Sovereign might have been the worst of the city’s abandoned sites, but it wasn’t the only one. There were thousands of vacant sites, and outside the womb of Center City they were as easy to find as crack vials or cigarette butts. Rendell also knew that the effects of vacant lots and vacant factories could be more than simply dispiriting. In certain working-class neighborhoods—the ones that had gained the most from the city’s manufacturing legacy and had lost the most in its decline—a single isolated act in the heat of Rendell’s first summer as mayor could turn into something combustible. And deadly. And irreversible.
4
The Racial Trifecta
I
It was a summer night in July 1992, one of those nights so thick with heat it was hard to breathe, as the mayor made his way to a grimy gymnasium in a neighborhood as far away from the nerve of City Hall as a crumbling fort in the ruins. The route he took, beginning at a boxy hotel on the straight edges of suburbia, was transformed into a painful communion of what was no longer there and what had somehow managed to survive—red zigzags of graffiti on a boarded-up doorway underneath a stone inscription commemorating the St. Joseph’s Home for Orphaned Boys; the bruised red brick of the stillborn Penn Ventilator Company rising to nowhere in the stench of the heat; tidy lines of trash underneath a bridge at Allegheny, as if someone had taken the time to arrange them. And then into the shut-off, shut-out neighborhood known as Kensington, at Allegheny and F, where women in tank tops stared from the narrow doorways of the brick row houses and kids with hair as slick as seal coats sucked down cigarettes. They briefly looked up when the mayor’s car came down the street. They saw Rendell through the dull sheen of the window, and they gestured to one another almost in a special sign language indigenous to the neighborhood, and they pointed in the direction of his car. They didn’t wave and they didn’t smile, but they looked almost bemused, as if a fat possum had just been sighted sniffing for food.
The mayor’s coming to Kensington because someone got killed. He’s going to preach peace and harmony, tell us how we have to get along with the spics who are taking over goddamn everything, just like they told us we had to get along with the niggers.
Big fucking deal, Mr. Mayor. Big fucking deal.
II
Robbie Burns worked part-time at a pharmacy in Kensington. He had recently gotten his degree in radiation technology and was now planning to take graduate courses. At six feet five inches, he was taller than the others who hung out at the corner of Rorer and Westmoreland on Saturday nights, and that may have given him an aura of toughness. But to those who knew him, that wasn’t at all a distinguishing characteristic of Robbie Burns. He stood out not because of his size but because, unlike so many others, he was planning a career and saw hanging out on the corner as a way of passing time, not a way of life. As a friend of his put it, “He was the only one who made it out of here.”
Sometimes the whites who hung out at Rorer and Westmoreland just hung out. Other times they drank more than they should have from their open containers. Occasionally they engaged with the Latinos who came upon the corner and were equally ready to rumble. The conflicts between the two groups had to do with the unwritten laws of the playground and the territory of the street corner, who had the right to be there and who did not. But the root of it lay in the joblessness and hopelessness of a city neighborhood that now engaged in the endless no-win contest of who the hell to blame it all on, working-class whites pitted against Hispanics, Hispanics pitted against working-class whites in a game of who had more of a right to nothing.
It was somewhere around 4:00 A.M. when a brown car, maybe a Chevy, maybe a Buick, appeared near the corner of Rorer and Westmoreland. Two Hispanics exited from the car and engaged in a fight with various whites who were hanging on the corner. There were also indications that one or both of the Latinos may have been struck in the head with bottles. They got back into their car, but they weren’t finished, and once Robbie Burns realized what was happening, once he saw the outline of the gun in the lowered window, he pushed a younger friend out of the way to avoid the line of fire.
The police radio call about the shooting went out at 4:00 A.M., the scratchy syncopation of the words sounding like a thin cover of tin on a boiling cauldron, revealing everything and nothing at the same time.
“Man with a gun, shooting, hospital case.”
The first patrol car arrived at the corner of Rorer and Westmoreland at 4:04 A.M., four minutes from radio call to arrival, and it is there the officers found Robbie Burns, his frame sprawled on the sidewalk, a single bullet buried in the right side of his head. Burns was rushed by a rescue squad to Temple Hospital, and doctors well versed in the mortality of blood and bullets worked feverishly on him, but their efforts didn’t matter because Robbie Burns was dying.
Within the neighborhood of Rorer and Westmoreland, pandemonium and hysteria erupted. Shortly after the shooting, officers at a nearby hospital observed two Hispanic males entering the emergency room for treatment of head wounds. Witnesses in the Burns shooting were immediately transported to the hospital, where they identified the men as the ones involved. They also identified a vehicle in the hospital parking lot as the getaway car. But it actually belonged to a nurse on duty at the hospital that night. And the suspects they fingered with such quickness were quickly able to prove to detectives that they had nothing to do with the shooting. It seemed clear they had been fingered merely because they were Latinos, and the police had no choice but to release them.
At 8:25 A.M. that Sunday, Robbie Burns was pronounced dead.
News of his cold-blooded killing moved quickly across the tight webs of Kensington. So did news of the release of the two Latinos, but without the police justification for their release. A crowd of about fifty people gathered at the corner of Rorer and Westmoreland on Sunday morning in protest. They were peaceful and dispersed after about an hour. At about 2:30 P.M., another crowd gathered, this one loud and unruly. The demonstrators started marching, and before police had time to seal off the area effectively, a blue Mazda moved westbound on Allegheny in their direction. The driver was a twenty-four-year-old Hispanic named Michael Rosato, and with him were his wife and six-year-old son. He could have turned around when he saw the crowd, but he did not, and so set himself on a direct collision course with the demonstrators. His car was engulfed. His windshield was smashed. Shots erupted from inside the car. One man was hit in the left thigh, another in the stomach, another in the buttocks. Rosato sped off with police in pursuit. When he was stopped, the officers found a .38-caliber silver revolver underneath the seat.
In less then twenty-four hours, four whites had now been shot in Kensington, one of them fatally. Wild rumors sped everywhere; building in intensity were the accusations that the police had actually had in custody but let go the two suspects in the Robbie Burns shooting. The demonstrators, unsteady and unpredictable on account of youth and drink, refused to disperse. “If they love Puerto Rico, send them back to Puerto Rico. I’m tired of our boys lying on the street,” someone said. Desperate to get the crowd to go home, a contingent of five police officers went to Robbie Burns’s home and asked relatives to come and speak to the crowd.
“Robbie don’t want this,” said Burns’s stepfather. “Please go home. I beg you, go home.”
His words calmed the crowd to some degree, but they also wanted the mayor. Through an intermediary, Rendell agreed to meet with the community the following night, giving him twenty-four hours to defuse the feelings of anger and alienation and disfranchisement that had been building in Kensington over weeks and months and years, allowing him time to negotiate the narrow racial tightrope strung between working-class white and Hispanic and to appeal to all, to try to convince them that they all live under the roof of one city, despite the almost inevitable result that at least one side would feel betrayal and outrage.
Even without the shootings, this was an area of the city that had been tired and turned off by the endless parade of politicia
ns whose promises were never kept. With the shootings, the odds of reaching any kind of common ground with the white working-class residents seemed impossible. At best, they would not listen. At worst, they would mercilessly heckle him and boo him off the stage while the entire city press corps licked its fingers. And in the meantime, during the twenty-four hour reprieve that he had been given, there might be more killings, more vigilante justice at the point of a gun. He needed a miracle, something that would reduce the heat and divert attention.
Ed Rendell was not a particularly religious man. He was Jewish only in the most nominal sense, and he looked forward to various Jewish holidays not because of their religious significance but because they meant he had a valid excuse to stay home. In his office one spring, he voiced his own version of the Four Questions of the Passover seder by asking, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” and then answering with a refrain of “the NCAA finals.”
But he still knew better than anyone else the powers of divine intervention.
III
In the city that Lincoln Steffens had also called “the most American of our greater cities,” no area embodied the tradition of industry and the white working class better than Kensington, with row house and church steeple and narrow street and the El and the spew of factory smokestacks all within its boundaries. The first American textile mill opened in Kensington. So did the country’s first building and loan association. Around 1900, close to 100,000 people filled its row-house corridors, an assemblage of Irish, English, Scottish, and German immigrants pocketed in a neighborhood two miles northeast of the grand spire of City Hall, and the estimated worth of its manufactured products was said to be $100 million annually. “A City Within a City,” touted one local booster, “filled to the brim with enterprise, dotted with factories so numerous that the rising smoke obscures the sky.… A happy and contented people, enjoying a land of plenty.”
It wasn’t nearly as rosy as that. Conditions were often brutal, but one thing Kensington always promised was work, its factories alive with what America wanted and could get only from the American city: novelty toys and miniature pianos and beer and textiles and carpet and dyed goods and gingham and diapers and hosiery and yarn and silk upholstery. By 1920, the population had ballooned to 155,000, and Kensington led all American cities in the value of its carpets, rugs, hosiery, and knit goods.
With the Depression and the postwar shift in factory production from the gritty neighborhoods of the cities to the placid suburbs and the South and the third world, the steady might of Kensington began to crack. The multistory factories built there weren’t desired anymore. In the age of automated mass production and robotic assembly lines, they were unwieldy and technologically obsolete. Businesses wanted plentiful space for factories that the suburbs could easily supply. They also wanted to avoid the contentiousness of unions. The population of the area, which in 1950 was 149,000, dropped to 95,000 in 1990, a loss of 36 percent. The factories that reflected the very heart of the area, its very essence, were abandoned.
For much of its history, race had not been much of an issue in Kensington, largely because of its refusal to accept blacks. There were blacks who worked there in the mills and the factories, but as author Peter Binzen noted in Whitetown, U.S.A., they weren’t likely to be assaulted as long as they observed the unofficial curfew and were out before sundown. But in the 1960s, as the dynamics of race in the city changed and the percentage of blacks in the population multiplied, Kensington reacted violently. In October 1966, after a black family rented a home near a local high school, there were five nights of riots. The family ultimately moved away, but the issue of race in Kensington did not. Between 1980 and 1990, the Latino population of Kensington and the adjoining neighborhood of Fishtown increased by more than 40 percent while the number of whites decreased by nearly 14 percent.
In looking for ways to displace their anger and frustration, young whites in Kensington seized upon Hispanics as the culprits, and Hispanics all too willingly returned the fire. It was one thing to have to share the neighborhood with them, and as long as they never crossed the invisible border of Front Street, things would be OK. But it was another to watch them encroach upon their playgrounds and favored street corners as if they somehow had a right to be there, particularly when these were the only reliable institutions they had left. “Scum.” “Animals.” “Not human.” That was the way some of the young whites referred to Hispanics. In response to Hispanic encroachment, a group called the Swoop Troop was formed, a kind of makeshift SWAT team. SPICS GO HOME said giant-size graffiti on a wall.
In the early 1950s, a sociologist named Peter Rossi had visited Kensington to do research for a book he was writing on why people move, and he found, much to his amazement, that residents of Kensington did not want to move despite its dearth of amenities. He found the loyalty to it astounding and the rituals of the place—buying soft pretzels under the El, going to soccer games over at the Lighthouse Field—had a hold that was almost spiritual. But over time, that sense changed—a neighborhood in the city that was no longer a place to live in but a place to escape from if you were somehow lucky enough to have the means of escape. “Kensington today is a passed-over, deteriorated, forgotten section of industrial Philadelphia,” wrote Jean Seder in a book called Voices of Kensington. “Almost all the mills have gone. They’ve moved South, or gone out of business. Periodically the children set fire to the empty shells of factories, and the city levels the ruins into another empty lot.”
IV
Rendell did not equivocate, nor, unlike some politicians, did he seem the slightest bit insulted by it. Placing himself in their own shoes for a moment, he wondered why anyone in Kensington would be remotely happy to see him. He could make a few promises, increase the presence of the police, repair a basketball net, and patch up a rec center roof. But how could he do what was needed most—make the echoes of those factories and mills into real sounds again? If it were just he and a group of public officials up on the stage of the McVeigh Recreation Center gym tonight, the crowd would be inclined to scream and yell, heap the legacies and histories of their anger on him.
That’s why he called the cardinal.
“I don’t know these people as well as you do, but I know them from my days as district attorney,” said Rendell in a meeting with advisers in City Hall that Monday morning. “They probably don’t believe in God, but they are not one hundred percent sure.”
Several hours later Rendell spoke with Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua over the phone and made his pitch for accompaniment. “We have an enormously difficult problem in the Kensington area. Essentially what it is is a recurring problem; it’s Hispanic and white. It’s a very, very explosive situation. These are the hardest hit whites in the city of Philadelphia, and they blame their problems on minorities, which is not correct. They share everything in common with minorities in confronting problems.”
Bevilacqua, the head of the archdiocese of Philadelphia, said he would be happy to attend the meeting and asked for some background material.
“Sure,” said Rendell, thoroughly up-to-date on the changes in modern religion. “What’s your fax number?”
The mayor and the cardinal met secretly in front of the Ascension of Our Lord Church on Westmoreland Street at about 8:00 P.M. Rendell quietly exited his car and then, as in one of those films about Mafia informants, slid into the backseat of the cardinal’s before anyone knew what was really going on. During the short trip to the gym, the cardinal was relaxed and pleasant, his one major concern his breath, since he had just eaten a large Italian dinner with lots of garlic.
The gym was packed when they got there, a sea of white—about five hundred people pushed against the grimy green walls, women with puckered faces and sweaty brows and blond hairdos as hilly as the moguls of a mountain, men in baseball caps and droopy mustaches and fleshy arms with a dollop of a tattoo near the blade of the shoulder. Initially the gambit of the cardinal paid off. As soon as he walked in,
there were oohs and ahs and breathless greetings of “Your Eminence!” He received a standing ovation, and his initial words helped to soothe the crowd. “To correct an evil or injustice, you don’t perform another evil. Wrong does not correct wrong. We are all Christians, and we know the message of Jesus Christ.… We are called on to be people of peace. Each of us must be peacemakers.”
Rendell spoke as well, and his words too seemed to have a positive effect, in large part because of their lack of pretense and bombast. “We’re not going to come here tonight and promise the things that we cannot do. If you hear us say we will do something tonight, we will do it. If we keep fighting each other, keep killing each other, wasting our time on things like that, this city doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of turning things around.”
The crowd seemed both dazzled and wooed by the duo of the cardinal in his impeccable vestments of red and white and the Jewish mayor in the creases of a blue suit, and their odd-couple fox-trot seemed to be working in an area of the city where outsiders, any outsiders, were almost never embraced. But then other public officials spoke, and the mood dissolved, the illusory moment of a united city unfettered by race and class giving way to the very rawness of race and class that now seemed destined to divide it eternally.
A Prayer for the City Page 12