A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  Shortly after that meeting, in May 1992, the federal government took over the housing authority on the grounds that it was in “flagrant substantial default of its obligation … to provide decent, safe, and sanitary dwellings.” It was a stunning act, the largest takeover of a public-housing authority in the history of the federal government, and for a one-year period, HUD assumed control of all the authority’s functions, including hiring, firing, and daily management. The appointed board that had run the authority in the past was still there, but only in an advisory capacity.

  True to what Smerconish and Rendell had spoken about privately, a plan was put into effect to reorganize the authority, fire the worst managers, and hire the best managers available on the basis of merit. But the urgency for change that had seized the authority, based on the idea that an institution sustained by $200 million a year in taxpayers’ money had some accountability to those taxpayers, quickly sank in the all too familiar racial flogging that had already made effective management nearly impossible. Tenant leaders claimed that the hiring process was racially biased against blacks, and in January of 1993 the accusations were so intense and furious that a memo was faxed to Cohen listing those who had been hired at the authority as part of the reorganization. The list did not give any insight into their qualifications, what they could do or could not do, their strengths and weaknesses and sources of expertise. Instead, next to each name were two rows: one listed the person’s race, and the other listed his or her sex.

  It was the issue of race that had set the stage for the memorable exchange between Smerconish and Congressman Blackwell. Tenant leaders in particular were incensed by the firing of two individuals they had supported, so they did what came naturally to them: they ran to the congressman. And the congressman went to the mayor and waved the race card in front of him like a gigantic Fourth of July flag.

  “Someone has given the appearance, even inadvertently racial, that we’re letting go of Afro-Americans while hiring Caucasians” came Blackwell’s squawky voice over the speaker phone. As a result, both he and City Council President Street wanted the hiring process stopped.

  Smerconish balked. For more than a decade, every politician in the city had clamored for radical change at the authority, and now that it was happening, why was it necessary to go through this? It wasn’t possible to please everyone in a purge such as this, and the process had already been the subject of a federal court challenge and had been deemed fair and reasonable. The two people in question weren’t let go because of racism. They were let go because they were no longer found qualified for their jobs, and the person presiding over the process, the special master appointed by HUD to run the authority in the aftermath of the takeover, was himself black. Halting the process, even temporarily, would smack of the political favoritism and meddling that had made the agency such a hopeless morass. In addition, tenant leaders themselves had said repeatedly that the authority needed to be reshaped.

  In trying to make his point with Blackwell, Smerconish used the analogy of the person who repeatedly says that it’s time to clean up Congress, just as long as his favorite congressman goes unscathed. “Throw the bums out, but not my congressman.”

  Rendell rolled his eyes. He knew that of all the analogies that could have been uttered at that precise moment, using the infinite variety of words in the English language, this was the very worst.

  “Why’d you say Congress?” snapped Blackwell over the phone.

  The screaming of Blackwell and Smerconish just got louder and louder. Blackwell said that a mistake had been made in letting Smerconish, a Republican appointee under George Bush, stay on now that a Democrat was in the White House.

  “I’m not backing off!” screamed Smerconish. “If you don’t believe I deserve to be here, have me terminated!”

  “I know we made a mistake when we asked you to stay on!” the congressman screamed back.

  “Any racial charge is not going to get landed on my doorstep!” Smerconish screamed back.

  “I’m the reason that he’s there! I’m the reason that he’s there!” the congressman screamed back.

  Ever the conciliator, Rendell suggested that a meeting be held in the city in several days to resolve the hiring dispute. He mentioned the names of those who should be present but omitted Blackwell’s.

  “Why would you meet with them and not me?” snapped Blackwell. “I’m the congressman!”

  Rendell gently said he assumed that Blackwell would be in Washington and therefore unavailable.

  Blackwell, still firmly on the side of the tenant leaders, hung up in a huff, and Rendell, initially at least, offered an idea on how to proceed: “My thought is to machine-gun them all.”

  He said he had every belief that the right decisions had been made in the reorganization process. But in subsequent days, he shifted and ultimately threw his weight behind a moratorium on it. Terrified of creating any fissure in the fragile coalition that he had established with the city’s black politicians and aware that one false move could land him a black challenger in 1995, when his term ended, he wavered. And he did the same later in the week when the two finalists for the post of executive director of the authority were interviewed.

  From one standpoint, Rendell could understand the threatened feelings of the tenant leaders and the threatened feelings of the black politicians. He knew the history of race in the city, how blacks had been all but disfranchised until the early 1980s, when the city had elected its first black mayor. From another standpoint, he could see the tender cheek of a baby, jagged and permanently scarred by a radiator that never, ever shut off, not in the dead of winter, not in the heat of the summer. He could walk into the Cambridge Plaza high-rise where that baby lived and go past the concrete of the dimly lit lobby, where urine had soaked into the corners. He could feel the chill of riding up an elevator that had become the perfect setting for robberies and walk past the filthy stairwells and the green walls covered with graffiti. He could enter an apartment that was dark and impervious to light and walk into one of the bedrooms and find kids splayed across a bed like winter coats, barely paying attention to a television sitcom, trapped inside because their mother was too scared to let them play outside. He would know he had no choice but to do whatever was necessary regardless of politics, regardless of anything, to help that mother.

  The two finalists for the executive director’s job had been chosen after a long and exhaustive search. One of them, Benjamin Quattlebaum, was the executive director of the Camden, New Jersey, Housing Authority. The other, David Gilmore, was executive director of the San Francisco Housing Authority. In terms of credentials and experience, Gilmore was clearly the better choice. But the credentials that were not on paper—Gilmore was white and Quattlebaum black—became as much a part of the selection process as anything else, although they were never made part of the public dialogue.

  Michael Smerconish had unusual poise for someone his age. Although only thirty, he rarely stammered in front of politicians, and he had held his own in the screaming match with Congressman Blackwell, except that his white dress shirt had turned soggy with sweat. Meeting in private with the mayor to discuss the housing-authority job, he made it clear that Gilmore was a far better candidate, not only in terms of experience but in his ability to handle the rough waters of public-housing politics. But there was also a problem, and that’s when he began to stammer a little bit. “The biggest thing against him,” he said, and then he paused, as if scanning the mayor’s office to make sure no one was hiding behind one of the plants, “he’s white. The tenants will go bat shit if it’s Gilmore. They can live with Quattlebaum.”

  Rendell interviewed Gilmore later that afternoon and seemed more sold on him than ever and said the job of executive director was his if he wanted it, regardless of whatever pressure was mounted by black politicians or tenant leaders. “Fuck it,” he said. “We just can’t be chickens.”

  Gilmore’s tenure in San Francisco had not been unblemished. A HUD aud
it had questioned whether the authority’s self-evaluation had been inflated. But under Gilmore’s tenure, the San Francisco Housing Authority had been removed from HUD’s infamous troubled list, and the San Francisco Examiner noted in an editorial that Gilmore has “brought the troubled agency into the black, he has pared the vacancy rate down to less than 1 percent, helped reduce the crime rate and improved the authority’s relationship with the feds.”

  “It’s hard to refute that Examiner editorial,” Rendell noted, and he also got assurances from several HUD officials in Washington, who promised to say complimentary things about Gilmore if contacted by the local media.

  But several days later Rendell wavered once again, in part because of a concern that Gilmore might be too headstrong for his own good, but in larger part because of the politics of race. It was relayed to him that Council President Street was very concerned about his picking a white executive director, given all the recent controversy over the reorganization of the authority and the reaction that tenant leaders would have to such a choice. The mayor’s gung-ho endorsement of Gilmore suddenly became lukewarm, and Gilmore, twisting in the wind, withdrew from consideration. That left Quattlebaum, who was deemed too inexperienced for a job as difficult as this one. So that left no one, the agency as fraught with politics and infighting as it had ever been, the lives of the residents continuing to suffer. An interim executive director was chosen, but he was just that, an interim executive director. By the end of March 1993, the housing authority was still in disarray. The vaunted reorganization had ground to a halt, and in the past year the vacancy rate had climbed from 20 to 25 percent.

  From the darkness of apartment 3C in Cambridge Plaza, Gaynell Gillespie couldn’t begin to sort out all the Byzantine politics of the housing authority. No one could, not even those who worked there. But she intuitively knew what it represented. “To me, the city is goin’ haywire,” she said. “The city is goin’, I don’t know, it’s letting down a lot of young people to me. They look at us, they don’t respect grown-ups, and why should they?”

  The issue of the housing authority would not disappear. In the coming months, Ed Rendell would have to deal with it again, in ways that he had never dreamed of when he took the oath of mayor, and the impulse to run from it would be stronger than ever. But in May of 1993, as a gray and drab winter gave way to a kind and gentle spring, the mayor’s focus drifted to other issues.

  The circus wasn’t coming to town, but the president of the United States was.

  11

  Urban Sacrifice

  I

  The air transport carrying the president would be on the tarmac of the Philadelphia International Airport in less than an hour, but members of the mayor’s staff had already been emotionally depleted by the mercurial changes in plans that were a feature of the Clinton presidency and by the way in which these changes were communicated—by advance people who greeted everyone with frozen smiles of superiority and stiffness.

  In the preceding twelve years, Ronald Reagan and George Bush had visited the city on several occasions. They had known where they wanted to go, who should be on the tarmac to greet them when they arrived, who should be in the little row of chairs behind them on the podium when they gave their speeches, which contributors they had to acknowledge to keep the pump primed. For Clinton’s staff, the simplest decision became a crisis of indecision, with everyone but the president scurrying about below. The president will go here. No, scratch that. The president will now go here. No, scratch that. No, the president will go back to where you suggested he go in the first place. Start planning for it. And that’s final. Until you hear from us otherwise. The president wants this person on the podium. No, forget that person. Well, maybe that person is OK after all. No, maybe not.

  By the time of the appointed visit, certain members of the mayor’s staff were cursing, swearing, and showing total exasperation with the changing dictates. They were also nervous and excited. After all, a visit by the president, however torturous it was to plan for, was still an important event. Only one member of the mayor’s staff rose above the swirl of chaos and seemed oblivious to the Secret Service requirement that the shades in his office be drawn as a security precaution against snipers. He didn’t find it the least bit noteworthy when the trained dog sniffed his office for explosive devices. Instead, he sat at his desk, working the phones, reading documents, not looking up at the person who was there for a meeting with him.

  “I’ll keep talking while you keep not listening,” she said.

  He still didn’t look up.

  When Sergeant Buchanico came in afterward and asked whether he was going to the airport to meet the president, his answer was a flat no, as if the very idea of the question—leave his office to greet the president?—were preposterous. Who did the president think he was? The president?

  “All I want to do is get some work done,” said David Cohen, in the hope that he might be able to take at least one day off during the upcoming Memorial Day weekend. “And it doesn’t even have to be contiguous.”

  Sergeant Buchanico looked at him in understandable puzzlement. What the hell was a contiguous day off? What the hell wasn’t a contiguous day off?

  “That means a half day Saturday and a half day Sunday.”

  Buchanico just got up and left. What possible use was there in trying to understand?

  * * *

  Across the hallway, Mayor Rendell was going to the airport to meet the president. It was a matter of protocol, but it was also more important than that. As the motorcade made its way to City Hall, where the president would give a speech, Rendell would have twenty minutes of precious private time in which to bring up the issues that he believed were of the utmost importance to the city and the ways in which the federal government could help realize that agenda. The list was potentially endless, and everybody had an idea of how best to maximize the time. Even if the route of the motorcade had been from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia, Mississippi, Rendell could have kept on going. But in the modern era of politics, where photo ops and sound bites fed to the masses set the standard, twenty minutes of private time with the president was a millennium, and the mayor had to be judicious.

  The weeks preceding the president’s visit had been particularly grim and unremitting, even for the city. The Senate had killed a jobs bill President Clinton had proposed, meaning a loss to the city of as much as $70 million. The failure of the bill in the Senate came in the wake of news that the city had lost 17,700 jobs in the previous year. On top of that, there was a report by the National Association of Realtors that housing prices had dropped more precipitously in the metropolitan area than in any other region of the country in the past year—by 9 percent. And on top of that, there was a report that seven million square feet of office space in Center City was vacant. Ten entire buildings had been mothballed, and the vacancy rate in the downtown area was at its highest in nearly fifteen years.

  As if in response to the grim economic news, the city expressed dissatisfaction, not with the intensity of the wrenching days after the death of Robbie Burns in Kensington but in ways that were chilling in their lawlessness. At the beginning of May, on a quiet Sunday, a man named Santiago Pineda, tired of the drug dealers in his neighborhood, tried to chase them from the front of his home on North Eighth and Pike. As a result of this act of protecting his family and his neighborhood, Pineda was ambushed, shot twice, and beaten.

  Six days later four juveniles robbed a man over on Torresdale. There was nothing unusual in that, but then, after fighting over who was going to share in the meager spoils, they went back to their victim several minutes later, realized he was intoxicated, and sensed an opportunity: they poured some clear liquid over him, set his hair on fire, and then ran off laughing as the flames quickly spread to his head and shoulders. The coup de grâce—the lighting of the first match—said the police, was administered by a fourteen-year-old.

  A day after that, Mother’s Day, Rendell spent the bulk of
his time in Newark testifying before the federal government’s Base Closure and Realignment Commission, the same commission that had made the decision to close the navy yard. Rendell was there to fend off yet another potential round of military-installation closures in the city that had been recommended by the Pentagon and would mean the loss of an additional ten thousand jobs. “I understand the need to reduce the [federal] deficit,” he told the commission. “In sixteen months, we have eliminated a four-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar deficit. But the city of Philadelphia will lose more jobs than forty-seven states. This would cut us off at the knees at a time when we’re just getting on our feet.”

  There would be no word on the fate of those jobs until the end of June, but twelve days after Rendell’s Mother’s Day testimony, the city was told that construction of a proposed $200-million General Services Administration building had been canceled. The news made Rendell livid. Not only would the construction project have been an enormous boon for the moribund building and trades industries, but the cancellation also raised the question of whether the city, beyond the obstacles it already faced, was being willfully pushed closer and closer to a state of impotence. It wasn’t a matter of complete extinction because there would always be a downtown. Given the building boom of the 1980s, there would be enough skyscrapers to last until well into the twenty-first century. There would be quaint shops along Walnut and a renaissance of restaurants and the newly constructed Pennsylvania Convention Center and jaunty shuttle buses painted purple to take conventioneers to the city’s favored attractions and men and women in uniform cleaning the streets. Mayors everywhere, sensing the changing tide of the economics of cities and seizing on tourism and entertainment dollars from conventioneers and suburbanites as the new solution, had restocked their downtowns so they never looked better. But it was often deceptive, a brocade curtain hiding a crumbling stage set.