A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  “Not me,” said Rendell with a devilish smile on his face.

  At the stroke of midnight, a cake in the shape of the city was brought out, and it didn’t take long before little chunks were being stuffed into Rendell’s mouth as if he were the groom at a wedding. From several feet away, Bob Brady, the chairman of the city’s Democratic party, watched the proceedings with a grandfatherly benevolence. Political decorum would dictate that chunks of cake should probably not be forced into the mouth of the mayor of the fifth-largest city in the country even under the most joyous of circumstances. But Brady had been down this road many times, and he seemed to know instinctively that the best night of a mayor’s life was usually this very first one. “Let ’im have fun,” said Brady. “Tomorrow he’ll wake up and say, ‘I’m the fucking what? What the fuck happened?’ ”

  Behind the swell of hope and optimism lay the unraveling of a once glorious American city. And there were also issues of Rendell’s character. Several weeks before the election in November, Cohen had gotten word from a variety of sources that the Inquirer was delving with a vengeance into allegations that Rendell had engaged in acts of sexual harassment while district attorney. Cohen received nearly thirty phone calls from individuals who had either been contacted by the newspaper or were aware of the investigation, and so he knew intricate details of it: the names of the reporters assigned, the supervising editor, and the kinds of allegations being pursued. He knew that the investigation had generated considerable controversy within the paper’s newsroom—some thought it was a legitimate story; some thought it had nothing to do with anything. Cohen questioned the timing. Such rumors were not new. Virtually every time Rendell had run for office, they had cropped up. So why all of a sudden were they being vigorously pursued? The more Cohen learned, the more he became convinced that the paper was conducting a kind of witch-hunt, contacting a secretary in one instance to ask her whether Rendell had once chased her around the office in the nude. The paper never published a word of what it learned or didn’t learn. But from this episode alone, it seemed likely that questions of Rendell’s character and behavior were not simply going to disappear.

  As Ed Rendell danced and sang and rocked back and forth in a red cap that said RIZZO’S PIZZA on the front, David Cohen stood on the fringes, away from the music and the stage. He wore a tuxedo, but given the way his eyes scanned every detail, he might as well have been at the top of a ridge dressed in dark glasses and camouflage, armed with binoculars and a map pointer. He too received his share of congratulations, but whereas there was a grace period for the mayor, there was no grace period for him. Much of his evening, in fact, had been taken up with people who wanted jobs with the city now that a new mayor was coming into office. Amid the pulsating swell of the music, one such job seeker came forward to ask Cohen whether he had received his covering letter and résumé. Cohen listened to the name thoughtfully and then politely offered acknowledgment: “Buff-colored paper with a signature on the left-hand side.”

  It had been buff-colored paper. The signature had been on the left side. How could anyone have remembered that? Why would anyone have remembered that? “That’s right,” said the man with a strange look on his face. Cohen gave a modest shrug. After all, why wouldn’t he have remembered the résumé?

  There had been only four thousand of them.

  It was a grand party and a grand day, and no one begrudged the mayor a single second of it. When he woke up the next morning and went to work, the first item on the agenda, among roughly a thousand, would be how to somehow right the city’s financial condition and stave off bankruptcy. Beyond that, one could already feel the first rumblings of the war with the unions that would take place in the coming summer, not a war simply about the usual territories of wages and benefits but a war over the ability of government to reclaim itself and act as an instigator of bold change, not an impediment to it. These were immediate crises that might somehow lend themselves to reversal with ample amounts of luck and miracle. Beyond them lay problems that seemed impervious to hope or even the barest outlines of solution.

  There was the disgrace of public housing, where the vacancy rate hovered at 20 percent and children got third-degree burns from exposed pipes that melted the skin in a sizzle. There was the shame of the schools, whose teachers taught with contempt in a system where 60 percent of the elementary school students lived at the poverty level. There was the flow of manufacturing jobs, 80 percent of which had been lost, and there was the vast industrial heritage of the city, whose once proud moniker, Workshop of the World, was now just a cruel taunt. There was the despair of the neighborhoods, where in many cases the only answer to these once sturdy blocks, as bleached of life as a skull in the desert, was to borrow a chapter from Vietnam and save them by demolishing them. There were the pockets of despair in the city’s black neighborhoods, where heroic grandmothers who had already raised their grandchildren were now raising their great-grandchildren and were hoping to veer them somehow from the path of dice games and drugs and drive-by shootings that had become rhythm and regimen. There were pockets of anger in “changing” neighborhoods, where those who worked and suffered through the wage tax and believed and luxuriated in the heartbeat of the city felt they were being driven out by those who didn’t work and didn’t care and had no respect for themselves, much less for anyone around them. There was the fear of the men and women who worked at After Six stitching tuxedos or at Whitman’s making chocolates or over at the navy yard at the foot of Broad repairing ships suddenly being told to find new lives and new means of employment because these places were closing up for good.

  “There’s so much work to be done,” said Nellie Reynolds, who had lived her whole life in the city and had been a longtime activist on behalf of housing for the poor. “The city looks like it has gone to the dogs. Everybody looks to the mayor like he is the gospel, but everyone knows that it’s going to take more than one person to clean up this mess.” But in the giddiness of that inaugural night nobody seemed to believe that at all.

  Shortly after Rendell’s victory in November, political strategist Oxman had written a confidential memo with fourteen points that the new mayor needed to tackle to succeed. The memo had a political framework, but it went beyond politics and urged Rendell to do what was right, regardless of how hard that might be, regardless of the virulence with which others might fight him. The very life and future of a city was at stake now, and the hard choices, the choices that no politician made anymore, must become the only choices.

  “Remember, Ed Rendell has won a huge mandate for change,” wrote Oxman. “You can take over everything. Fuck them all.”

  2

  The Number

  I

  It was somewhere around 2:30 A.M. when David L. Cohen and F. John White ran the model through the computer to discover whether there was even the slightest prayer. White was the managing director of a company called Public Financial Management, which specialized in helping municipalities discover creative financial paths out of seemingly intractable financial disasters. He knew the hidden arteries and veins of big-city finance as well as anyone else, and so did Cohen, who, by the arduous and tireless embrace of foot-thick documents, had become the city’s leading budget expert. They were in White’s corner office on the sixteenth floor of a downtown office building, huddled over the computer next to White’s desk, and the sense of anticipation was palpable. After hundreds of hours of interviews with city department heads, a few of them fruitful but most of them ending in Waiting for Godot–like curlicues—Is this your budget? Is this not your budget?—they were finally going to get a number, the Number, that would quantify the extent of the city’s budget mess and show the cumulative deficit over the next five years if no corrective action was taken.

  It was January of 1992, shortly after the inauguration, and of all the activities that Cohen might seize during the four years of the mayor’s term in office, none was as important as this. Without the Number, they could not even try
to begin to move the city forward. Of course, once they had the Number, it might also become apparent, less than one month into a term in which there were still forty-seven left, that they would never be able to move the city forward. Perhaps it would be better, as the previous administrations had done, to get out the pad and abacus and fairy dust and number blocks, make a calculated guess, and spin tales better than those of Charles Dickens.

  Sitting at the keyboard, White punched the requisite data into the model—projected revenues based on the various taxes that the city levied, various fees the city charged, state and federal aid; projected obligations based on salaries and benefits for city workers and the cost of services that the city purchased from outside vendors. The computer paused momentarily and then returned the Number.

  Emotional reactions to budget-forecast models were not part of the financial vernacular, particularly for someone like White, who saw weird numbers all the time. Numbers, after all, were numbers. But what was this? Then it became obvious what had happened. In the lateness of the hour, he had simply made a clerical mistake, punched in some incorrect data. With Cohen still next to him, he went through the same procedure.

  The computer again paused momentarily, then returned the Number once again.

  John White looked at it, and so of course did Cohen, and they quickly noticed the same thing. It was exactly the same as when White had punched in the data the first time. There had been no clerical error. There had been no mistake.

  $1.246 BILLION

  That was the Number glaring at them from the computer screen. That would be the budget gap over the next five years if nothing was done: one billion two hundred forty-six million dollars—a budget deficit bigger than the entire budget of Boston or Houston or Baltimore.

  John White looked at David Cohen. David Cohen looked at John White.

  “Holy shit,” said White. “This is bad.”

  II

  It was still occasionally called the City of Firsts, and it was more than mere promotional gimmick, even though so many of the firsts had occurred so long ago that few who lived in the city were aware of them—the first public school in the colonies, the first American paper mill, the first stone bridge, the first botanical garden, the first volunteer fire company, the first American magazine, the first American hospital, the first American insurance company, the first American stock exchange, the first American theater, the first production of an American play, the first carpet woven in America, the first piano made in America, the first American corporate bank, the first daily American newspaper, the first circus, the first balloon flight, the first public building lit by gas, the first American-made lager beer, the first screw-propeller steamship, the first American minstrel show, the first Republican National Convention, the first American zoological society, the first American merry-go-round, the first women’s suffrage demonstrations, the first telephone book, the first Salvation Army in America, the first black newspaper, the first revolving door, the first Automat, the first Girl Scout cookie sale, the first city wage tax.

  It was perhaps a symptom of things to come that the last of these firsts occurred in 1938. Even then there were serious signs of implosion and decay, the beginnings of a two-tiered society in the city, the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the poor, nuggets of wealth surrounded by rings of decline. But in the headiness of the American era, particularly after World War II, the signs were largely ignored. Outwardly, at least during the 1950s, the city still managed to sustain itself rather well, and nothing but growth seemed to be on the horizon.

  In 1960, an enthusiastic plan by the City Planning Commission predicted that the population of Philadelphia would be a minimum of 2.25 million by 1980 and perhaps as high as 2.7 million. The plan predicted a robust increase in manufacturing employment, with the exception of jobs in the textile industry, and an increase in citywide employment above the magic one million mark. Printed lovingly on the finest paper, the plan was bold and energizing to read, a testament to the optimism of the American spirit that existed then not just in regard to the city of Philadelphia but in regard to all American cities, the idea that nothing could diminish regardless of what evidence there might be to the contrary. It was also one of the most wrongheaded documents ever created, a symbol of the dangers of urban myopia. By 1960, conditions in many American cities were already alarming. A social upheaval was taking place, but still no one wanted to listen to those who recognized it and issued warnings. White middle-class flight to the suburbs fueled by the crafty and relentless engine of federal policy; black migration by the millions from the South spurred by the dream of industrial jobs that were already dwindling and beyond reach; the rapid loss of manufacturing to nearby locales, where the land was cheaper and more plentiful for efficient, one-story assembly lines; the shift from downtown shopping to suburban strip malls and to the latest retail invention, the indoor shopping mall; the ravages of the slums and the ignoble record of urban renewal—these were just some of the evident problems that would multiply exponentially over the next thirty years.

  “The modern city can be the most ruthless enemy of the good life, or it can be its servant,” President Lyndon Johnson said in 1965. “The choice is up to this generation of Americans. For this is truly the time of decision for the American city.” The generation Johnson beckoned to clearly responded. By leaving.

  In 1950, ten of the country’s twelve largest cities reached their highest populations ever. After that moment, the American city was never the same. By 1966, the proportion of nonwhites living in cities of more than 250,000 had nearly doubled, to 23 percent. For the vast majority of these residents, it was a wrenching and almost horrifying transition to urban life, and this was a demographic shift that only intensified in later decades. Between 1950 and 1990, the population of Detroit dropped 44 percent while the proportion of minorities increased to 79 percent. The population of Cleveland dropped 45 percent while the proportion of minorities increased to 53 percent. The population of Milwaukee dropped 15 percent while the proportion of minorities increased to 39 percent. The population of Chicago dropped 23 percent while the proportion of minorities increased to 60 percent. The population of Newark dropped 38 percent while the proportion of minorities increased to 82 percent. In Philadelphia, the population of the city dropped 23 percent from its peak, and the proportion of minorities increased to 45 percent.

  For many of these minorities, the move to the city was beset with hostility and alienation. Instead of finding the promised land, they found only the sealed-off physique of the ghetto, and what made these statistics even more distressing were studies showing that the incidence of poverty in cities was growing. Between 1980 and 1990, according to one such study, the number of blacks living in urban ghettos had increased nearly 40 percent, from 4.3 million to 5.9 million.

  Philadelphia itself continued to compile firsts during the 1970s and 1980s, but they were different firsts: the first city in the country to have as its mayor a former police chief who didn’t have a high school education and once wore a nightstick in his tuxedo cummerbund; the first city in the country to be sued by the Justice Department for systematic police brutality; the first city in the country to have a mass murderer who was fond of torturing his victims and also invested rather well in the stock market; the first city in the country in which a remarkable number of people thought the statue of a movie prizefighter belonged at the top of the steps leading to the art museum.

  After 1960, the city of Philadelphia did not gain a minimum of 225,000 residents, as the Planning Commission had so rosily predicted. Instead, between 1960 and 1990, the city lost 400,000 residents. Once the country’s third-largest city, by 1990 it was only the fifth largest, with 1.58 million residents, and the number of inhabitants in the city was the smallest since 1910. Beyond sheer population loss, an analysis of the numbers showed a nearly 30 percent drop in the number of middle-income families. The phenomenon only reinforced a place that had the demographic look of a lopsided sandwich,
a thin piece of bread on top and a thick piece of bread at the bottom, but less and less meat in between to provide consistent nourishment and sustenance. Unless the trend somehow reversed, the middle-income would continue to leave a city that held no hope for them, beckoned by the suburbs and the most enduring American dream of all—private lot, private lawn, and private home. The small percentage of wealthy who could afford burdensome taxes and private schools would feast off a city that had wonderful shops and restaurants and privileged oases in which to live. The low income would always live in a city that by any standard of decency and morality had become unimaginable.

  By 1990 in Philadelphia, 20 percent of the entire city was at the poverty level. Sixty percent of its children had been born to single mothers. Fifteen percent of them had had little or no prenatal care. Thirty-five percent of them were not adequately immunized. One in eleven had a case open with the city’s Department of Human Services, the agency charged with protecting abused, neglected, and dependent children. In the city’s public school system, 40 percent of those enrolled dropped out in high school.

  There were also the compounding effects of the problems that arose during the 1980s that no one could have imagined: the number of AIDS cases in the city had gone from zero to more than 2,200; the number of people in treatment for cocaine abuse had gone from 117 to 10,480; the number of inmates in the city prison system had gone from 2,722 to 5,178. In 1981, there had been no city agency to serve the needs of the homeless. In 1990, with an estimated 5,000 people on the street at any given time, the city was budgeting close to $37 million to care for them. In 1981, the city had budgeted $510,000 for demolishing dilapidated buildings and industrial sites. By 1990, due to abandonment and population loss, that figure had increased more than tenfold, to $5.3 million, but it was still a losing battle. By 1992, there were 27,000 vacant residential buildings in Philadelphia, roughly 6 percent of the city’s residential stock, and 15,800 parcels of vacant land. Another problem in the city that flourished was murder, which reached an all-time high of 500 homicides in 1990.