Ah, the sounds of the state Capitol during the busy fall legislative session. The lawmakers backslapping, the chorus of schoolchildren on class trips, and the click, click, yeeooow! of women's heels slip-sliding across historic tile floors.

Meet Public Enemy No. 1 for women in the Capitol, particularly lobbyists in stiletto heels: the polished Moravian tiles that blanket 16,000 square feet of the great rotunda and the halls of the 106-year-old building.

Smaller than baseball cards, the faces of the Capitol’s terra-cotta tiles vary. Some protrude; others dip. In between are low-lying gullies of heel-gobbling grout.

This uneven surface has sent generations of women hobbling to podiatrists, kept cobblers employed, and forced many a veteran Capitol issue-pusher to trade in her heel taps for flats.

“It’s uneven, it’s slippery. It’s not practical for heels,” says lobbyist Angela Zaydon, who works for the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association and previously lobbied for optometrists’ and insurers’ trade groups.

Almost every longtime female lobbyist in Harrisburg has a war story to tell, and — blisters to bunions — the battle scars to back it up.

Holly Kinser, executive vice president for lobbying powerhouse S.R. Wojdak, has logged many a mile in Capitol corridors atop sky-high heels. Her client list includes the City of Philadelphia.

Kinser — who favors Prada pumps and Christian Louboutin red soles — says traversing the tiles led to painful knee injuries early in her career. She remembers breaking a heel (on her shoe, not her foot) in the 1990s, in the middle of a busy legislative session day.

Those are the days when lobbyists are most on the go: Bills are being voted, amendments attached or squashed. “I had legislation moving and no time to get new shoes,” Kinser recalls. “I had to lobby the rest of the day barefoot. Some people still call me the shoeless lobbyist.”

Heidi Prescott, lobbyist for the Humane Society of the United States, went to a podiatrist in 2001 for pain in her Achilles tendons.

“When I told him I walked on cobblestones all day, he said, ‘Cobblestones!?’ Then he yelled at me about my heels,” Prescott recalls. The diagnosis was Achilles tendinitis.

Now Prescott, who has been pounding Capitol floors for 18 years, limits the days she wears heels.

Female lobbyists say heel height is more than just a fashion choice — it is part of looking professional in a male-dominated building. “If you want to run with the big dogs, keep your shoes on,” Zaydon says.

Foot pain was probably the last thing a Bucks County tile-maker had in mind.

In 1898, Henry Chapman Mercer, an avowed anti-industrialist with a love of German pottery, founded the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in Doylestown to craft decorative tiles using native Bucks County clay. A few years later he won the commission that became his legacy: flooring for the new state Capitol.

The first floor became Mercer’s palette. He spread rust-, blue- and black-colored tiles, interspersed with 400 mosaics that paid homage to the state’s history, its art and archaeology, technology and industry, fauna and flora.

“It is the life of the people,” Mercer wrote, “rough, powerful and absolutely real, that seems to struggle in this plastic pavement for expression.”

“I’ve picked up any number of women off the floor,” says Tony Barbash, chief clerk of the state House, who has worked in the Capitol since he was hired in 1975.

Not everyone blames the flooring. “It’s not the tiles. It’s the shoes,” says Valerie Gaydos. Gaydos ought to know. She lobbies for the Pennsylvania Podiatric Association. Barbash, too, says stiletto wearers have only themselves to blame — “Shoes should be function over form,” the House clerk opines. And the floor has a sort of lobbyist of its own in Charles Yeske, manager of Moravian Tile Works, which is still churning out the clay tiles after 113 years.

Yeske successfully petitioned the Capitol Preservation Committee to set a new policy for delivery carts in the building. Balloon tires replaced metal wheels to prevent damage to the tiles.

Yeske says some historic buildings warn visitors about spiked heels, and maybe the Capitol should, too. “You are entering a historic structure. It deserves a certain amount of respect, like a church.”