Mary Maher continues her work encouraging Democrats to vote in the upcoming presidential elections and sees the harsher end of life in Pittsburgh.
Our campaign shifted into second gear last week with the distribution of a document titled Canvassing Safety Procedures. While it's not especially alarming - never enter houses or apartments by yourself, never leave the sight of your turf buddy, keep a charged phone with you at all times - it does underline the downside of our mission. To court the alienated Democratic voter, you have to slog through some stretches of urban USA never featured in Sex and the City or Friends.
The 23rd ward falls in the not-the-worst category. "I've checked it out," one of my turf buddies said. "It's a soft crime area, drugs and prostitution. Those crimes, you know, they kind of take care of themselves. No one's likely to bother us going about our business."
I agreed. In fact, I told him, one local I'd been talking to said the area was improving, that a lot of the "soft crime" had been driven out.
"Yeah, right," he snorted. "That's what Giuliani said about Times Square."
We started about our business, marching up and down rickety wooden staircases and knocking on locked screened doors in search of Democrats or Independents to engage in conversation. On the good streets, the little houses have grills over their windows. At least half are former family homes converted to multiple minuscule flats. John H. (43, Democrat, according to my notes) was repairing his roof but descended to talk. He's a mechanic, out of work since he was laid off last year. "Don't worry, I'll be voting all right," he said grimly.
On the bad streets there are doorways jammed with bins and broken windows blocked up with mattresses. Some streets are only narrow alleys. There's a stench from rotting vegetation or worse, from the overgrown vacant lots. When no one answers the knock, we hurry on with guilty relief.
Quite a few streets are mixed, though it's hard to tell whether they're going up or down. At the end of one we found a neat little house, newly painted, with the address we'd been hunting. Just as my turf buddy was about to knock, I noticed "Republican" next to the name.
"It must be a mistake," I said.
"I guess," he replied, pointing to the sign on the windowpane under an American flag:
"Nuke Their Ass
Take Their Gas."
To be fair to our organisers, there aren't many mistakes in their documentation. Accompanying the safety procedures are the lists of some 6,000 unsuspecting registered voters: names, addresses, ages, and party affiliation. Every one of us is meant to talk to 200 of them in the next three weeks, several times if possible.
But first we have to find them. Apart from residents pursuing the above-mentioned criminal career paths, the 23rd ward accommodates thousands of ordinary families, a high proportion of old people, and a surprising number of students who can't afford better. On the third floor of a dim and grubby apartment building, we found Shannon (20, Independent).
"No, I'm not Irish," she smiled. "My parents just thought it was a pretty name."
She intended to vote and identified her issue. "I'm a student, and I'm worried about grants."
I handed her the blue leaflet with details of Bush's record on education, including the cuts that have deprived 113,000 students from Pennsylvania of grants.
Sharon is likely to leave the 23rd ward behind her. George, the elderly black man in the baseball cap, who stopped me to ask where his polling station was, has no such prospects.
He'd heard the debate on Friday night, and was disgusted that Bush could claim nearly two million jobs created last year.
"I know those jobs! They're low end, going nowhere, poor man's jobs. They're not real jobs you could feed a family on. I worked in the steel mills 27 years and then Ronald Reagan comes in and closes 'em all down. I got work after, but the pay didn't amount to nothing. Now I'm retired, I got $600 a month to live on."
Lou, who is 70 and works in the motel where we are quartered, has already given me a different view on the demise of the industry. "Tell you what killed the steel mills, greedy workers, that's what. All those jobs are in Japan or somewhere now. Can't stop that. Employers find people to do the work cheaper, of course they're going to move. I'm not against unions. Have to have them. They asked for too much, though."
But they both have a kind of stunned outrage in their voices when they talk about Pittsburgh. For two centuries, this was a prosperous city, hard-working and unpretentious. Once there was coal, right across the state, from Schuylkill County in the east - still linked to the Molly Maguires in local lore - to the western hills on the Ohio border.
Then came iron, giving Pittsburgh the nickname Iron City, and then came steel and alloys. Up to the 1980s, the city was known for its fiery night sky, reflecting the demonic glow from the blazing chimneys of the mills. We pass them now on our way into the city, silent rows of charred brick buildings.
By 6 p.m. we'd managed to track down 10 potential voters and turned into Peanuts Bar and Grill on East Ohio Street. The man with "Steamfitters Local 449" on his cap greeted us like dear and admirable friends, introducing himself and his wife, Mike and Carrie.
We dutifully rejected anything stronger than Diet Cokes - we were still in our uniform T-shirts - and I asked him about George's castigation of Ronald Reagan.
"Oh, sure," he said. "Reagan. He busted the unions. I remember a time when first thing you'd do when steel came onto the job was check that it was US-made. Any load that wasn't got sent back, we wouldn't touch it. Now, everything comes in is foreign-made steel. Everything. What'd people think was gonna happen?"