Whether Ms. Pugh can bring Baltimore together remains to be seen. Her closest opponent, Sheila Dixon, a former mayor who was forced out of office amid a corruption scandal, remains hugely popular in some of the city’s poorest African-American neighborhoods.

In West Baltimore on Wednesday, demonstrators marked the anniversary of the unrest with speeches and song at an all-day rally in front of the CVS pharmacy that was looted and burned last year. Many were not Pugh backers; their despair was palpable.

“A lot of people don’t trust politicians; we vote for politicians promising us stuff and they never keep their word,’’ said Dante Bradley, a 26-year-old chef, cradling his 4-year-old daughter. He has been reading Malcolm X and other black writers. He did not vote on Tuesday, he said, but if he had, he would have cast his ballot for another candidate: City Councilman Carl Stokes.

People in Baltimore have no illusions about the hard work ahead. The city has deep systemic problems that fueled last spring’s unrest — and that predate it by decades. Unemployment, particularly among young black men, is high. Crime has spiraled out of control; last year, Baltimore, with roughly 623,000 people, had about as many murders as New York, with a population of 8.4 million. (There were three murders in Baltimore last weekend alone.) Thousands of abandoned and dilapidated rowhouses line city streets.

“To assume that whomever you elect mayor is going to wave a magic wand and change that dynamic — that’s not going to happen,” said Courtney Billups, 47, a lawyer who recently moved here from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where he spent four years in public office as a county commissioner elected as a Democrat.

Ms. Pugh says she understands that. She called herself “a person of best practices” and said she had been combing through research conducted by the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, a branch of the University of Baltimore.

“I know the neighborhoods where unemployment is the highest,” she said. “I understand that we have 77,000 people unemployed in this city.”