, single-line phone ownership, automobiles, and other things we now take for granted. The front porch news network was particularly active in spring, summer, and autumn as that's when folks walked the most in the northeastern United States.

The book is told in narrative, with samples of The Corny Chronicles, which was published for local GIs during World War Two (and was started by Wilson's uncle) and photos where appropriate. The Front Porch covers Swissvale history and locally famous places and landmarks as well as Wilson's experience with those places when she was a young, impressionable girl, and the book follows her life up until her marriage, the birth of her first child, and her moving out of the city to a suburb of Pittsburgh in the early 1950s.