Before television and air conditioning, before cell phones and computers, before we needed to take our problems to "therapists," go online to "meet" people, or learn "techniques" for relaxation, there was the stoop.

And after all those things, the stoop remains: a simple series of steps -- wooden, marble, concrete or brick -- that, while decidedly low-tech, while never intended to do anything more than get you up to the front door of your rowhouse, have become both multi-purpose tool and social phenomenon.

Haircut? The steps are perfect for that. The cutter takes the top one, the cuttee sits two down and the trimmings are gone with the wind. Escaping the heat? Just plant your rump on a cool slab of marble and enjoy the breeze. People-watching? Meditating? In search of friendly conversation?

The steps, in Baltimore, are the place -- to commiserate, pontificate, socialize, philosophize, reminisce, daydream, get high, pray, gossip, cool off, stand guard, unwind, pitch woo, play ball, do hair, talk trash, or do nothing at all.

Some might suspect step-sitting to be a lost art -- a victim of air conditioning and television, a casualty of an era in which leisure time seems to be vanishing and fear of violence growing.

They obviously don't get around much.

Every night, in dozens of Baltimore neighborhoods, thousands of residents leave their houses, but not their homes. They go out the door and down a step or two, and they are where they want to be. There may be bullets flying. There may be virus-carrying mosquitoes looking for a meal. There may even be something good on TV.

But they choose the steps.

It's not practiced everywhere. In the ritziest rowhouse neighborhoods, step-sitters -- steps, not stoops, is the preferred terminology in Baltimore -- are a rare sight. In some, like Federal Hill and Canton, newer residents have turned to rooftop decks, where -- as opposed to seeing life at street level -- they can, in relative seclusion, enjoy a panoramic Inner Harbor view.

But steps are different. Steps jut right out into the sidewalk. Steps don't just allow social interaction, they encourage it. Come as you are. No appointment necessary. Take a load off. Sit a spell.

Tuesday, 7 p.m.

Pigtown

There's the 15-year-old hooker. Over there's the six-months-pregnant hooker. Down there's the hooker that once got picked up by a stretch limousine with California license plates and tinted windows.

And look at that sunset.

Karen Conley can see it all from the front steps of her Formstone-covered rowhouse near Washington Boulevard and Bayard Street, where she sits every night except the three she goes to church.

Her west-facing brick steps look out over Carroll Park, and her home is just a few doors down from a corner that -- nearly around the clock -- is dotted with prostitutes.

She wishes she could help them, and wonders how.

"I've given them water and cigarettes when they go by. I've talked to them and hugged them and tried to let them know somebody cared about them." But their drug addictions, she says, keep them trapped in the life. "Drugs are just literally eating up people."

A 42-year-old factory worker, Karen sees the hookers when she leaves for work at 5:30 a.m. She sees them when -- after eight hours of putting tops on glass vials and putting them in boxes, thousands a day -- she comes home in the afternoon. And she sees them, and much more, when, after serving her family dinner, she takes -- as she has since childhood -- to her front steps. There, she watches her 10-year-old son play, chats with neighbors, ponders life, talks to God and gets an eyeful.

"No matter what it is," she says, "you stay here long enough and you'll see it."

Compared with some other parts of the city, the steps of Pigtown teem with life, a reflection partly of income level, partly of mindset.

In Pigtown, where many homes lack air conditioning, you can see entire families sitting out, often on steps accessorized with lawn chairs, the occasional piece of upholstered furniture, even plastic kiddie pools. You can see people sitting on steps outside to watch TVs that are inside.

But escaping the heat that builds up in brick rowhouses is not the sole, or even primary, objective of step-sitters anymore. Karen, who has lived in the house on Bayard Street since 1991, has window air-conditioning units. She doesn't sit out to cool off. She sits out to sit out.

"I just can't stand sitting in the house," she says. "Wintertime is bad enough. As soon as it gets warm enough, I sit out. A lot of people are too scared to come out anymore, but you can't live your life in your house."

Indoors may be safer -- "Hit the floor!" her 10-year-old son, C.J., says when gunshots are heard, something she thinks he learned from TV -- but indoors, in Karen's view, is not where life is happening.

On the steps, you can be out in the world, but still at home -- perched, as it were, on the edge of your nest, seconds away from safety.

In some neighborhoods, that's not enough.

At the end of April, on the city's east side, 2-year-old Carlos Woods was hit in the back of the head by gunfire while on the front steps of his home. In July, on the city's west side, 10-year-old Tevin Montrel Davis was struck in the neck by a stray bullet as he sat on his front steps with his father. At least four more people were shot this summer while sitting on the steps of others -- by people allegedly trying to reclaim their own steps.

In Pigtown, many residents go inside once the sun goes down. They, like Karen, recall the summer night when one of their neighbors, Denise Ann Cooke, a 44-year-old mother of two, was shot and killed around the corner on Washington Boulevard when she couldn't come up with more than 52 cents for a robber.

Even seven years later, they all remember the amount: "Fifty-two cents!" they repeat.

Karen keeps a close eye on C.J., who is not allowed to stray more than a block or so from home. If he's not in sight, she goes around the corner to check on him every few minutes. When he takes off for a lap around the block on his scooter, Karen shouts, "I expect you to be alive when you come back."

One of eight children, Karen grew up not far from here, on West Lombard Street. Her "old man" -- they've been together 12 years -- is not as serious a step-sitter as she is.

"He's shy. He might say, 'Hi,' but he's not gonna talk to you," says Karen. "I talk to anybody."

Once in a while, she will join a neighbor on their steps. But Karen, who also has a 19-year-old daughter, generally stays on her own brick, cement-patched steps, close to home and, as much as possible, off Washington Boulevard.

"A woman can't walk down that street without somebody pulling up. I walked to that gas station there for cigarettes [less than a block away] and it happened to me. And you see how much I weigh. I don't look like no prostitute," she says.

"It's not that this neighborhood is evil -- there are good people here, hanging together. It's the world. It's all over. There aren't any morals left. It's all about drugs and money and sex."

Children pass by on in-line skates, dribbling basketballs, and on bicycles. She is sitting on the top step, the fourth. Her son is on the first. The sun casts a deepening pink glow on the clouds, and an ice-cream truck turns the corner onto her block, playing its jingle.

Karen spots another hooker. "I've never talked to that one. I tried, but it's like her mind is burnt. I don't think she can make conversation."

She looks back at the clouds.

"Look at that sky now. That's bright red, ain't it?"

Friday, 5 p.m.

Little Italy

With a striped purple cushion wedged between himself and the marble, Joseph "Buddy" Votta, 81, sits on the steps of the house in which he was born.

"I remember when my father put these in," he says of the steps. "Before that, we had wooden steps, and you had to paint them every two or three years. This is marble from Italy. That's what he said it was, so I'm just surmising it's from there."

Actually, almost all of the marble for Baltimore's rowhouses came from area quarries, which is why marble steps -- seen as a sign of distinction and success -- ended up on so many rowhouse fronts.

"In the old days, they'd be out here every Saturday scrubbing these steps," Buddy says. "I used to clean 'em, but I can't do nothing anymore. I'm shot. I had a three-way bypass. If it was polished up, though, it would be beautiful."

Buddy sits on his steps in the afternoon -- shaded by then -- and at night, usually until around 9, "unless there's a ball game on TV." His wife, Fran, joins him unless it is too hot, as it was most of this summer.

"You got to take what they give you," he says. "That's life. Ain't nothing you can do about it."

Buddy points to the window above the wooden bench next to his steps. There is a bullet hole in it. One morning this summer, Buddy opened the drapes in his "parlor" and saw it. He called the police. And the glass company.

"People got no respect today," Buddy says. "It ain't like the old days. Oh, it was beautiful back then. Used to be everybody would sit out, but that's changed. A lot of people are gone."

That -- the old days -- is a common theme on the rowhouse steps of Little Italy.

"No one sits out on the steps on my block anymore," says Frances Caliri, 82, who lives around the corner from Votta, on Trinity Street. "It's lonely."

Rather than sit by herself, she walks a couple of blocks and sits with friends.

This time, she's approached by a tourist, seeking advice: "What's the best Italian restaurant?"

She recommends Caesar's Den and points it out, then watches as the couple go elsewhere. "See," she says, "they never go where you tell them. I don't know why they ask."

Buddy gets that question a lot, too, living across from one of Little Italy's new parking garages on Exeter Street. He remembers when a yeast factory was there.

Buddy went to school at St. Leo's, the Catholic church and school down the street. He is still an usher there on Sundays. He went to work for the railroad, and got married 51 years ago.

"I'm Italian, my wife is Polish. All the Italian guys used to go after the Polish girls, and all the Polish guys went after the Italian girls. Don't ask me why."

A tiny American flag is taped to the mailbox on the front of his house, which he had covered with Formstone in the 1950s.

"This Formstone is wonderful," he says. "Otherwise you have to paint it every few years." He points to some houses on the other side of the street, where the Formstone has been removed to expose the original brick. "How they could do that is beyond me."

Buddy no longer drives, no longer goes to Orioles games. "I'm over the hill, you understand." Every morning, he walks down to Iggy's Sandwich King, where he drinks coffee, plays Keno and gabs with buddies. Mostly, though, he stays on his steps.

"I stay put right here. I have seniority on this block. I've been here all my life. I'm not going to leave. I'll sit here til I die."

Monday, 6:30 p.m.

Mondawmin

On a block peppered with boarded-up homes -- a block dominated by drug dealers until the women, mostly single moms, took it back -- the side-by-side steps of neighbors Anita Williams and Ruth Logan serve as living room, dining room, playroom, counseling office, hair salon, child-care center, unofficial neighborhood watch headquarters and social club.

Drop by and you might spot four generations sitting on the front steps and in lawn chairs that Anita and Ruth put on the sidewalk in between their homes on Parkwood Avenue -- from as old as great-grandmothers to as young as Anita's two foster children, 8-month-old twins she calls "Ping" and "Pong."

"All my nights off, I sit out here and chill," says Anita, a nurse technician who, with her own three children all nearly grown, took in the foster twins several months ago.

When she and Ruth, a school-bus aide, moved to the street -- Anita two years ago, Ruth three -- sitting out front seemed out of the question.

The block was rife with drug dealers. "You would come home and find them on your front steps," says Theresa Carter, who lives four doors down.

"Everybody was afraid, especially the elderly people. They would not come out, and you couldn't blame them."

It was Theresa who insisted that the only way to have a block on which one would feel comfortable sitting on their front steps was to sit on the front steps.

"As long as we stayed inside, nothing was going to change. It's scary, but you gotta do what you gotta do. We had to take back our fronts."

She enlisted Anita and Ruth in the effort.

"We would cook up some chicken wings, put a table out there and just eat and look at them.

"Just the fact that you're there helps. They know you live there, and they're not going to make too much noise because they don't want you to call the police on them."

Between the watchful eyes of the single moms and an increased police presence on the block, it worked. The drug dealers moved elsewhere.

Now, under the tree in front of Anita's house, where dealers and customers used to gather for the shade, there is a brightly colored flower garden that Anita tends every morning, even though everything in it is plastic.

"I clean my fake garden every day -- get out all the cigarette butts and trash," she says.

Now, on a good night, the only things disturbing the peace and quiet are Anita, Ruth and Theresa.

All three were out on the steps by 5 p.m. By 7 p.m., Theresa was cooking chicken, and the other women were bugging her about when it would be done. Ping and Pong, both in walkers, played tug of war with a fly swatter.

The other women say they worry that Anita seems to be getting too attached to them. As foster children, they remind her, they could be removed any time.

By 10 p.m., Ping and Pong were put to bed, but the single moms stayed up on this good night, talking and laughing on the steps until 4 a.m.

Tuesday, 8 p.m.

Pigtown

Three doors down from her house, Karen is leaning on the railing of a neighbor -- a woman who is afraid to sit out much anymore.

"You gotta be scared," the neighbor says. Not long ago, walking to the store, a man stuck what she thought was a gun to her side and asked for her money. It turned out to be a hairbrush.

"Most people living here want to get out," Karen says of the neighborhood, said to have gotten its name because pigs ran through its streets on their way to the slaughterhouse from the stockyards. Legend has it that residents would reach out their cellar windows and snag pigs for dinner.

Now its streets are better known for another commodity.

On their steps, Karen and her neighbors talk about the prostitution problem, the drug problem, about Pigtown's lack of clout, about how nothing gets fixed and the police and mayor don't seem to care.

Somehow, the conversation moves from the mayor to Martha Stewart.

"I never did trust her," Karen says. "She does the crafts. She does the cooking. She gets on my nerves. One day she was doing four kinds of baking. Four kinds! I went out and bought one of those plaques for my house that says 'Martha Stewart doesn't live here.' "

Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights, Karen goes to her church. "Friday is pizza night at the church; you get a slice." It's called the Power House, just around the corner on James Street. The congregation is painting a mural on the side of a corner rowhouse across the street -- of God's hands, holding the world.

Karen quit school in the 12th grade to get her factory job. At the time, the money it offered -- $2.30 an hour -- was just too tempting, and it made school seem unnecessary.

She regrets the choice now. Her hands and legs get swollen and achy. "My thumbs get to hurting real bad," she says just as a prostitute passes in front of her brick steps."

"Hello, girl," she says.

"Hey," the woman responds.

"Howya feeling?"

"Fine."

Karen shakes her head when she has passed. "She's only 19," she whispers. Sometimes, she says, "the girls" will stay out for two days straight. "They take ... this stuff called meth."

Karen says she learned about it on Cops, which she watches on Saturday night.

She has smoked since 12, doesn't drink and never tried drugs. Yet she empathizes with those who have become hooked: "Until you actually walk in somebody's shoes, you have no idea."

She has done some volunteer work at the YANA (You Are Never Alone) project on West Pratt Street, which provides counseling and outreach services to women trapped in prostitution, but she gets the feeling she should do something more.

"I'm feeling like I should pack some sandwiches and bring them out to them at night. I don't feel like there's nothing I can do to help them. I don't have no money. ... Maybe some peanut butter sandwiches."

On the other hand, she says, maybe she should keep minding her own business.

"I go to work. I come home. I worry about my own stuff. I may talk to the girls, or give them a drink -- I always let them keep the cup -- but I don't try to get into their business."

Karen got up -- as any step-sitter working without a cushion must periodically do -- and leaned on a yellow Cadillac parked on the street. "You have to get up and move around," she said. "You can only sit there for so long." The moon was out when she returned to the steps. Her son was inside. The neighbors were gone. It was time for her to think about the things she thinks about when she's alone on her steps.

"I look up in the sky and I talk to God. I watch the girls. I watch the neighborhood. Sometimes it's very peaceful. Sometimes I get scared."

Wednesday, 3:30 p.m.

Little Italy

It's another scorcher today, and the glass man still hasn't come to fix Buddy's bullet hole. Hold your hand up to it and you can feel the cold air rushing out. The bullet flew right over the plastic flowers in the front window, through the room and is still lodged in his parlor wall. The police weren't much interested in it.

Buddy is on his steps, sitting with his daughter, Debbie, who lives across the street, when "Toodie" pulls up.

Toodie, whose real name is Mike Geppi, doesn't park his car, just leaves it running, with the flashers on, at the intersection. Leaning on Buddy's railing, he talks for 30 minutes, maybe an hour. Nobody's looking at their watches.

Toodie runs a print shop on High Street. Buddy sees him every morning at Iggy's Sandwich King, where they and others "drink coffee and talk bull," Buddy says.

Toodie, brother of Steve Geppi, part owner of the Orioles and publisher of Baltimore magazine, grew up in Little Italy, but now lives in Dundalk. He'll often stop at Buddy's steps on the way home.

Buddy remembers Toodie being a little boy almost as well as Toodie remembers it himself.

"I'm 57 now," Toodie says. "He's about 157," he says of Buddy. "I think he was a waiter at the Last Supper."

Toodie remembers how he used to run errands for Buddy and the other railroad workers, and how he used to play with other children at a lumberyard.

"It was MacLea's lumber. We called it MacLeasville. We played cowboys and would ride sticks of wood like ponies. We just played between the stacks, hiding and capturing each other. We just couldn't have had more fun. I would never grow up in another neighborhood."

Now, it's a different world, and even Little Italy -- as crime reports and Buddy's window attest -- has its troubles.

Buddy recalls how, in the old days, law-abiding citizens would toss troublemakers into the harbor as punishment. Things were in control. Now criminals seem to be running rampant. "And then, when you wanna shoot them, the police want to lock you up!" Buddy says. "None of it makes any sense."

A car pulls up and the driver asks for directions to Amici's restaurant. Toodie provides them.

Another car drives by, a black Cadillac, and the driver informs Buddy that a certain horse scratched.

Buddy and Toodie talk more about the old days, about the old nicknames -- remember Johnny Plucko? -- and how Toodie got his own. For a long time, he thought it came from always being first in line for the Tutti Frutti ice-cream truck, but actually it came from a relative.

They talk about neighborhood characters, cell phones and how annoying they are, and the new grocery store that has opened down the street -- Whole Foods. Buddy tried one of their sandwiches.

He's pretty sure it had "dandelions or something" on it, and it didn't have enough "damn meat to be charging $6 for it."

That leads to a discussion of great sandwiches, the importance of stacking as opposed to folding meat, and the verdict that Miss Ninni's veal cutlet sandwich -- made at a corner bar run by Ray and Marie Ninni, now both deceased -- was the greatest of all.

Toodie says he has to go, and about 15 minutes later, he actually does, leaving Buddy's steps a lonelier place.

In slippers, black socks, a white T-shirt and blue shorts, he sits silently.

"We need some rain," he finally says. "We really need some rain."

Tuesday, 5:30 p.m.

Mondawmin

Ruth's out on her steps, but she doesn't know where Anita is. She clips her hedge, checks her rat poison, and sweeps the sidewalk before Anita pulls up in a car with her sister.

Anita gets out, opens a rear door, and pulls out a half-bushel of crabs.

"Go get some newspaper," she tells Ruth.

Anita walks down the street to Theresa Carter's house, retrieves Ping and Pong and, one under each arm, walks back, handing them to her sister.

She goes inside -- her house has central air conditioning but she says she can't afford to use it -- and comes out with a card table. As she sets it up, Ruth comes out of her house with the newspaper, stepping around her 23-year-old daughter, who is on the steps braiding the hair of her daughter.

As Anita spreads the newspaper on the table, Ruth realizes that the hair gel her daughter is using is attracting bees. "Uh-oh," she says to her son, Sean, 11, "go get the fly swatter."

Anita goes back inside. She brings out strawberry soda, corn-on-the-cob, and chicken and noodles for Ping and Pong.

Her sister, Agnes Diallo, twists the top off the soda and it sprays -- on Agnes, Anita, the babies, and the babies' food.

"Now they got strawberry chicken alfredo," Anita says.

The soda attracts more bees and wasps.

As they eat and swat, the subject of mosquitoes comes up, and West Nile virus.

"A man down the street got it this year, and there was one on the other side of us who got it last year," Anita says. "It's because we're so near the lake."

Theresa says she's more concerned with rats than bugs.

"We've got rats around here like this," she says, holding her hands a foot apart. "They outweigh the cats. They're like young kangaroos."

Together, the women have experimented with different brands of rat poison, she says. They've tried mixing them, even sprinkling raw meat with them and stuffing it in rat holes.

Theresa has lived on the block for 41 years -- 34 years in one of the now boarded-up houses, seven years in her current one.

"Yeah, I think about the little house with the white picket fence out in the country," she says, "but until that day, this is where I want to live. I don't plan on going anywhere until the bricks fall down on me."

Despite all the hazards -- rats, bees, mosquitoes, guns, drugs -- it's a piece of corn-on-the-cob that, this night, does Anita in.

Suddenly, her hand goes to her mouth and she realizes she has lost a front tooth. Thinking it was a piece of crab shell, she had spit it out. Now she can't find it. She goes through the whole pile of shells until she does, then shows it to her friends, who tease her relentlessly.

They tell her she'd better go to the dentist. She says that's unlikely. They tell her, with that smile, she's not going to be winning any beauty contests.

And on it goes -- the kind of teasing only friends can get away with. Beneath it, they admit, they have a strong bond -- one that formed, and is reinforced nightly, on the steps they fought to reclaim.

"We look out for each other," Theresa says once the tears of laughter are wiped away. "That's what neighbors are about."

* * *

The reason the steps are there is simple.

When most older rowhouses were built, basements needed to be accessible from the street for coal deliveries. That meant first floors, and front doors, had to be above street level. And that meant there had to be steps leading up to them.

The reasons the people are there, on those steps, are more complex. For some, it's because their houses are hot and crowded. For some, it's because their alley-facing back yards lack ambience, or are being used for storage.

For most, though, it's because "out front" -- whether in Pigtown, Little Italy or Mondawmin -- is where the fellow humans are, where they can find, or lend, a sympathetic ear.

It's where Karen Conley, who never did bring the hookers peanut butter sandwiches, feels most alive. It's where Joe Votta, whose front window was eventually replaced for $149, can find camaraderie. It's where Anita Williams, who handed Ping and Pong back to child welfare officials in September so they could live with their grandmother, gets her good cheer, strength and support.

All it takes is a few simple steps.