City Council candidate John Pitkin campaigned all day yesterday trying to garner enough votes to put him on the council.

A tall, thin man in a red turtleneck hustles down the sidewalk wrapped in a dark overcoat, hauling a bag from Crate & Barrel and a canvas sack filled with pamphlets. The wind whips along Inman Street on a chilly morning as he nears a cheery group of Cantabrigians parked in front of a large red-brick building.

Inside, on the second floor of the city office building at 57 Inman, election workers are chatting away as a handful of voters cast ballots behind red-and-black striped curtains. Out in front, bundled in parkas and clutching colorful signs, a band of candidates and their supporters exchanges cracks about the cold and speculates about turnout.

It’s half past seven o’clock and Election Day in Cambridge is underway.

For John Pitkin, the man in the overcoat, it’s been underway for two hours already. Pitkin is one of a dozen challengers in a field of 19 candidates vying for spots on the Cambridge City Council. He rose at 5:30 a.m. and an hour later was making last-minute plans for a party at his house that night to celebrate the end of the campaign.

At the end of the day, when all the ballots have been cast, a complicated system of voter preferences will whittle down the field to nine councillors. Ahead of Pitkin between now and then is an entire day of visiting polling places, meeting voters and boosting morale among supporters. He will visit voting stations at the Agassiz and Peabody schools, Longfellow House and Youville Hospital.

“My goal was to talk to as many people as possible in my precinct,” he explains. “So I’d spend the day out in other precincts where people don’t know me.”

But the 57 Inman precinct is his home territory, just a couple blocks from his house in Mid-Cambridge. He made his name working on development issues in the Mid-Cambridge neighborhood. Now, his campaign is focused on citywide rezoning and closer ties between city government and neighborhood groups.

Pitkin will return to his home base twice more before the day is done, once around 12:45 p.m. to cast his own ballot and again for the last two hours of voting before the polls close at 8.

A car pulls up that Pitkin recognizes. For the next 12 hours, Rachel Faith will shuttle around the candidate in her 1987 silver Saab. She parks near the group of campaigners and gets ready for a day of holding signs. First things first, though.

“I’m going to go up and vote now,” Faith says. “I’m in a no-parking zone but that’s okay.”

Pitkin laughs.

“I don’t know,” he says. “No promises on any tickets.”

Faith got involved with Pitkin when he championed the cause of a 100-year-old tree that she had fought to protect. This is the first campaign Faith has worked on, but she’s the one who picked the color scheme for the campaign logos: an orange oval with large, black “Pitkin” letters outlined in black.

“Orange is the new black,” she explains. “It’s hip, it’s happening, it’s now.”

At the moment, two orange Pitkin signs aren’t the only campaign banners. At 57 Inman the crowd includes School Committee member Alice L. Turkel, who is running for reelection with a yellow, blue and red logo, and outgoing city councillor Jim Braude, who is passing out green brochures in support of a ballot initiative (see sidebar).