In addition to her salary, she also received financial assistance from various family members. Money was tight, but there was enough to go around, and she lived frugally, using supermarket coupons with almost surgical precision and ferreting out bargains no matter how remotely tucked away they were in the mile-long aisles—cans of soup, frozen bags of corn on the cob, precooked Chinese dinners, cartons of iced tea.
Robin knew she was a remarkable woman, unlike any other he had ever met. And she believed he was equally remarkable, a true miracle who had taken the disintegrating shell of Cookman United and saved it from extinction.
III
The original charter of the church dated back to 1881, and in celebration of its dedication a decade later on the last Sabbath of May, 1,333 people swelled through its doors. The original building was destroyed by fire in 1925, but the structure was quickly rebuilt, and its interior of solid wood and straight lines served a congregation of whites who lived and worked in the neighborhood. Attendance numbered regularly in the hundreds until the end of the 1950s, when many of the members left the neighborhood for the suburbs. The church reflected the job loss and population loss that had seized North Philadelphia, and by the time Robin Hynicka arrived as a missioner in 1978, it was barely there at all. Robin was a graduate of Albright College in Reading who had grown up on a farm in Lancaster County, the son of a plant manager for RCA. With a master’s degree fresh from the divinity school at Duke University, he was twenty-four at the time and unprepared for what lay ahead. He drove down Lehigh Avenue with his mother and brother and pulled up to the house next to the church where he would be staying. It was unrenovated and dilapidated, with a bathtub in the front room. That first Sunday he preached to five people, two adults and three children, and the biggest issue facing him when he delivered his sermon was whether to stand at the pulpit or on the church floor.
He was a white in an area of the city that was black, and he knew he needed the divine intervention of God to build trust and ease natural suspicions. He liked basketball, and he joined a neighborhood team called the Smokers. The coach put him in, and he was the only white on the court. It was the championship game, he got fouled, and although he had been a fine athlete in college, he had never been more nervous than he was at this moment, and he prayed to God in a style that the Duke Divinity School had probably not taught him—“Please God, please let me make this shot”—and then the wind started to blow, and the hoop began to shake, and he threw up the shot.
It hit one side of the rim.
God was answering him.
It hit the other side of the rim.
God was still answering him.
He closed his eyes.
God was still answering him.
It went in.
Shortly afterward, he accidentally locked himself out of his house. He had to walk through some of the roughest parts of the city to get another set of keys, and he made it to within three or four blocks of where he needed to go when he saw a group of black kids standing on the corner. He couldn’t avoid them, and he felt instantly afraid and automatically assumed that they wanted to rob him or shoot him or just mess with him a little bit when one of them said, “Hey Robin.” The kid had recognized him from the basketball game, and in that moment Robin understood that the problem was not what those black kids on the corner felt but what he felt. “My reason for being afraid was based on my own racism. They had done nothing. There were no weapons visible. There was no verbal abuse.”
It was a pivotal point of self-awareness, one that he remembered as he began the long and improbable task of rebuilding the congregation. Prophecies about human nature were risky and self-defeating, and he quickly found that those who he thought would support him the most supported him the least and those who he thought would support him the least supported him the most. There was no grand scheme or master plan, just the sweat of labor and dedication. The neighborhood, which was bad when he got there, only got worse, thinning out the desert even more. The Botany 500 plant, several blocks up the street from the church, at Broad and Lehigh, closed, and the ravages of crack set in in an epidemic every bit as corrosive as the earlier tuberculosis scares. Eventually a cure had been found for tuberculosis, but the cures for crack—decent jobs, decent schools, decent places to live—were further away than ever, and Robin knew that every family in the community in which he served had been affected. Families that were struggling to remain stable came unglued. Grandmothers became baby-sitters for husbandless daughters who roamed the streets like the living dead. Once-beautiful women turned to prostitution. A faithful churchgoer on her deathbed whispered to Robin, not asking for salvation but announcing that her fourteen-year-old granddaughter was pregnant. A mother he knew was beaten so badly by her son for five dollars that she was put on life support and eventually died.
But with help from what Robin called the mothers of the church, women like Fifi and Ester Potts and Ellen Arttaway, the congregation slowly grew. There was an irrepressible spirit, and the church served as its focal point. The congregation never came close to the numbers that had sustained it in the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s, but by the time Robin decided to take the next step in his life, it numbered 108, more than twenty times the number that had shown up that very first time.
He had the soul of a man of the cloth, but he still had the competitive ferocity of the wide receiver he had been in high school and college. He was long and lean, and he didn’t like being screwed with. When he witnessed a purse snatching near the church, he ran and tackled the guy and ended up with a huge gash in his head that required thirteen stitches. When someone stole his favorite jacket, the one with the leather sleeves, from the wall rack in his office, he embarked on a high-speed chase for two blocks, all the way to the Broad Street subway line. He never found the perpetrator, but at least he was able to retrieve his wallet, which had been left on top of a token dispenser. His parents thought he was crazy to be doing what he was doing, but he kept on despite his own bouts of self-doubt. He wondered whether the church was really relevant, whether anything could really be relevant in the mess of the desert out there. But he also realized that the role of the church wasn’t necessarily to save but was to offer peace and refuge. “That’s what I provided as a person; that’s what the church provided,” he said at one point. “I provided a step every week out of the chaos. I was available.”
In his life, Robin could remember books that were so touching and so real that he had avoided reading the final chapter for as long as possible so they would never end. He had done that with To Kill a Mockingbird, and he was doing it now, at the end of June 1993, in saying good-bye to Cookman. “We’re trying to avoid the last several pages of this book,” he said a week before his last sermon, and his normally cluttered office had now been filled with the smell of cardboard moving boxes. The once-crammed bookshelf was empty; all that was left were the Holy Bible and The Life of Christ between faded covers.
His new job, as executive director of the Frankford Group Ministry, would involve far more administration than his job at Cookman had, and he seemed to welcome that. But the bonds he had forged, the strength and the intimacy of them, were unlike anything he could have imagined. He had come to Cookman as a young pragmatist. Fifteen years later, he was leaving as a true believer in the miracles of the human spirit.
In the days before the last sermon, his mind traveled. Sitting late one night in the pharmacology lab at Penn, where his wife, Weslia, a PhD candidate, was doing an experiment, his mind raced back five years and then ten years and then fifteen—to the house next door to the church with the bathtub in the front room, to the providential foul shot that became a rite of acceptance, to his fear of those boys on the corner that exposed his own vein of racism and wrongful expectation. He knew that going to the Frankford Group Ministry was a good move. There was infinitely more responsibility in the job, and there was the challenge of supervising a staff. But there was always the question of what would happen to those he wa
s leaving behind. His constant accessibility at Cookman, he admitted, had been a weakness as well as a strength. He always had this sense that he was picking up the pieces, constantly picking up the pieces. But it was hard to imagine what life for someone like Fifi would have been like without him. Truly he had been her heart. When she hugged him, she just felt secure, and in the desert of North Philadelphia, in the context of her life, that was a sacred feeling.
Robin’s final service on the last Sunday in June began with the singing of “Sweet, Sweet Spirit.” He stood in a white frock with his hands on either side of the pulpit, as if slightly steadying himself, but he looked comfortable and serene. The church itself was not crowded. Many of the pews were empty, but that only gave the moment a greater sense of intimacy, a true gathering of friends. The sound of a crying toddler echoed from the dimly lit wood, but no one seemed to mind, and through the opened slats in the stained-glass windows came the sound of the city—sirens, car alarms, honking horns. Muggy chunks of heat pushed through the windows, and the congregants gently cooled themselves with little off-white fans courtesy of Baker’s Funeral Home.
The children’s choir got up to sing, dedicating their songs to Robin. There were only four members, but they sang with such off-key gusto that their spirit was utterly infectious, their voices loud and shrill and easily carrying to the height of the massive vaulted ceiling.
I will serve thee … Because I love thee …
Robin spoke next, his voice slightly quavering. There had been a celebration at the church in his honor the day before, and although the emotional aspects of it had been wrenching, it was nothing compared with this.
“I knew that today would be harder than yesterday, to stand here for the last time,” he said, and he spoke about the tone of the previous celebration, how “not a word was mentioned about race, because race has no place. We built a bond of trust early on, and that bond of trust carried us through fifteen years together.
“I love you all from the bottom of my heart and will always remember this time as a time of great strength, of great creativity. I’ll remember where I first learned about those things, at Cookman Church, Twelfth and Lehigh, in your arms.”
Through the church came cries of “amen,” and then the adult choir went to the pulpit to sing. There were six in this group, and in the middle, like a tamped-down version of the Statue of Liberty, was Fifi, singing with gusto, joyfully undaunted by her occasional off-key notes. Though she had risen at 6:00 A.M., between getting the great-grands ready for Sunday school and making sure everyone got fed in the chaos of the kitchen, she had been late for the service. But it didn’t matter now. She had dreaded this moment when she would have to say good-bye, but she fought back her emotions and lost herself in the rousing song, swaying, smiling that smile that could cut through the thickest wall, dressed gloriously in a white top and black skirt.
You ought to take the time out to praise the Lord …
Robin spoke again, this time to give his sermon. He hadn’t written it out because he knew that this was a moment when the spirit had to take over. Whatever he said—whatever words floated into his mind as he stood on the pulpit now would be the right ones.
I grew up here. I learned some things here I never would have learned anywhere else. I don’t know how many furnaces I learned to fix. I don’t know how many cars I learned to hot-wire—when someone stole ’em, we stole ’em back. I don’t know in how many households I was able to receive nourishment. I don’t know how many lives touched my life.
You have taught me to believe in miracles.
Despite the emotion of the occasion, he told those gathered that this was not the end of anything at all.
Today is not a day God has brought us to say “It’s over, it’s finished.” Today is a day God has brought us to say “It’s new, it’s a beginning.” Are you ready?
His refrain of hope was appropriate, but in that simple church built for another time and another era, it was hard to know just what would happen. For nearly thirty years, the church had been on uncertain ground, recently nursed back to life a slow step at a time. Now in this moment of good-bye, it seemed more fragile than ever. A successor was in place, but the post would be part-time.
Inside there was still peace and serenity, but outside life went on as always. If you were born here in the 1960s and lived here still, you were a witness, every single day of your life until you died, to an environment that had only deteriorated. Under such conditions, as if watching the creep of cancer through every pore and every tissue, why wouldn’t you turn to crack? Why wouldn’t you become pregnant? Why wouldn’t you father as many children as you could? Why wouldn’t you pick up a gun? Why wouldn’t you want to die?
Robin ended his sermon with the parable of the eagle who thought he was a chicken, lost and confused, unaware of his strength, until he found his proper path.
My friends, you are now all eagles. You will soar with God. You will keep your eyes on the sun. You are wonderful.
God loves you. So do I.
After the sermon, Robin invited the congregants to the altar to reaffirm their devotion to God. They came and knelt, and Robin slowly went down the row with tears in his eyes, hugging each of them, clasping their hands.
A mile away, in the heart of Center City, lay a glistening convention center that had been dedicated the day before, a shiny and no-expense-spared Mecca for the out-of-towners who would start flocking there from all over the world with their disposable dollars to spend. But here there was no convention center. There was only the faith of those somehow strong enough to have it still.
The choir sang one final time, the words lingering there.
At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light, and the burden of my heart rolled away …
One by one the congregants filed out of the pews in the dim light and said their good-byes, first to Robin’s wife, Weslia, and then to Robin himself. Fifi lightheartedly promised Weslia that she was going to send her a tape of her singing. Then she reached up to hug Robin, and he reached down to hug her. “God bless you,” he whispered, and she closed her eyes, and her hug became a little bit tighter. Then she and her daughter made their way back home along Twelfth Street, walking slowly and side by side in their Sunday finest, past the litter-strewn gutter, past the sealed-up homes that had long ago been left for dead, past the clump of teenage boys rumbling with a pair of dice in the early-afternoon light, farther into the desert of North Philadelphia.
13
Hot Dog Day
I
It started with a clatter of noises on the City Hall apron, not the familiar garble of protest through a bullhorn with bad sound but something different and more curious. Even Cohen couldn’t resist, so he turned and peered through the grime of his office window. Down below he saw someone he most definitely recognized lightly wrestling with a six-foot mascot known as Smiley, and then he heard a voice as familiar to him as his own loudly saying something, the very same voice that in the very same week had helped structure the successful sale of more than $500 million in bonds on behalf of the city.
“I, Edward G. Rendell, mayor of the city of Philadelphia, do hereby proclaim July 23, 1993, as Hot Dog Day.”
Cohen was rattled, his legendary focus momentarily broken by the sight of a man, the mayor actually, wrestling with a mascot in the shape of a very pink pig, and when he fielded his next phone call, he couldn’t help but dwell on what had just taken place, as if he had just had a vision: “I hear Ed’s voice, and there he is, reading a proclamation with a six-foot pig next to him. The mayor of the fifth largest city in the country is reading a proclamation about a hot dog with a six-foot pig jostling him. Yesterday he sold five hundred million dollars of bonds. Today he’s being jostled by a six-foot pig. When he takes off the jacket, I say, ‘What is he going to do now?’ And then he puts on a hat and apron, and he’s suddenly surrounded by all these kids in little yellow caps. I am stunned. That’s all I can say.”
In
return for the appearance, a company called Hatfield Quality Meats had agreed to contribute $5,000 to the city’s Recreation Department, so there was a cause and an effect of such behavior, but even Rendell wondered whether he had gone past the threshold.
“The things that I will do for five thousand dollars,” he later lamented.
In the afterglow of the success of the Welcome America! celebration and the convention-center opening during the summer of 1993, such actions increasingly defined the mayor. He hated the tag of supersalesman, this notion of him as some amalgam of Deepak Chopra and Lou Costello, the big-city mayor who never saw a pool opening or a groundbreaking he could resist. He liked to think of himself as sober and serious, a statesman with maybe a few strange moments here and there. But he never stopped pumping on behalf of the city.
In recent months, he had worked mightily to raise the nearly $80 million that was needed to build a new orchestra hall in the city. When he heard that fashion magnate Sidney Kimmel was good for $10 million, he figured he could extract another $7 million or $8 million out of him if there was an agreement to name the hall after him. Some, particularly those in the sainted community of the orchestra, might balk at the notion of something called the Kimmel Concert Hall. What kind of artistic ring did that have? But not Rendell, not if it meant getting the damn thing built. “Short of a Nazi, I don’t care if it’s named after Garfield the Cat.”
Obsessed with making the city as appealing as possible to first-time visitors, he worked on a plan whereby taxi and limousine drivers would automatically take visitors downtown from the airport on Interstate 95 instead of the Schuylkill Expressway, thereby avoiding the smelly jangle of oil refineries and the junkyards that were bound to terrify. When he wasn’t appearing somewhere or trying to sell someone on something, he was attending to the egos of fragile politicians—like a scene in E-R, there in rumpled suit and tie attending to an always full waiting room of easily bruised and insecure egos. A state senator was pushing a candidate for the state supreme court. Could Ed maybe make a few calls for a fund-raiser? A congressman was running for reelection. Could Ed maybe make a few calls for a fund-raiser?
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