Essential Pittsburgh

Finish line logistics captain Brian Schmidt is in the thick of it now. All last month he categorized and readied a behemoth assortment of race-day paraphernalia across two floors of a Strip District U-Haul facility. Today, he’s a walking ledger for pallets of road cones, fruit cups, Vaseline and mylar spread over 14 neighborhoods in dozens of tarp-covered, plywood boxes.

Jerry Kraynick bends at the waist, hands on hips, and peers over his glasses. He gestures towards a bike. “Throw it up on the stand, and I’ll look at it.”

Two part-time workers stood on either side of a T-shaped conveyer belt as 61-year-old Joe Spaniol moved down its twin trunks, trading full boxes with empty ones when its contents started to overflow.

For decades, contractors demolishing old buildings in Pittsburgh knocked them through the sub-flooring and filled in the holes with whatever was left behind. Debris, support walls, bricks and even appliances -- all topped off with dirt.

Gina Merante grabbed a banana bunch from a red wall lined with gradually ripening fruit. She shuffled past boxes of apples and red peppers and pointed outside, past the large display window at the front of her store, Linea Verde Green Market .

At nearly five city blocks long, the Pennsylvania Fruit and Auction, known to locals as the Produce Terminal, is hard to miss. It sits along Smallman Street between 16th and 20th and seems to watch over the business on Penn Avenue.

Nied’s Hotel in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood is one of a handful of bars where workers who clock out while most hit the alarm clock can still meet for coffee or a beer. Taverns that cater to third-shift workers aren’t a new concept to Pittsburgh, but over the years, their clientele has evolved.

A lot has changed over its 35 year history, but the Old Allegheny Victorian Christmas House Tour has always started on Beech Avenue at Calvary United Methodist Church.

Eric Luster grew up in a three-bedroom 1920s-era home on a quiet dead end street in Homewood. It was a self-described good childhood, but he thought he would have a better future in Atlanta, Ga., so he moved out of town to raise his five children.

A few decades ago, Terri Baltimore tagged along with a group of architecture students and their professor while they were visiting the Hill District. “And what they said about this neighborhood broke my heart,” she said. “That it was dirty.

Pittsburgh is home to many sports firsts: the Pittsburgh Pirates participated in the first Major League World Series, the city was the first to have a retractable dome stadium and the Steelers were the first to win six Super Bowls.

Earlier this month, we spoke to a handful of families from across the Pittsburgh region about the upcoming election. We checked in with them after the third and final presidential debate to hear what they were thinking as we move toward Nov. 8.

A Pittsburgh group named A Few Bad Apples has three missions. The first is to teach people the lost skills of making use of homegrown fruit.

Along the Allegheny River in an unassuming former car garage sits the 112-year-old Natrona Bottling Company . Established in 1904, the business has distributed thousands of glass bottles with their signature Red Ribbon Cherry Supreme, spicy ginger beer and mint julep.

To the left of her fridge, Zinna Scott can peer out her kitchen window on Rosewood Avenue in Homewood and see the two open, grassy lots where her neighbors once lived. It’s where she wants to build her dream house.

The Rutherfords are a family not easily pigeonholed. They live in a modest home in Bethel Park. Dad, Kurt, 46, works in the Medicaid division at UPMC. Mom, Leslie, 44, stays home to take care of the house and manage their three kids’ busy schedules.

Donna and Steve Dzurilla live in a single-story home on a quiet street in Lincoln Place. They’re just barely in the city limits, surrounded by neighboring West Mifflin. The walls of their home are lined with photos of places not far from their house, places that mean a lot to their families: the steel mills. Three black and white prints capture the furnace and a few of Homestead Works. A blue filling cabinet in the dining room came from an office at that facility where Steve’s dad worked for 35 years. His last job there was as a plate inspector. In the same room is a shadow box filled with Steve’s father’s old mill ID and glasses. “When I was in school in the ‘70s, every male member of my family worked in one mill or another – my dad, my brother and five or six uncles on both sides of the family,” he said. The couple has been together for 16 years – married for two. Steve, 55, works at a scrap processing plant and for the United Steel Workers Union where he's been a member for 21 years

In the fields and forests of Pennsylvania’s Elk County, love triangles, unrequited advances and fevered courtships have a unique soundtrack.

Sara Middleton and Catlyn Brooke both teach cross fit at the Allegheny YMCA on the North Side. They renovated the upstairs studio themselves. Middleton built the barbell racks, as well as a huge structure for pull up rings and high bars. “I fell in love with it and I got certified to teach,” Brooke said. Middleton is the Program Director of Healthy Living at the YMCA and leads a team of personal trainers. Brooke is the full-time aquatics director for the Y downtown. The two are in their mid-twenties, met a few years ago and got engaged this summer. Both grew up in pretty small towns - one outside of Pittsburgh, the other outside of Philadelphia. Middleton said she’s always been a registered Democrat, while Brooke held onto her family’s conservative political leanings a little longer. She said she didn’t vote for Obama in 2012, but that her values shifted amid college, Americorps and more community involvement. “All my friends make fun of me because I only recently switched my voter

Jasmine Cook stood in front of her house in the North Side neighborhood of California-Kirkbride. She held her 7-month-old daughter, flanked by her other two children. Her 7-year-old daughter was a self-proclaimed singer-gymnast and her 4-year-old son was a superhero with laser eyes, graciously contained by a pair of plastic red sunglasses. Running around the side yard was a miniature Batman, the boy who lives next door. “All kids around here, nothing else, just all kids,” she said. “Everybody knows each other around here. It’s a good street to live on.” Cook grew up in the South Side, raised by her dad. The 23-year-old works as a home health aide and is firm about her vote for president. “Team Hillary,” she said. Republican candidate Donald Trump is too mercurial for her tastes. “We don’t want a president that pleases everybody, right, because then you never know," Cook said. "We do need a stern president, a friendly one but also who can get down to business and not worry about what