A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  Afterward, in the privacy of the mayor’s office, Rendell and Cohen went over the speech to be televised that night. Most of the points they discussed were minor, centering largely on who in the political world had to be given credit regardless of whether or not they actually deserved credit. Rendell wanted to be slightly discerning, but Cohen’s instinct was to err on the side of total inclusion. Rendell, after pondering for a moment, agreed. The names—“suck points” as Rendell called them—went in.

  While Cohen sat still, making the changes at the round table, Rendell walked around the office, throwing a football into the air and then catching it. He sat at the table briefly, the football clutched in his hands, but before long the football popped out, skittered across the table, and headed straight for Cohen’s head. It missed him by inches, a drive-by football.

  “Sorry, David,” said the mayor somewhat sheepishly.

  Cohen didn’t seem to notice.

  When it came to the last line of the draft, Rendell felt there should be something new. Up to this moment, all the private briefings on the five-year plan had gone well, remarkably well, but the most important briefing of all, with the leaders of the four municipal unions, was not until that afternoon. And he knew better than anyone else that the five-year plan, as pretty as it looked on paper, could quickly dissolve into a public bloodletting. Given his view of the media, he could hear them filing down their incisors, making them razor sharp as they looked for the sweet and the meaty parts of the plan, the parts that could be torn to bits, this number off, this projected savings pie-in-the-sky voodoo, eager to portray the new mayor in the very stance he hoped to avoid—locked in some epic do-or-die struggle against the city workforce. So for the moment at least, Rendell thought it might be better to end the speech this way:

  Thank you. Good night. I’m going away for a month. You can reach me in Aruba. I made a plan, and now I’m out of here. I’ll be back to watch the NCAAs in basketball.

  Several hours later Rendell braced himself for the briefing with the city unions. Hoping to establish a spirit of cooperation, he carried with him individual letters to each, asking for productivity suggestions. If any of them could come up with ways to save money that would lessen the impact on salaries and benefits, he was all for it. The meeting was set for 5:30 P.M., but as minute after minute ticked by after the appointed time, it became apparent there was a problem. As the mayor stood in a holding area between his private office and the Cabinet Room, his good mood, which had lasted the entire day, began to crumble. He didn’t get angry but seemed chagrined, like a little boy whose plans for a memorable birthday party, with hats and noisemakers and jam-packed treat bags, had dissolved when no one even bothered to return his invitation. “I guess nobody’s showing up,” said the mayor quietly, and he was precisely right. Nobody from the city’s unions was showing up, and Rendell knew immediately the symbolism of that.

  “This is the story,” said Rendell, whose instinct for news was as keen as any reporter’s. “The rest is all bullshit.” He looked sadly at the letters he had so carefully planned to hand-deliver, the perfect olive branch that had been met with a cigar-size middle finger, a very bad omen of things to come. He patted them gently and then put them away. “I guess we’ll have to send these.”

  An hour later Rendell was in the studio of a local television station. He was moments away from giving the most important speech of his life, one that would be watched by hundreds of thousands, but the impact of the snub by the unions still gnawed. “I’ll tell you one term may be enough, more than enough,” he said, his month and a half as mayor more like a millennium. And then, at exactly 7:00 P.M., as the on-the-air light went on, a new spirit seemed to float into his body. Weariness was replaced by comforting strength, and of all the political skills that Ed Rendell possessed, his most valuable may have been the way in which he conveyed horrific news. The city was on the brink of bankruptcy. An ugly confrontation with the municipal unions seemed inevitable, no matter how much he tried to delay it. The Number hovered like a guillotine. People were fleeing the city by the thousands, and so were jobs. But he made all of it somehow sound like a wonderful opportunity for change and renewal if everyone in the once-shining city would put aside petty differences and come together. The unions would have to sacrifice, but, he also announced, cabinet members and appointed officials, including himself, would take an immediate 5 percent pay cut. “Everybody is going to have to be part of the solution,” he said, and he firmly established that the city’s efforts to right itself financially must finally come from the city and not in bailouts from the state and federal government. “The only resources that we can rely on to solve our problems is ourselves.”

  The unions hated what he had to say, but in the corridors of the state capitol and the equally important offices of Wall Street, the response was unprecedented, what one called “a new day.” Rendell himself was aglow afterward, but he knew the moment would not last, because moments such as these in the life of the city were always just that. Moments.

  V

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  The mayor ground his teeth as he said it, spitting the words with such venom that they came out like little projectiles, capable of rocketing across the wide berth of his office and causing punctures in the wall. It was now April Fool’s Day 1992, but the time-bomb look on his face, menacing and slightly contorted, indicated that any kind of prank would be highly risky. His meeting with Deputy City Representative Kathleen Sullivan was supposed to have begun at 9:15 A.M., and he was forty-five minutes late, meaning that well before noon his jam-packed schedule had already begun to unravel hopelessly. His mood only meant trouble.

  The five-year plan had not yet been approved, which meant that the city was still teetering on the brink of insolvency. The union negotiations were totally up in the air, and so was the budget. But none of that had any standing at this particular moment. Sullivan was responsible for organizing various events that promoted the image of the city, and she cut to the chase. What about Mickey Mouse? Would the mayor stand with him or not?

  Oh Christ, not that frigging mouse again.

  As soon as Sullivan mentioned the name, a kind of sickened look crossed his face, as if he had just been stung by something. He had been mayor for three months, and in that short time he had accepted the degree to which the job involved groveling, begging, proselytizing, and grace in the face of foolishness. But even so, couldn’t he still retain some shred of self-respect? Spending time with dignitaries from Chile and Hungary and Cameroon was one thing. They usually left behind nice gifts—bowls, vases, pictures, fancy coffee-table books that fit in perfectly with the teak walls of the mayor’s office. But what the hell did Mickey leave behind besides pictures of Minnie and those damn mouse-ear hats? When an important official came to town, the city liked to give them something, usually a miniature Liberty Bell. The bells cost money, and the mouse wanted one? You had to hand it to him. Beneath that squeaky voice, the mouse had cojones.

  “We have to try to keep a little bit of value in my appearance,” he said to Sullivan with plaintive weariness. “Standing next to Mickey Mouse is not a great deal.”

  Sullivan pressed on, trying to convince him that it would be worthwhile for him to do exactly that as part of a Disney promotion. The event was to take place on Market Street near the Liberty Bell, and thousands of kids would be there. For a city that was trying to establish itself as a tourist destination, the slightest snub of Walt Disney might be fatal. But Rendell was firm. If Disney chief Michael Eisner was playing the mouse, he told Sullivan, then he might do it. In the absence of that, he had made a decision, and that was that. Mickey would get over it, and for God’s sake he shouldn’t take it personally. “I’d do the same for Bugs Bunny,” the mayor told Sullivan.

  In the midst of the Mickey Mouse meeting, Police Sergeant Buchanico, the head of the mayor’s security detail, walked in to give a status report on the various demonstrations taking place at City Hall. Demonstrations at
City Hall were obviously not new, but today it was important for the mayor to have a road map since there were four going on simultaneously. When he stepped outside the office, Rendell would at least know who was screaming and why and not risk giving the right assuagement to the wrong demonstrators.

  Around the corner, in the Reception Room, hundreds had gathered to disrupt the board meeting of the Philadelphia Housing Authority. This demonstration was not wholly unexpected, since the PHA, ostensibly responsible for administering public housing in the city for some eighty-thousand residents, had been under siege for close to twenty years.

  The Reception Room was one of the most elegant in all of City Hall, with almost every inch of the towering walls covered by portraits of the city’s mayors, stretching back to the 1700s. Now, however, the atmosphere was charged, pent-up emotion ready to burst, angry single-mother tenants lashing out at stone-faced board members trying to maintain order. The board was set to vote on whether to study the possibility of abandoning high-rise public housing in the city. Given the inherent social ills of high-rise public housing and the cynicism with which it had been constructed in city after city across the country, designed to pack the highest number of poor people into the smallest landmass possible, it was an idea that made infinite sense. But given the housing authority’s legacy of neglect, corruption, and contempt for those it was supposed to serve, tenants had ample cause to be both scared and livid. Board members sitting at a long table at the front of the room like rejected apostles asked for quiet, but it was pointless. “We do not want to be nice!” yelled a member of the audience to loud applause.

  Two floors up, two demonstrations were taking place inside the chambers of the city council. One was by children and youth advocates, replete with signs that said STOP KILLING BABIES. The other was to protest possible budget cuts in the city’s Department of Health. Back downstairs, a small group of people had gathered in the hallway outside the mayor’s office. Since they were not very well organized, with no signs or bullhorns or designated screamers, no one gave them much credence at first. But the more they talked, the more others began to listen, including an increasing flock of reporters scurrying from the press room across the hall. (As Rendell would point out on several occasions, the guy who decided to put the City Hall press corps right across the hall from the mayor’s office was a real “smack ass.”)

  The story these demonstrators told was as harrowing as it was astounding: the city, in its eagerness to eliminate crack houses in a blighted area of the city known as the Badlands, had mistakenly demolished the home of a fifty-nine-year-old maid named Helen Anthony. The day before, Anthony had left for work at 7:45 A.M. When she returned home, at around 4:35 P.M., police were on the scene and refused to let her inside. She left and came back in a panic with relatives, only to find that her home had been demolished, except for a blue foundation wall on which several dresses, a white skirt, and a gray jacket hung neatly on a hook above a rubble of bricks and jagged wood. “I can’t tell you,” said Anthony before breaking into tears. “When you don’t have nothing, when everything is gone …” Her frame was frail and gaunt, the look on her face bleached and painfully tired, and she clutched a purse hard against her chest.

  City officials maintained that they had a legal right to tear down the house because it was structurally unsafe and imminently dangerous. They also said that they had found bloody heroin needles and dog feces on the first floor and they could not imagine that anyone could live there. Somehow Anthony had survived on this drug-infested corner of Germantown and Stella for twenty-three years, close to ten of them as a widow. She put up boards of thin plywood as protection against the crack addicts, but the effort was in vain. The addicts did what they wanted when they wanted. So Anthony lived mostly on the upper floors with her wedding pictures and her children’s trophies. City officials later conceded that they had made a mistake. It was also a public relations disaster, exponentially intensified by the fact that a 48 Hours film crew, there to witness the city’s ostensibly noble efforts to take swift action against drugs, now had the entire Helen Anthony fiasco on tape.

  Rendell seemed to take the demonstrations in stride, much as he took in stride the fact that the round table in his office, at which he did most of his paperwork and held most of his meetings, had disappeared. The table had been made by a prisoners’ work cooperative in Philadelphia. Rendell had showed it off with considerable pride on the day of his inauguration, but while undergoing a little refinishing, it had fallen apart. “It was supposed to be a twenty-four-hour job to fix it,” said the mayor. “It’s now approaching twenty-four days.”

  Rendell presided over his last meeting of the day at 10:00 P.M. It took place in the den of his home, under the watchful eye of a bronze Buddha that looked strikingly like the mayor. The Buddha dressed humbly, but Rendell himself wore a purple sweatshirt and blue sweatpants.

  “Let’s see,” said David Cohen, mulling over the day’s events. “Two billion for children and youth and health, eighty thousand to buy a woman a new house. A couple of hundred thousand for PHA. For two and a half billion, we could have solved four demonstrations today.”

  The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to discuss the most effective use of lobbyists on behalf of the city and the most effective way in which the administration could push through its agenda at the state level. It was suggested that Rendell meet privately with Governor Casey when he came to town at the end of the month. Of course seeing the governor was a good idea. More than ever, good relationships between the city and the state were crucial to any chance of future success. But there were complications.

  “One of the reasons I can’t see the governor is because I’m seeing a mayor from Chile and the president of Botswana,” said Rendell. Sitting so comfortably in a chair in his den at five minutes to midnight, feeling a sense of peace and the security of knowing that he had at least another five hours, maybe six, before it all started over again the next day, he rolled his eyes and shook his head.

  “I do some unbelievable shit.”

  The next day, the inexhaustible Kathleen Sullivan was back with Mickey Mouse. The day before, the mayor had been strident. Now he just seemed defeated and tried one final time to make her understand it all from his perspective.

  “It’s appearing next to a mouse,” he said sadly.

  “Why, you’ve been in worse company,” she shot back.

  “But not with my picture in the paper.”

  When that didn’t work, Rendell made an appeal to practicality: why appear with a fake mouse when there were several real ones rummaging around his office on a daily basis? That didn’t work either. Sullivan shook her head in disappointment. She also saw a clear case of scandal: Why, she wanted to know, was the mayor seemingly willing to appear with the Diet Pepsi Uh-huh girls and not Mickey Mouse? He looked at her for several seconds with an expression that was somewhere between a grimace and a cry for help. He was thinking, as if pondering the possibility of a Justice Department bias suit on behalf of the world’s most beloved mascot. In a deposition, how would he explain that appearance with the Pepsi Uh-huh girls? It was never easy.

  “All right. I’ll do the fucking mouse.”

  Not all his meetings were like this. Some were even more bizarre, and many were wrenching and sober. The five-year plan and the union negotiations and the city’s attempts to balance the budget were important enough to occupy his attention for all of 1992. But hovering over Rendell, always in the back of his mind, was something else even more crucial and vital to the lifeblood of the city than any of these issues, the very essence of its soul. Looming was the future of the city’s largest smokestack employer, still holding on to the kind of industrial jobs that had built this city and dozens of other cities like it. Looming was the fate of the yard.

  3

  The Yard

  I

  Beyond a wife and six children, ranging in ages from three to sixteen, Jim Mangan had no constituency. When he pondered the futu
re of the navy yard, he didn’t worry about how to convert the fears of a workforce into votes by making assurances that could not be kept; he had more personal concerns: the cost of clothing, the price of food, the payment of the mortgage on the modest home on Haworth, the feelings that would overwhelm him if that moment came when he no longer had a job and, in the absence of finding a comparable one in a marketplace uninterested in his skills, would no longer be able to provide for his family.

  He was a quiet man, thirty-seven years old, with a wryness that served him well in terms of the fate of the yard or at least took off some of the edge of hurt and fear. His voice had the raspy roughness of the Philly twang, various words filed off to a blunt point. He smoked his cigarettes to the stub, and he yearned to move from the cramped house that he had bought over in the Frankford section of the city because that was all he could afford. He was in many respects a working man in what had been a working city, but he also had a philosophical and intellectual side that seemed incongruous among the uniform porches and men in undershirts that dominated his neighborhood. He was perfectly at peace talking about Plato’s philosophy of government or watching, with a bemused smile on his face, the bizarre wonders of the legislative process as it unfolded on C-SPAN.

  He heard the politicians give their fighting chants that the navy yard would stay open even though a federal commission had voted for its closure. He knew how many of the workers, particularly the old-timers, still believed that, still believed that if they did a good job, the Navy or the Pentagon or the Defense Department or someone in power would see the error of their ways. Given the strain of forced career change, particularly for men and women who had survived by the strength of their hands and did not have the college degrees and the computer skills that every employer seemed to want, it was easier, perhaps even safer, to run from the truth. Just about everywhere you looked now, the news was bad for the working man, particularly for the working man who had made his wages off heavy industry. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in its exhaustive occupational forecast, predicted a 3 percent drop in the number of manufacturing jobs nationally while the number of jobs in the service sector was expected to rise 35 percent. Occupations requiring little formal education, the report said, were expected to “stagnate or decline.”