The results of last week's mayoral vote paint a fascinating portrait of Pittsburgh. It's a picture of either a city in transition or a city seriously divided.

Or, if you're an optimist, it's both: We're divided because we're in transition.

Post-election, Mike DeVanney, campaign manager for defeated Republican Mark DeSantis, noted how difficult it was to appeal both to East End progressives and to social conservatives in some South Hills neighborhoods where "every other house has a Virgin Mary statue" out front.

Although to this Protestant's ears, his quip comes a little too soon for comfort after the snide anti-Catholicism of the Duquesne University-Planned Parenthood dust-up, it rests on some tangled truths that are worth sorting through.

Those truths are part of the portrait of a "city divided/city in transition" that beckons from the ward-by-ward voting map.

Other pundits have noted that Mr. DeSantis won handily in the city's most affluent neighborhoods, but they left it at that -- as if the vast majority of Squirrel Hill and Point Breeze residents were registered Republicans.

They aren't, of course, but they weren't afraid to vote for one. Or, perhaps, to vote against something: the status quo.

At the other end of the spectrum are places like Brighton Heights, Bloomfield and South Hills communities where urban decay never got truly desperate and where, consequently, opportunities for risk-taking newcomers are less obvious.

It's safe to conjecture that many residents in these older, fairly stable neighborhoods are not particularly hungry for change. The status quo, slightly tweaked, is fine with them (if, indeed, that's what Mayor Luke Ravenstahl represents -- a big if).

Those two extremes bookend the city's fascinating transitional neighborhoods -- the ones where yards with Virgin Mary statues sit next to houses with Gaia wind chimes.

In these communities -- the Strip District, the South Side and the heart of old Allegheny City, for example -- the new urban pioneers are settling next door to salt-of-the-earth Pittsburghers who never gave up and moved away.

These transitional communities are pockets of demographic change. They are not as upscale as those in wards 7 and 14 that went overwhelmingly for Mr. DeSantis, but they're more economically vibrant and mixed than those where the tally for Democrat Ravenstahl actually matched his party's huge registration advantage.

And as you might expect, the mayoral votes in these changing neighborhoods were more evenly mixed, too.

These are broad generalizations, of course. I wouldn't want to predict the vote of, say, the little old lady who came barrelling down a city hillside in front of me last week, with a Jesus fish and a Bush/Cheney sticker on her bumper and a Virgin Mary dangling from the rearview mirror.

The divide isn't religious or even partisan. It's about the fraught emotions of economic change.

In general the places with more DeSantis votes are those with more people who do not fear change or competition. (Maybe they fear Pittsburgh not changing.)

They either have enough to know they'll survive social upheaval (think Shadyside) or they're urban pioneers (South Side, the Strip) very willing to take risks. They believe competition is a good thing, whether in the marketplace or at city hall.

That message was forcefully delivered by this newspaper in endorsing the Republican candidate in particular and the two-party system in general.

It's very possible that the city's nonpolitical elites lining up behind Mr. DeSantis actually helped Mr. Ravenstahl. What I heard in casual conversations and almost-interviews at city hall before the election was concern approaching paranoia.

Other commentators have pooh-poohed the power of the Democratic machine but can cite only primary tussles as evidence of discord. Faced with even the remote possibility of a not-ready-for-prime-time candidate losing their lock on the system, fearful foot soldiers did their work.

When I endorsed Mr. DeSantis, one angry caller, identifying herself as an 81-year-old native, hissed, "You better watch your column and write the right thing."

That attitude has been hurting Pittsburgh for decades. What the city needs are risk-takers in every neighborhood who are unafraid to think for themselves.

Like the 74-year-old South Sider who e-mailed to say she'd vote for Mr. Ravenstahl because his 311 help line worked for her. She needed change and she got it.

That's great, I replied. In a delightful exchange, she expressed the hope that the candidate "who really loves Pittsburgh" would win. I think she got her wish. I think she'd have gotten it either way.

Change is, well, inevitable. The election's biggest question was how fearlessly, or capably, we'd embrace it. That's still the big question.