A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  There was always a certain fatalism to Mangan, measured by the way he sometimes sat on the couch in his living room with a quiet expression on his face, as if fighting off some personal demon inside him, or by the way he consistently acted as though what could go wrong not only would go wrong but already had gone wrong. But the stirrings inside him, of what it meant for a man to be a provider for his family and what it meant to no longer be able to do that, were not imagined.

  Unlike some of the old-timers, who had worked there for twenty or twenty-five years and had developed a deep and abiding love for the yard, Mangan could not confess to such feelings. Many of the workers came from neighborhoods so close that they could almost reach out across the bed and touch the steel of the dry docks. Son followed father who had followed grandfather, but Mangan was different. He grew up in the neighborhood of Mayfair in the city’s northeast, some ten miles north of the navy yard, and his father was a computer programmer who liked nothing better than to read quietly and surround himself with books. Mangan himself went to Catholic grade school and then to Central, the area’s most prestigious high school. He considered college but decided against it and instead went to a trade school to learn air-conditioning and refrigeration. He spent six and a half years at a company that made specialized air-conditioning equipment to keep computer rooms dry. When the company moved to the suburbs, Mangan elected not to move with it. Instead, in 1981, when he was twenty-six, he joined the yard, going to work in an apprenticeship program as a welder.

  Mangan never thought the yard would be the place where he finished his career, and in the back of his mind he always dreamed of following in the footsteps of a grandfather who had run his own business, a bar called Jim’s over at Tulip and Venango. His grandfather, who died before he was born, was a go-getter and an entrepreneur, a man who wasn’t afraid to take a chance if he thought the chance was right, and Jim always thought his life might have turned out differently if his grandfather had lived and had imparted to him some of the secrets and the confidence of that spirit, helped him to reverse the fears and dourness that sometimes seemed to cloud over him.

  But still, the yard wasn’t at all a bad place to be in those early days. The dry docks were filled with ships needing repair, and the first of the gigantic aircraft carriers, the Saratoga, was in for overhaul as well. Mangan cut his teeth on the Saratoga, a half-billion-dollar job so massive that, as a reporter for the Inquirer wrote, it was “hard to tell whether the insides are outside or the outsides inside.” As an apprentice, he learned the rigors of what welders did, using their torches to cut holes called rip-outs so huge turbines could be taken out and sent back to the manufacturers for rebuilding; patching up the hull; crawling into darkened shafts deep in the innards of the ship to work on the deep tanks. He quickly formed respect for the men who had spent their professional lives routinely doing what he was just learning to do. In the romance of the trade, laboring on a ship was called working on the iron, but to Mangan it was little more than what he termed a euphemism for work that was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter and perpetually smoky and dirty. If you weren’t at dizzying heights, you were in tiny and confined spaces.

  The worst job of all was working with preheated metal in the summertime. The metal would be warmed with strip heaters that look like the coils of a toaster. A temp stick would be placed on the metal like a stick of butter, and once the temp stick melted, you knew that the metal had reached a temperature of 150 degrees and was ready for the weld. Mangan had to do this work on every possible part of the ship, from the lowest tank to the uppermost reaches of the flight deck. There was a pay differential for such misery, so-called hot money, just as there was “high money” for working so far up the mast that you had to be tied to it. The extra cash was nice, but it never made the work any more palatable. “I’m convinced it takes years off your life,” he said, referring in particular to the times when he had worked on an area of the ship that a week later had been sealed off because of possible asbestos contamination. Scariest of all was working on the deep tanks: they fanned out from the center of the ship far below the main deck, and just finding them was tortuous and difficult. To get to the tanks, he had to go through a series of manways, then pull down the welding shield, then straddle a board that meant a fall of thirty feet if you happened to slip off of it. On one occasion, he got stuck in an area of the tank called the inner bottom but was somehow able to extricate himself.

  Industrial accidents were not uncommon. While the Saratoga was in the yard, ten people were injured, three of them critically, when a valve on a steam line carrying twelve hundred pounds of pressure blew open in one of the boiler rooms. Metal fragments from the line hit some workers, and a spray of hot steam hit others, causing critical burns. An accident such as this was hardly comforting, but Mangan persevered, and so did the yard. The aircraft carrier Forrestal followed the Saratoga, and the Independence came after the Forrestal. He had a little trouble catching on at the beginning, but he learned quickly as he proceeded up the steps of his apprenticeship. “I was no surgeon,” he admitted, but he generally hit the weld right the first time and had little rejected when his work was inspected. If the labor was dirty and scary, it was also challenging, and at the beginning at least there was a considerable amount of pride associated with it. It also offered good pay and good benefits and ample opportunities for overtime.

  But then Mangan took the chance that he had been thinking about for so long. He left the yard in 1986 to open up his own business in air-conditioning repair and service. He lasted for a year before it all went sour. He went back to the yard and to welding, but with no regrets. “I learned a lot the year I was out” was the way he justified it. “I learned a lot about my failings.” He settled back into the routine of the yard, back into the work of preheated metal and deep tanks and hot money and high money. In a bountiful year, with the overtime still flowing from carrier work, he made almost $45,000, but at that point there already was the churn of uncertainty.

  By 1990, the rumors plaguing the yard were all over the place. Mangan neither dismissed them nor listened too closely until 1991, when in his capacity as a shop steward for the boilermakers’ union, he traveled to Washington with a contingent of local labor officials. All that day they talked to members of Congress, and it became abundantly clear to Mangan that not only did the navy want the yard closed but it had really wanted the yard closed twenty years earlier. He returned from Washington with a feeling in his heart that few others shared or at least shared publicly. He went about his work, but the pride he had once felt came to be replaced by the sensation of knowing that as far as his livelihood was concerned, he was living on borrowed time.

  In his stronger moments, as if trying to talk himself into what he was saying, he claimed he had worked out a scenario for himself whereby, if he didn’t find another job before the yard closed, he would take the severance pay that was offered, run through the unemployment that he was entitled to, and go on welfare. Given the state of the economy, he said he wasn’t bothered by that. There had been a certain point in his life when he had perhaps drunk a little bit more than he should have, and he had realized the degree to which his life had been guided by fear—fear of failure, fear of ridicule. After he stopped drinking, he also changed the pattern of his life. “I don’t worry,” he said. “I live one day at a time. I’ve lived from one paycheck to the next for so long I don’t know anything else.” But at other times—particularly down at the yard when everybody was waiting for the next overhaul to come in and the trickle of work was so damn slow that all you had was time on your hands to think, to think about all the things you never wanted to think about—he confessed to other thoughts. “In my quieter moments, it’s scary as hell.”

  He sat in the living room of his home on Haworth when he said that, and later he moved outside to sit on the front steps. He paid $21,900 for the house in 1981, and while it wasn’t exactly what he wanted, it was still a home. He could still make th
e mortgage on it, and it still offered security. Rain fell in little drops from a gray sky, and a swirl of cool air broke the heat. The block, lined with identical-looking single-family homes like the ones in a game of Monopoly, hummed and flowed with mothers and fathers and girls and boys on bikes. Jim Mangan had never sorted out how much he really liked the navy yard, but it meant a paycheck, a steady one, and it meant benefits, and it made him a good provider. It was one thing to do something else with your life because that was your choice. It was another thing to do something different with your life because you had no choice.

  Linda Mangan sat on the steps with her husband, and they were joined by their two youngest daughters. Framed in that moment, they presented a Norman Rockwell portrait of an American working-class family in the city, children interlocked in the loving arms of mother and father so as to become one, watching and laughing at the simple comings and goings on a block paved with red brick.

  It was Jim Mangan, with his own quiet and laconic wisdom, who saw the ingredient missing from it all. “What happens when all the jobs have left?”

  IV

  For the Rendell administration, in the spring of 1992 the answer to that question manifested itself not only in the fate of the navy yard but in the more immediate fate of a place called Sovereign Oil.

  In 1909, of the 264 different classifications of industry as determined by the Bureau of the Census, Philadelphia was represented by 211 of them. It led the nation in the production of hosiery and knit goods; carpets and rugs other than those made from rags; fur-felt hats; locomotives; dyed and finished textiles; shoddy; upholstery materials; streetcars; oilcloth and linoleum; sporting goods; saws; and surgical appliances and artificial limbs. The Englishman Arthur Shadwell, after completing a study of industrial life in England, Germany, and the United States, called Philadelphia “the greatest manufacturing city in the world,” and in the late 1800s a delegation of Japanese businessmen visited the city for a three-week tour of its great manufacturing plants.

  They traveled to Baldwin Locomotive on Broad, where twenty-five hundred employees churned out an engine in twenty days. They went to Cramp and Sons Steam Ship Yards, where four different vessels were being built simultaneously, and they studied tools they had never seen before: noiseless punches, extra-strength sheers, angle iron cutters. They went to Henry Disston and Sons’ Saw Manufactory at Front and Laurel Streets and marveled over the use of emery stone for polishing. They went to Excelsior Brick Works at Broad and Germantown, where nine large kilns produced seventy thousand bricks a day. They went to J. B. Lippincott and Company, publishers and booksellers, on Market above Seventh Street, where sixteen presses were in simultaneous motion, and they especially admired the machines that were being used for folding, automatic cutting, embossing, and stamping. Everywhere they went in the city, they saw something unparalleled in the fields of manufacturing and production, something you could find only in a city that was teeming with the marvelous twins of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. When a salesman at Lippincott asked the Japanese whether they might like a copy of the British translation of Simonin’s Science of Mines, Metallurgy, and Engineering, they declined.

  “No, no,” replied one of the guests. “We want only American books on American engineering. We want everything American.”

  Baldwin Locomotive wasn’t in the city anymore. Neither was Cramp and Sons. Neither was Disston. In 1909, Philadelphia was the largest manufacturer of textiles in the entire world, and one third of all wage earners in the city worked in some area of the field. By 1992, employment in the textile and apparel industry had shrunk to a minuscule thirteen thousand, or 2 percent of the city’s total employment. Given the trend of the last decade, when eighty-eight thousand manufacturing jobs, or two out of every five, were lost, it was apparent that the decline would only continue. The Workshop of the World had become the Manufacturing Mausoleum of the World.

  Sovereign Oil, an abandoned industrial site about two miles north of City Hall in what was known as the American Street Business Corridor, embodied the futility and the tragedy of the city’s manufacturing death. On a Thursday morning in the middle of May 1992, in a rare break from the business of the budget and union negotiations, nine people were deep in a summit at the mayor’s conference table. They spoke in the blunt and agitated tones of an emergency about which something has to be done and done right away. Sovereign Oil had been in the business of buying shipments of oil in bulk, blending the oil, and then selling it as various byproducts. But then, in May 1990, the company closed and filed for bankruptcy, and the place became a horrifying mess with an eight-foot bouillabaisse of oil and water flooding the basement.

  The city tried vainly to get Sovereign’s owners to clean up the site. But the efforts only underscored the utter impotence of a system of laws and rules and procedures that seemed designed to provide city bureaucrats with jobs and private lawyers with fees. The city’s Fire Department, Law Department, Department of Licenses and Inspections, Commerce Department, Water Department, and Managing Director’s Office were all involved at various stages, and the collective result of their warnings and citations for code violations and threats against an owner who was apparently too broke to pay a fine but too rich to drive anything less than a Mercedes, had been little. The judge hearing a civil suit filed by the city against Sovereign had ordered fines and the removal of materials that might cause an explosion or a fatal injury, but according to records, little had been done.

  When in May of 1992 the situation had finally become enough of a crisis for the mayor’s office to get involved, at least four fires the previous month had been set to rubbish that had been dumped around the exterior of the building. The interior had become a clubhouse for crack users and prostitutes. There were so many leaks in general that oil routinely seeped through the walls of the building. Every time it rained, oil bubbled from the ground as in the opening scene of The Beverly Hillbillies and trickled into the nearby Delaware. Oil byproducts also spilled into the street, causing at least one car crash.

  Two days after that summit meeting, on a gray, rain-soaked morning, Cohen, City Council President John Street, and other public officials visited Sovereign to assure neighbors and local businesspeople that the site would finally be cleaned up regardless of who had to pay for it. In 1910, when Philadelphia had been at the height of its manufacturing glory, the building and site had been used as an engine house by the Reading Railroad. Eighty-two years later the yard outside was filled with discarded tires. At one point, a fence had been put around the property to prevent such dumping, but in a city where people scavenged for parts and supplies they could not afford, the fence had quickly been stolen, and the pile of tires had just multiplied. Thick lumps of asbestos insulation, syruped with oil, lay in a corner of the loading dock. Tiny shreds of green and clear beer-bottle glass covered much of the surface, along with a sock, a Marlboro box, a single work glove, a can of Blackjack roach and ant spray, and a margarine box. The interior of the building was huge and pitch-black once the natural light from the loading dock fell away. Like an underground cave, its shape and circumference were impossible to fathom, as if it might have gone on for miles. The only sound came from the rainwater seeping in through holes and cracks in the roof and drawing puddles around hundreds of little caps that had once been used to seal bottles of motor oil. There was little to see in the absence of light, and yet there was something mesmerizing about that darkened cavity, a hope that if you stood before it long enough and stared into its emptiness, you might gain some explanation of how something like this had been created and perpetuated in what was supposedly the world’s most advanced society.

  No, no. We want only American books on American engineering. We want everything American.

  Had those foreign visitors been standing on the loading dock of Sovereign Oil, watching those little caps float in the rainwater like drowning bugs, what would they have thought of America and the once great city that had embodied it now?

&n
bsp; There was a bitter irony about a city’s being forced to pay even a cent for the cleanup of an industrial site that far from providing a decent wage for a single resident had only created havoc. Rendell knew that the fundamental issue underlying the future of the city, his city now, was jobs—how to hold on to the ones that were still there, how to create new ones. Even in his short span in office, a mere four months, he had become remarkably effective at pumping hope into the veins of the citizenry. And more than just hope, there had been progress, the likes of which had not been seen in nearly forty years.

  As it turned out, the five-year plan for the restoration of the city’s financial health that Cohen and White and others had worked so hard over had not been for naught. After an exhaustive review, in which every assertion had been challenged and reviewed and then challenged again, it was approved by the persnickety faces of the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority. Toward the end of May, $475 million in bonds was issued on behalf of the city, and a major rating agency actually increased the city’s credit rating, placing it at a level reserved for speculative investments instead of at one reserved for investments that are in imminent risk of default. PHILADELPHIA IS NEARING SOLVENCY said the headline in The New York Times, and Randall M. Miller, a professor of history at St. Joseph’s University, called the city’s turnaround “downright startling.” But the need was still voracious.