Several weeks later Congress and the president did come to an agreement on an urban-aid package. It wasn’t the $35 billion that the U.S. Conference of Mayors believed was necessary, nor was it the far more modest $4 billion to $5 billion advocated by Rendell. It was $1 billion, the majority of which would go to Los Angeles for riot relief and to Chicago for relief from a downtown flood. A $5 billion urban-aid package was then passed by the House over the summer, this one containing fifty enterprise zones. The amount to be spent was to be spread over six years. But as a compromise, only twenty-five of the enterprise zones would actually be in urban areas; the rest would be in rural ones. The bill, said The New York Times in an editorial, “spreads money too thinly, in an obvious attempt to buy support.” But it didn’t matter. Shortly after his loss to Clinton, Bush vetoed the bill.
As America’s newest president, Clinton might be different, or he might not be. Rendell was enormously fond of him personally, and the president at least talked about cities as if they had a place somewhere in American society. But Clinton was still subject to the rigors of a Congress focused on the suburban middle class, and although he seemed inclined to test the theory of enterprise zones in a way that was bold and might actually accomplish something, there was no national mandate for a far-reaching urban policy. Cities were not rioting, despite Maynard Jackson’s prediction. Their neighborhoods were just continuing to fall apart, the schism between the poor who lived in the cities and the wealthy who lived in the hidden fringes, in palatial hills and gated communities, wider than ever. What a mayor could gain for his city, if he or she could gain anything, seemed largely dependent on the rapport established with the president. Appeals and fiery, impassioned rhetoric about America’s moral imperative to save its cities seemed out of touch. To the contrary, the history of federal policy, with the exception of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society days of the middle 1960s, had proved that America felt no such moral imperative whatsoever. The best a mayor could hope for were stopgaps to staunch the bleeding every now and then—a conversation with the president not about saving the city, but about saving something within it.
At the end of June 1993, a month after Rendell made his pitch to the president to save those ten thousand defense jobs, the mayor gathered with a hundred politicians, workers, and reporters around an eighteen-inch television set in the City Hall Reception Room. They were there to witness live on C-SPAN the Base Closure and Realignment Commission’s decision on the fate of those jobs, and it was an eerie moment, reminiscent of the one when the commission had decided to eliminate more than seventy-five hundred jobs at the navy yard.
The commission voted, and as had been the case in the fate of the navy yard, the decisions handed down were unanimous:
Naval Aviation Supply Office—2,416 jobs: to remain open.
Defense Industrial Supply Center—1,872 jobs: to remain open.
Naval Air Technical Services Facility—200 jobs: to remain open.
Defense Personnel Support Center—3,956 jobs: to remain open.
Not all 10,000 jobs had been saved, but 8,444 had been, and every politician and every worker who had gathered around that television set knew whom to thank: the mayor of the city, grinning from ear to ear. He had no direct proof, but he was convinced that his pitch to the president had made a significant difference in the outcome of the decision.
In a series of wonderful crescendos, it was yet another wonderful crescendo, another defying of the odds, and in the back of his mind, Ed Rendell wondered whether maybe, just maybe, there was a chance for something stunning and everlasting. Fuck the federal government. Fuck those bureaucrats whose contempt for cities could barely be concealed by the smarmy glint of their smiles. Fuck those senators whose idea of urban hardship was a lumpy pillow at the Four Seasons. He and his city would do it alone, if only they got just the slightest push of help every now and then, if only there wasn’t some issue they could not control, if only confetti would fall from the sky forever.
12
The Last Sermon
I
Cohen had gotten there early and, wielding a cellular phone with balletic fluidity, had the situation fully assessed and ready for briefing by the time Rendell arrived.
“Who are the protesters?” asked the mayor as he gazed up the street. He had already seen hundreds of them during his term, but these demonstrators, given the uncharacteristic gentility with which they conducted themselves (one of their signs read, LET THEM EAT CAKE. MARIE ANTOINETTE 1798.), seemed as if they had just been brought up from the minor leagues. They were certainly not of the same caliber as the group of disabled citizens who, upset by the mayor’s refusal to spend tens of millions of dollars the city did not have on federally mandated curb cuts, had slithered off their wheelchairs right outside his office and then peed into little bottles they carried with them, thus making their removal by the police not only politically incorrect but rather messy.
“We got FOP [the police union] on the left,” said Cohen. “We got homeless right in front. We got Uhuru on the right.”
“Who’s Uhuru?” asked the mayor.
“No one,” said Cohen. “They just want publicity.”
The mayor seemed satisfied. Even the protesters were in wonderful alignment today, adding a spot of good-spirited democracy in action to the painstakingly orchestrated proceedings, and off Rendell went to make small talk with Vice President Gore in the waning moments before the dedication of the city’s new convention center. To some, like Linda Morrison, it was just a building, and a particularly wasteful building at that, built at a taxpayer cost of $522 million and subsidized by taxpayers in terms of operating costs and bond debt for years to come. But many others were hailing it as a new and wonderful dawn in the life of the city, the cornerstone of economic revival.
“It’s more than just a convention center,” said the vice president to the brimming crowd that had gathered outside. “It’s a building block for the revitalization of Philadelphia. It’s the kind of revitalization President Clinton is trying to bring about for America.”
At 11:28 A.M. on a sun-drenched Saturday at the end of June in 1993, the vice president tugged on a red ribbon to officially open the building. Fireworks shot into the sky, and like the opening of a jack-in-the-box, a high school marching band burst through a set of doors in hats and uniforms.
The scene bore inevitable comparison with another moment in the life of the city when a high-ranking public official had used the occasion of a grand opening as a symbol of something greater. Like Gore, he too had spoken on a stage filled with politicians and other dignitaries. He too had been surrounded by the swell of jaunty music. But unlike Gore, he had spoken not of hopeful revitalization, because the very suggestion of such vulnerability seemed unimaginable, but of a strength and a might the likes of which had left an entire world envious.
The city was still feeling the might of the consolidation that had made it the largest city in physical size in the entire world, drawing into its boundaries the ring of suburbs desperate for its superior services. Its population had continued to boom and thrive with no end in sight, a growth of 21 percent, or some 140,000 persons, in the six years alone since the last census was taken. New homes of vintage row-house style were being built at the rate of 6,000 a year to handle the constant influx, and with 9,000 manufactories in the city employing nearly 150,000 people, the work was always plentiful. It was a proud boast of the city that its working class was better housed than that of any other city in the world, and it was a boast that appeared to have merit, since nearly half its 130,000 dwellings had been built specifically for laborers. The waterfront thrived, with twenty-one shipping docks, twenty-three piers, and 2,000 men employed just in the daily shipment of 30,000 tons of coal. About a mile away, near Broad and Spring Garden, another 3,000 were employed at Baldwin Locomotive. The thoroughfare of Market Street was home to John Wanamaker, believed to be the largest and most complete clothing store in the entire world. Eight different railway line
s fed into the city. There were twenty-seven daily and weekly newspapers and 34,000 rooms in which to bathe while reading those papers, most of which supplied hot water.
The appointed day started off rainy and cloudy. But the sun broke through by the early morning. Six new hotels with nearly 5,000 rooms had been built expressly for the occasion, and crowds by the tens of thousands arrived at the newly built depots of the Reading and Pennsylvania Railroads. They came from Boston and New York and Baltimore and Washington and Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, but they also came from Germany and France and India and Turkey and Ireland and Japan and China, crowding the grounds with their eclectic attire, and the words of official greeting put them in a mood to celebrate.
One hundred years ago our country was new and but partially settled. Our necessities have compelled us to chiefly expend our means and time in felling forests, subduing prairies, building dwellings, factories, ships, docks, warehouses, roads, canals, and machinery. Most of our schools, churches, libraries, and asylums have been established within an hundred years. Burdened by these great primal works of necessity, which could not be delayed, we yet have done what this Exhibition will show in the direction of rivaling older and more advanced nations in law, medicine, and theology; in science, literature, philosophy, and the fine arts. Whilst proud of what we have done, we regret that we have not done more. Our achievements have been great enough, however, to acknowledge superior merit wherever found.
“I declare the International Exhibition now open,” pronounced President Ulysses Grant from the stage that had been set up in between the Main Building and Memorial Hall. It was now somewhere close to noon on May 10, 1876, and all threat of rain had disappeared for good. The flag of the United States rose up the Main Building, the largest building in the world, with a length of nearly a third of a mile, and the flags of foreign countries rose up on the other buildings. The perfect ovals of glass for the windows had come from the country’s two greatest centers of glass-making, Pittsburgh and Wheeling, West Virginia. Fountains shot cologne-scented water into the air, and a chorus and an orchestra blasted out Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus to the accompaniment of a newly built pipe organ containing 2,704 pipes and made by the great Boston firm of Hook and Hastings. A procession of four thousand, which included the president, the emperor of Brazil, and members of the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and the Cabinet, passed through the Main Building into Machinery Hall. The president and the emperor approached the platform on which was displayed an elaborate engine designed by George H. Corliss of Rhode Island—forty feet high with fourteen hundred units of horsepower, a fifty-six-ton flywheel, and twenty tubular boilers. They touched a designated lever, the flywheel turned and cranked to generate power, and within that hall five miles of machinery came to life.
The Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 had officially begun, and in the buildings spread across 236 acres in Fairmount Park in the city of Philadelphia lay example after example of the magnificence of America and the magnificence of the industrial city, a revolution in the very nature of work and mass production—an automatic shingle maker capable of making twenty-five thousand shingles in a single day; a machine for bending the stout wooden beams of ships; a ditchdigger that could dig eight cubic yards of earth per minute, or as much as a man could dig in a single day; a wallpaper machine capable of printing a roll in fifteen different colors; an envelope maker that could cut, fold, and gum 120 envelopes per minute; a machine for the manufacture of rubber-soled shoes; a cork maker that cut corks of various sizes; a tack maker that churned out four hundred tacks per minute; an automatic nail cutter.
The power loom of the United States Corset Company attracted considerable attention. So did the power looms of John Bromley and Sons of Philadelphia, capable of running off thirty-five yards of carpeting a day. So did the machine of the Pyramid Pin Company of New Haven that could stick 180,000 pins into paper in a single day. The fully automatic elevator was introduced here. So was the telephone as a tool for commercial use. Another display highlighted perhaps the country’s most valuable social contribution to the rest of the world—the public school system.
“All were at work,” a chronicler of the time wrote of that moment after President Grant and Emperor Pedro II of Brazil had set the great Corliss engine in motion. “The looms weaving their varied fabrics, the printing presses throwing off their sheets like huge snow flakes, and pumps, lathes, drills, hammers, and the wilderness of machinery, which you see around you, were humming, pounding, whirring, and clattering, a grand chorus and tribute to their unsceptered monarch.
“Industry.”
One hundred and seventeen years later, in the summer of 1993, it seemed incongruous for a convention center, even one as beautiful as this, to be the savior of the city. It seemed incongruous for the Workshop of the World to fashion a totally new wardrobe as the Host of the World, for the sound of factory machinery to be replaced by the sound of small talk around an exhibition booth, for the row houses that had gone up to house those factory workers to be replaced by the pink polish of convention hotels to house the American Society of Hematology and the National Solid Waste Management Association, for the spiritual solace of men and women coming home from a hard day’s work knowing that the labor of their hands had made something to be replaced by men and women coming home from a hard day’s work hoping that the flawlessness of their drinks and meals had pleased conventioneers from Peoria and Fargo in sufficient measure for a generous tip.
The Pennsylvania Convention Center in all likelihood was not the ultimate answer, and it might well turn out to be the taxpayer boondoggle that Linda Morrison feared. The service jobs it might generate in hotels and restaurants and stores would be of little use to someone like Jim Mangan, who had spent the bulk of his career as a ship welder, unless he reached the point of utter desperation in his search for a job. There was something painfully ironic about a city that had forged its reputation on producing nearly everything there was to produce now trying to reforge its reputation by serving as a gracious and convivial host.
But Rendell had neither the time nor the inclination to ponder such disparities. He dwelled little on the industrial history of the city, perhaps because it augered so badly for the present. Staring with dewy eyes at empty factories or dreaming of the day when cargo vessels would once again ply the waterfront was a worthless pursuit. In talking about the city’s budget problems, he said it would be wonderful to give deserving programs all the money that was desired—just as it would be wonderful for him to wear his hair in an Elvis pompadour. But the truth was he didn’t have the money, he didn’t have the hair, and the city no longer had anything remotely resembling an industrial base. In the absence of a miracle, the city had no choice but to focus on what it did have—health care, banking and legal services, tourism—the familiar anchors of the so-called service economy.
He seized on the opening of the convention center with full force, and he transformed it from just an opening into an event of enormous psychic significance, as pivotal in its own way as the era of growth that had been ushered in by the Centennial Exhibition. He believed in tourism not necessarily because it was the best answer but because it was quite literally the only one, and he envisioned a quadrangular nexus—the convention center; a Disneyesque repackaging of the city’s history, with battle reenactments and costumed Franklins, Washingtons, and Jeffersons helpfully giving tourists directions; the Avenue of the Arts along Broad Street, with its orchestra and its concert and theater halls; and riverboat gambling.
He was at his indefatigable best, furiously dishing out bread and circuses better than any emperor. Over the course of the Welcome America! celebration highlighting both the opening of the convention center and a visit by President Clinton on July Fourth to award the city’s Liberty Medal to Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk, he went to no less than fifty-two events. His enthusiasm was like that of a child celebrating a birthday over and over and over and blowin
g out the candles with more determined gusto each time. He was the mayor, and he was expected to be at events such as these, but his presence had taken on star proportions in the city.
The night before the convention-center opening, at an elaborate black-tie dinner, he entered the center’s huge exhibition hall with the vice president, and it was he who received the louder ovation. “That’s what happens when you don’t raise taxes,” he quipped with his usual self-effacement, but that wasn’t why the guests were clapping. So often disheveled, to the point where an untidy appearance seemed to be part of the act of being mayor, tonight he looked resplendent in black tie. Every detail of the event, from menu to who sat where, had been personally planned by the mayor, and this wasn’t mere obsession. He wanted the night to be perfect and memorable, as fine a bread and circus as he could possibly conjure up. “I think cities are run by the perception about them and the mood people have and the feel people have about them almost more than the substance,” he said to the Inquirer’s Matt Purdy. He knew that with hope, however precarious its foundation, there was the possibility of a miracle. He knew that without hope there was the possibility of nothing. Pragmatically he could fix the budget and take on the unions and talk a number of businesses thinking of leaving for the suburbs into staying, but the most awesome power he could unleash on the city was as simple as it was elusive—belief.
After Vice President Gore spoke at the dedication of the convention center and after the marching band burst through a set of doors, people on nearby rooftops showered the politicians and the other dignitaries on the stage with confetti. They were startled at first; then a confetti food fight erupted. The mayor was drenched, and the mayor’s wife, Midge, found herself engaged in such heated mano a mano confetti warfare with the city controller that she seemed perfectly willing to leap several rows of seats in order to shove some of the stuff down his shirt. The frozen smiles of decorum gave way to laughter, real laughter, and in that moment the convention center didn’t look like a mere building at all but appeared to be the true beginning of the economic resurgence that Ed Rendell had promised was on its way.
A Prayer for the City Page 30