Cleaning filthy alleys aids ex-prisoners

and flotsam that looked like it washed up from the river — twigs, leaves and such.

A guy appeared in the second-floor doorway behind Nicholas and yelled down, “You guys are awesome!”

This particular alley had been several weeks away from its previous cleaning, supervisor Earl Kalchthaler said, “so by the time we get back to each one, stuff really accumulates.”

When the alley had been scraped to within a half-inch of its real self and all the dumpsters were tightly secured and lined up along one side, the crew turned on the water buffalo and started power-washing one lane of the alley.

When they got to the end, they moved the dumpsters to the opposite side to powerwash the other lane.

Under the razor-sharp flow of water, the residual dirt began to slide in a straight line. It was a schmutzy brown peeling that moved in a clean line heading toward Liberty Avenue. It was kind of mesmerizing to watch that line of dirt on the move and to see the actual alley, which oddly looked kind of beautiful.

“It looks like the dirt was engraved on,” said Mike Blough, the federal case manager at Renewal, observing.

As the city came to life, in its Sunday morning way, you could almost hear the coffee pots switched on at whatever cafes were open. More cars and people began moving around. The sun was out, and a bus rumbled by on Liberty Avenue.

When the crew left Delray Street, there was no sour, fetid stink, no rotting yuk, no caked gunk. It was neat, totally devoid of even one scrap of trash, and it smelled like nothing. If you were visiting the city for the first time and judged all our alleys by that example, you would tell people back home, “Wow, we just came back from Pittsburgh and their alleys are clean enough to sit on!”