Darlene Harris' path to City Council president began in a Dumpster.

In the late 1970s, Harris and her husband, John, rented one for construction debris from a renovation of their Spring Hill home. The morning after it arrived, Harris found it full of her neighbors' trash. So she went door-to-door, telling them she expected them to pay for the next rental.

"And they did," Harris, 59, said during a recent lunch at an Italian restaurant near her fifth-floor office at the City-County Building, Downtown. Her neighbors asked her to join some of the community boards and public safety councils that were becoming the North Side's answer to decades of perceived neglect from the city's power center.

"For decades, the North Side was without political power," said Mark Fatla, executive director of the Northside Leadership Conference, a conglomeration of neighborhood groups Harris helped organize 30 years ago.

"These organizations were very active, very self-reliant. That contributes to the somewhat unique nature of the North Side's politics and approach. We don't believe that everything is solved with a call to a politician," Fatla said.

Nineteen years after winning her first elected office, Harris represents the political power her neighborhood once lacked, occupying the office that's next in line for mayor, who also happens to be a North Sider. Four of the past five Pittsburgh mayors served as council president, and three of them ascended to the office when their predecessor either died or left for higher office.

Yet, Harris says "we" when talking about Allegheny City, which ceased to exist when Pittsburgh annexed it in 1907. In these conversations, Pittsburgh is "they," the people who turned the state's fourth-largest city into a mere side of their own, and who returned periodically to plunder land and raze cherished landmarks for highways and urban planning experiments.

A map of Allegheny City hangs on her City Council office wall near an aerial, black-and-white photo showing East Allegheny and Spring Hill before bulldozers gouged a trench through the neighborhoods to create Interstate 279 North.

It's a cramped, high-ceilinged room. Papers and trinkets clutter her desk, and candy jars sit atop a nearby table. Harris, a mother of three, refills them often.

A dead cockroach lies legs up in a sealed Tupperware-like container on her windowsill. Rather than call Public Works to spray the office, she prefers catching them herself.

Directly behind her plain, black office chair, where a doctor might display diplomas, hang the framed state certifications of her two elections, in 2007 and 2011.

Cherished souvenir

Harris lives in her late grandmother's Spring Hill home, across the street from the house in which she grew up. She lost her first race, for Pittsburgh Public School board, in 1991, but won the seat two years later. Sophie Masloff, council's last female president and Pittsburgh mayor from May 1988 to January 1994, donated $100 to her first school board campaign. Harris still has the bill.

"I couldn't spend it. It was from Sophie," Harris said.

Harris served a contentious two terms on the school board, battling then-Superintendent John Thompson over curriculum changes and school closings. Voters, fed up with the bickering, gave Patrick Dowd — now a City Councilman and occasional ally — a 6.4-percentage-point victory in 2003, when she was serving as board president.

She joined City Council in 2007 and won her first term as president in 2010, with support from foes of Mayor Luke Ravenstahl. Feuding with Ravenstahl over initiatives including selling Parking Authority assets marked the term. Ravenstahl backed challenger Vince Pallus' primary campaign against her last year.

Pallus won the Democratic party endorsement, despite Harris's 10 years as a ward chairwoman. But Harris won the primary election by 105 votes, cashing in on the goodwill she builds by attending, or sending staff to, nearly every community meeting on the North Side, a throwback to her community organizing days.

"You can't fault her for a whole lot, because she comes to a lot of our meetings," said Nick Kyriazi, vice president of the East Allegheny Community Council. Despite their disagreements, Kyriazi, 59, said, "She seems genuinely interested."

Friends and foes

Harris won both her council presidencies on divided votes — 5-4 in 2010, and 6-3 this year. Her supporters this year included some of the mayor's closest allies, including the Rev. Ricky Burgess. She gave Burgess the coveted Finance and Law Committee chairmanship, which had been Bill Peduto's, who initially supported her.

Harris was the only council member to vote for her both times.

State Rep. Adam Ravenstahl, the mayor's brother, is running for re-election this year in a legislative district that overlaps Harris's. He donated $250 to Pallus last year.

"I haven't talked to her recently," Adam Ravenstahl said. "I think we have a good working relationship. Obviously, a lot of it doesn't have anything to do with myself and more about the differences between council and my brother. That's been well-publicized. But it hasn't affected Darlene and myself. We have a fine working relationship."

Pallus won the portion of the district that overlaps Ravenstahl's by 46 votes, according to county records.

"I try to get along with everyone," Harris said. Asked to explain the battles between City Council and the administration that marked her first term, she said, "It's just like a marriage. If there's no money in the house, there's always arguments."

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