A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  Examining just the overall numbers about the improved confidence of the city ignores real concerns among black and less educated white voters about the direction of the city. The enthusiastic feelings about the improved Philadelphia are driven mainly by the optimism of better educated and upscale white voters.

  That passage in italics, which had seemed so innocuous in the glory of the last-hurrah train ride to Washington in March, now seemed increasingly like a prophecy come true. An effort to reform the city’s charter, which Rendell had vocally favored, had gone down in a smashing defeat. His arguments that a reformed charter would only enhance the performance of the government had been resoundingly rejected, especially and surprisingly by a coalition of blacks and working-class whites. The gubernatorial primaries had been held at the same time as the charter vote, and the most significant news wasn’t the showing of the winners but the performance by Dwight Evans. Despite being black in a state that boasted the largest number of National Rifle Association members after Texas, he had finished second in the Democratic primary. This was a strong showing, and it only added to the swell of rumors that Evans would not only challenge the mayor for reelection next year but would also pose a true test.

  The mayor, by his own admission, spent the majority of his time on economic development. No company was too small to escape his exuberant sales pitch. Without the direct intervention of the mayor, the city’s rate of job loss would have been far more catastrophic than it already had been. But despite meeting after meeting, the attraction of new businesses, whether a second major convention hotel or discount stores or fancy chain restaurants, was proving remarkably difficult. At one point, Rendell was so desperate for another large hotel that he promised the considerable carrot of a riverboat-gambling license to whoever built it. But once the questionable legality of such an incentive was pointed out to him, not to mention the fact that the state had never even legalized gambling, he quietly withdrew the promise.

  Beyond the tightly controlled curtain of the downtown, a city once known for its neighborhoods was increasingly becoming a patchwork of vacant lots. In a radical shift of policy caused by population loss and acceptance of the hard fact that there was no longer any point in trying to save or rehabilitate blighted housing, acre after acre of the city was being leveled. Now the hope was that one day a less dense, more suburban style of housing could be built on this land. Every week the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections demolished twenty-five “imminently dangerous” houses, corner stores, and factories. In areas where the blight was still small and self-contained, the city put up false fronts like Wild West stage sets, so the neighborhoods would at least appear to be intact.

  At the southern end of the city, the navy yard, despite the continued foot stomping by area politicians, moved ever closer to its death. Toward the end of May, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the suit that had been filed by Senator Specter challenging the process the navy had used to determine the yard’s closure. This meant, as Rendell pointed out privately, that nearly three years had been wasted on a lawsuit that had always been destined to go nowhere, regardless of Specter’s self-serving rhetoric. It also made more important than ever the need for a coordinated strategy for deciding what to do with the yard once it closed a year and a half from now. But despite their writing petulant letters to one another and holding meaningless press conferences, area politicians seemed to share no consensus. Instead, they continued to advance pie-in-the-sky schemes—such as using the yard to turn Russian ships into scrap metal—that did nothing but once again inflate the false hopes of those who worked there.

  The initial idea, floated by Republican congressman Curt Weldon, received front-page treatment in the press, particularly when Weldon said it could generate between two thousand and three thousand jobs and keep the yard busy for at least another decade. The Russians, desperate to raise hard currency by selling off war matériel, were receptive to the proposal, and Weldon, whose district in Delaware County was filled with shipyard workers, was quoted as saying, “What a day it will be when the first Russian aircraft carrier, the Kiev, is towed up the Delaware.” Democrat congressman Thomas Foglietta seized the idea as well, perhaps because he truly believed in it or maybe because his Philadelphia district comprised the yard. The city hired the consulting firm of Day and Zimmerman to study the proposal, and a consultant concluded that 2,000 was the accurate number of jobs, give or take about 1,865. In addition, Day and Zimmerman concluded, the effect of creating those 134 jobs would be a net loss of $16 million in the first year. Various proponents of the proposal asked the mayor to get the consultant to revise the findings, making them more optimistic. The mayor concluded that such fiddling would look “sleazy and awful,” and the idea finally faded away, understood as being totally unworkable. In the meantime, the city’s top official in charge of the navy yard conversion said that the Russian-ship-scrapping idea, in addition to being utterly foolish, cost the city six months, time that should have been spent focusing on the realities of the future of the yard and those who worked there.

  All these issues were swirling in the middle of May 1994, and the idiosyncrasies of the mayor’s behavior only added to the atmosphere of flux. In the private sanctum of his office, the mayor passed through so many different moods so quickly that it was hard for anyone, much less him, to keep track of them. He could be utterly calm at a meeting with his schedulers, then suddenly be set off by the news of an appearance that he did not want to make, or by the realization of a time conflict and bang his fist on the table and grit his teeth and hiss. He could be perfectly calm over the phone, then hang up and start yelling, “Son of a bitch! Fucking son of a bitch!” Like most politicians, he had that turn-it-on, turn-it-off capacity to be enraged in private and the very next moment, once the camera lights came on, bubbly and effervescent. He himself admitted that he “acted” in his job 90 percent of the time, and it was no surprise to anyone who knew him that only one take had been needed for him to play a cameo role in the movie Philadelphia. Since he was playing the role of a mayor, it was pretty easy, he said, but the director, Jonathan Demme, was still stunned and claimed he couldn’t remember the last time he had filmed anything in one take.

  The mayor normally was able to separate his public and private behaviors and not let one spill into the other—until the end of May, when he felt fully besieged. As much as things had gone right with the city, something was always about to go wrong. Someone was always criticizing or complaining or trying to incite, and with the exception of his bathroom, from which the mayor could make private calls, there was no zone of privacy.

  Earlier in the year, at the city’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, demonstrators from the fire department were there, screaming at him and protesting because of the outcome of the union negotiations and other efforts to cut the department’s budget. Rendell never looked at them, and he refused to give them the satisfaction of thinking that they might be getting to him, creeping under his skin. He acted as he always did—warm, ebullient, funny—but they were getting to him, and when fifty people were screaming at him and hating him and condemning him for actions that he had taken for the greater good of the city, it did him little good to tell himself quietly that he was the most popular politician in the state.

  He knew better than anyone else how politics worked, the persona and the aura of the job subsuming everything else. People saw him as the mayor, always the mayor, never as a man who might have brushes with insecurity and sadness and even frailty. He wasn’t being thin-skinned in confessing that the demonstrators had upset him; he was being human, and it was in moments such as these that he wondered whether the standards for politicians were just impossible to ever fully meet. He knew the eternal fickleness of voters, in which the line between adoration and loathing could hinge on a missed garbage pickup or an overzealous meter maid or a poor job of snow removal. By its nature, living in the city was at best a moody, manic-depressive experience with aggravations sometimes clashing with
the force of atomic particles. He knew it was the basic nature of voters to be on the lookout for someone else who could do the job better. Or as he put it one day in his office, “If they had a choice between Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad, fifty percent would say, ‘Can’t we get someone else?’ ”

  He also had wondered whether the smart thing to do politically was cash in on his success with the city, quit, and run for governor at the beginning of 1994. He had taken on the unions and successfully balanced the city’s budget, and he knew that he would never have a greater and more unblemished story to tell than that of his first two years. “From a political standpoint, I’m doing absolutely the wrong thing by not running for governor,” he said. “Clearly I will never be as strong and popular as I am now. I will never have a greater story to tell.”

  And he was right.

  It was hard to know what had put the mayor in the foul mood that clearly engulfed him that day in May of 1994. It may have been the search for a new school superintendent, which continued to be mired in the misery of racial politics. It may have been the wrongful-dismissal suit that had been filed against the housing authority. Or it may have been the crisis of the moment, an endless dispute over the construction of permanent housing for the homeless in a neighborhood of the city that, in some quarters at least, was violently opposed to it. Rendell insisted that he was in favor of the project, but every action the city had taken, to the point where a federal judge had found it in violation of the federal Fair Housing Act, ran counter to that claim. Now there were reports that $15 million in federal funds for the homeless might be denied if the dispute was not resolved.

  Around 6:00 P.M. on that day, Inquirer reporter Amy Rosenberg waited outside the mayor’s office in the second-floor hallway of City Hall to ask him about the threatened cut-off of federal funds. It was a serious and important story, and there was nothing remotely exceptional about her waiting for the mayor in the hallway. Reporters had done it thousands of times before.

  Rendell came into the hallway looking ashen. With her deadline fast approaching, Rosenberg walked alongside him and started to ask questions. Normally he would have stopped, and given that he was on his way to a reception around the corner in celebration of public displays of art in City Hall, he could hardly claim that he was late for an important event. He kept on walking, and he seemed all right—until a particular question was asked. Suddenly and impulsively he threw out his arm and grabbed the reporter in the area of her neck and shoulders as they continued to walk, almost as if he were putting her in a vise. The look on his face, inches from hers, was a lock-jawed grimace, and he spit out his words as he muttered at least one obscenity. He looked terrifying.

  Rosenberg was understandably scared and shaken—the gesture, in its impulsiveness and underlying menace, was frightening. The mayor let go after several seconds, and then instantly blended into the crowd at the reception as if he had no idea of what he had just done, shaking hands, posing for pictures, putting an arm around people’s shoulders with bearlike gentleness. Rosenberg in the meantime sought out press secretary Feeley and told him she was thinking of filing a police report detailing the incident. She did not, and the paper itself was mercifully kind the next day in its reporting of what had taken place. When Feeley asked the mayor for his version, he said he was “stunned” that he had offended her. But he apologized the next day, and he also received a letter about the incident from the Inquirer’s city editor, David Tucker:

  Thank you for apologizing to Amy Rosenberg today for having grabbed her neck yesterday afternoon in reaction to questions she was asking you in City Hall. While we appreciate your apology, I feel obliged to make clear that we regard it as inappropriate to manhandle any reporter, even amid the pressures of public life that can produce tension and exasperation. We regard it as absolutely inappropriate to grab an individual’s neck, whatever the provocation.

  Five days later the mayor sent Tucker a response in which he said, “I agree with your letter. Touching a reporter is inexcusable and inappropriate no matter what the circumstances.” He claimed that he was in no way trying to intimidate Rosenberg and was “just trying to get her to focus and listen to what I was saying.

  “Nevertheless,” the mayor concluded, “it was totally inappropriate conduct and it will not be repeated.”

  In the midst of what was already taking place, the incident only added to the spiral. Over at the Daily News, questions about the mayor seemed to be intensifying. It wasn’t the mayor’s behavior that had turned the paper’s staff into doubters but a more fundamental sense that the administration—behind the façade of its great public relations machine and the optimistic shtick of the mayor opening those great canisters of oxygen day after day—had in no significant way altered the city. A meeting of the paper’s City Hall bureau and its top editors had been held, and the message was clear that the administration had been treated far too lightly. The mayor loathed the charge that he had turned his back on the city or was interested only in the economic development of the downtown. He knew that the appellation of America’s mayor was becoming a noose, and he rightfully pointed out that he had not sought out any of the national reporters who had written about him. Trying to accommodate them—the Joe Kleins and the Jacob Weisbergs who sat in his office like creepy Buddhas for a couple of hours in some meek attempt to capture the mayor up close and personal—was a pain in the ass, he said. He argued steadfastly that he was more than the convention-center mayor or the tourism mayor or the riverboat-gambling mayor or the Avenue of the Arts mayor. And yet on the night of the last day of June, his actions were so clouded and seemingly contrary that even his most loyal partisans wondered what had possessed him, as if every political and personal instinct born to him had somehow disintegrated. Psychological interpretations are always dangerous, but now it seemed as if—for whatever reason—Rendell were willfully pushing himself out onto the edge, daring someone to seize the disfranchised masses of the city and challenge him for the right to be mayor.

  II

  It was a shooting in a city in which shootings occurred all the time, and the power of it lay in its capacity to evoke emotions of outrage and sadness that went beyond race and class and socioeconomics, one of those acts, almost always an act of violence in the city, that galvanize and for the briefest of moments make people everywhere realize the degree to which the place they are in, an American place, has gone berserk.

  Michelle Cutner, whose destiny was to be six years old in a place that had no destiny, was walking home from school with her mother. They stopped at a variety store to buy potato chips and soda. Michelle left the store while her mother, Elizabeth, paid for the purchases, and that’s when the shooting started, and Elizabeth Cutner, with the reflexes of all adults in a neighborhood such as this, gathered the children in the store around her. Outside on Twentieth Street, a fifteen-year-old named Jerome Whitaker had a gun. He was angry, and he may have been looking for revenge, but neither of these motives mattered anyway, his reflexes being the same as Elizabeth Cutner’s inside the variety store, all of them ingrained, all part of the culture in which they lived.

  Jerome Whitaker started firing in the blossom of the afternoon, as kids all over the neighborhood were walking home from school. He was shooting at a car, as if that somehow made it all right, and he was shooting because he himself had been hit in a drive-by shooting the month before and probably felt like a victim too. But none of that mattered either because one of the bullets missed its mark or ricocheted off the car he was firing at, and a neighbor ran into the variety store and told Elizabeth Cutner that her six-year-old daughter had been shot, and she ran out of the store and saw her daughter on the sidewalk and said, “Oh God!” and “My baby!” and that didn’t matter either because the little girl was lying there with blood pouring out of her side and her eyes open, and Michelle knew, as much as a six-year-old girl can know about such things, that she was dying.

  Neighbors wept, and reporters perceptively noted that right ne
ar the patch of blood where Michelle Cutner was killed were the familiar red and blue caps of crack vials. The police bemoaned the easy access to guns, and one resident, between sobs, said, “Why? That’s all you can say—why? It don’t make no sense.”

  The night after the killing a neighborhood meeting was held at the Varick Memorial AME Zion Church at Nineteenth and Catharine Streets to grapple with the problems that had infected the neighborhood. It was pouring outside, and the falling rain only oppressed the streets even more, robbing them of what little crevices of life and light there might have been. It wasn’t refreshing, as a summer rainstorm could sometimes be, but cold and harsh to the touch, the sidewalks spotted with puddles almost instantly. The church inside was cavernous and slightly musty smelling. A chandelier with naked bulbs hung limply from the ceiling, and an American flag stood in the front in a tired salute. A coat of paint would have helped, but there was also an atmosphere of survival to the place, with beams of dark wood crisscrossing the ceiling in a sturdy patchwork, as well as a sense of delicate beauty, with feathery hues of browns and beiges and blues in the slender panels of the stained-glass windows. The beat of the rain against the roof seemed almost reassuring, and the two hundred people who were there, mostly blacks but also a smattering of whites, fanned themselves with little fans courtesy of the Andrew W. Nix Jr. funeral home. Since the meeting had been well publicized, a host of representatives of the city were there to give the appearance of concern, and at one point there were so many introductions that the meeting began to resemble a celebrity softball game.