Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette
	Workers clean the windows at the City-County Building yesterday afternoon in preparation for the start of visitation starting at noon today.

By Dennis B. Roddy
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A wedding or a festival
A mourning or a funeral
And this hath now his heart
And unto this he frames his song
-- William Wordsworth

	Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette
	Diane Torcaso of Oakland, speaks with city Department of Public Works Director Guy Costa, at left, while bringing flowers to the City County Building yesterday afternoon she said, "because Bob O'Connor passed."
	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette
	Workers "redd up" the main hall of the City-County Building yesterday in preparation for today's observances for the late Mayor Bob O'Connor.

In the long, columned hall of the City-County Building, they framed their song to a funeral yesterday. The notes flowed out in the hiss of the power spray on the granite and sandstone portico, the buzz of drills unbolting metal detectors from doorways, and the whir of polishers that spun across the marble floors on which Bob O'Connor's coffin will rest starting at noon today for his last visit.

Eight months ago, the big Redd-Up -- O'Connor loved that Scots-Irish expression Pittsburghers use to describe a cleanup -- was done for another festival. On Jan. 3 the new mayor was officially married to a job he'd courted all his life. The great hall teemed with visitors, music blared from every corner, and tables along the walls groaned with the varieties of Pittsburgh food, from Slovak to Chinese.

The late mayor hated rubbish -- anything that smacked of disorder and disrespect for the city's appearance. He once scolded a staff member when he found a spilled cup of coffee on the sidewalk outside the City-County Building. Someone was sent immediately to wash it away. Somehow it seemed inevitable that they'd clean city hall and that the man who liked to see it shine would lie in state there.

Yesterday, the faces looked tired. Mouths were taut. Cleaning for a funeral is a far cry from cleaning for a party.

"I just feel so bad," said Clint Burton, a Parks Department employee who lugged two dozen rubber-backed mats into the place. On his first trip, he had to pass through the metal detector on the Grant Street side. By his third, he was walking through a gap where one of the magnetometers had already been pulled down.

Orders for the cleanup came even before Mr. O'Connor had died. Dick Skrinjar, the lanky, gray right hand through which Mr. O'Connor often spoke, announced the plans an hour after Luke Ravenstahl was sworn in to succeed the late mayor.

"The mayor wants his city hall to look redd-up when he comes back," Mr. Skrinjar said.

Staffers leaving the building near midnight Friday exited in a mist of water jetted from a power cleaner. A crew from the Public Works Department started in the easternmost corner of the portico and swept their way across the front steps on which Mr. O'Connor took the oath in January.

"We'll have this cleared by morning," Guy Costa, the public works director who personally oversaw the outside portion of the job, said then. What Mr. Costa was thinking was hard to guess.

Mayor O'Connor died of a form of brain cancer. Mr. Costa has a slow-growing brain tumor. So far he's been winning that fight. In the small hours of yesterday, he simply watched, oversaw and directed the crews on how best to wash away the detritus of the eight months as best they could.

By midday, Mr. Costa was walking the shiny floor with a measuring wheel, taking distances.

"Ropes and stanchions," he said. Ropes and stanchions will line the hall as two lines walk past the mayor's coffin.

A crew from Goodwill Industries worked the floors to a shine, while a squad of men fairly pasted themselves to the three-story high glass windows that send a tunnel of light from Grant Street to Ross Street.

Every face looked as if its owner expected a punch in the heart.

Michelle Smith moved her floor polisher to the center and gave the thick, yellow power cord a hard whip to untangle it. From 30 feet away, it pulled out of the wall socket.

"I think I unplugged myself," she said.

Bernie Lynch, an O'Connor aide, walked in with a vase of flowers -- roses in a plain, glass container, a card "To Mayor Bob O'Connor's Family" tucked into the buds.

"Someone left these with the guard," she said. "They're not the first. We found some on the steps outside."

She carried them to the fifth-floor hallway that straddles the mayor's office and City Council offices and set them on a window sill. She noticed three rolled-up gum wrappers and picked them up.

"He wouldn't want to see this," she said.

Downstairs, Michelle Smith and the rest of the Redd-Up crew, all of them feeling a bit unplugged, made sure Bob O'Connor wouldn't have to.