A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  A series of secret focus-group sessions had been held in August to assess the mayor’s performance, and they once again revealed the mayor’s Achilles’ heels: neighborhoods and crime. Rendell began to talk about crime more frequently, blasting judges, promising more police under the Omnibus Violent Crime Control and Prevention Act that had just been signed by the president. It was hard to know what effect any of the new rhetoric was having, and in the middle of November of 1994, in the space of forty minutes, it all became moot anyway.

  The first calls started coming in to 911 operators around 10:00 P.M. and were responded to as if the desperation of them, the insistence that the police come because something horrible was happening, weren’t a cause for action but were a cause for resentment. The undercurrent of the operators’ attitude was so strong that the only explanation for it could be traced to the inevitability of race: the operators, most of whom were black, were clearly bristling at what they believed to be the pushiness of one white caller after another, as if they were the only ones who had to deal with crime in the city.

  10:20:49 P.M.

  Caller: Could you send some police over here to 7979 Rockwell Avenue? About 50 kids are busting up cars.

  Dispatcher: What are they doing?

  Caller: Busting up the cars, windows and everything.

  Dispatcher: About how many is there?

  Caller: About 50.

  Dispatcher: All righty.

  10:37:15 P.M.

  Caller: They got clubs out there. There’s a kid out there.

  Dispatcher: All right.

  Caller: Did you get that?

  Dispatcher: Yeah, a kid is hurt outside, and there’s a fight. Right? That was it?

  Caller: Yeah, that’s it! Send a police car to seven—

  Dispatcher: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You asked me, and I’m asking you. I have the information, you can hang up now.

  10:38:25 P.M.

  Caller: There’s about 20 kids outside fighting.

  Dispatcher: We’ll send somebody around.

  10:41:01 P.M.

  Caller: There’s about 50 teenagers, baseball bats. A gang fight—

  Dispatcher: We’ll get somebody right over there.

  10:42:32 P.M.

  Caller: We’ve been calling. Everybody in the damn neighborhood’s been calling. I call the district, they tell me to call 911. What are we supposed to do here? There’s cars. There’s a whole damn convoy of cars coming up here. You got a damn riot goin’ up here.

  Dispatcher: Police will be there.

  10:44:13 P.M.

  Caller: This is one of the sisters at St. Cecilia’s Convent on Rhawn Street. There’s a bunch of kids out in the parking lot, and it looks like they are beating up one kid.

  Dispatcher: We’ll send someone out.

  10:44:23 P.M.

  Caller: They are beating the hell out of people with baseball bats up here. When are you going to send somebody?

  Dispatcher: Who’s got a bat, sir?

  Caller: Who got a bat? Some gorilla. What the hell do you mean?

  Dispatcher: Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Don’t talk to me like that. I asked you a question.

  10:46:22 P.M.

  Caller: We’re having a problem outside our house here.

  Dispatcher: What’s the address there?

  Caller: OK. 525 Rhawn.

  Dispatcher: 525 Rhawn?

  Caller: Right.

  Dispatcher: Is it R—

  Caller: R-H-A-W-N! We’ve got kids being beat up. And no one wants to help us!

  Dispatcher: I’m trying to help you, ma’am. I have to first understand you.

  Caller: Rhawn. R as in robot. H as in health. A as in apple.… Does that help?

  Dispatcher: Immensely. Now, can you continue? What’s the problem there?

  Caller: We’ve been calling for 20 minutes now to get the cops up here, and no one’s come.

  Dispatcher: We’ll send the police, ma’am.

  Caller: Pardon me?

  Dispatcher: We will send the police.

  Caller: Send them now, not in 10 minutes, but now.

  Dispatcher: We will send the police, ma’am.

  At least thirty-three calls were made to 911 by people in the neighborhood of Fox Chase who were frantic about what was happening. From the time of the first call it took forty minutes for a police car to be dispatched, and when the police finally did arrive, it was too late anyway. The boy that some of the callers had been so desperate and upset about, sixteen-year-old Edward Polec, had been beaten so severely with baseball bats by an angry mob that he had seven skull fractures. Bent on revenge for what turned out to be a bogus claim of rape, a group of teenagers had tripped up Polec and then beaten him to death near the church where he had once been an altar boy. He died the next day.

  In the first days after the incident, news of the conduct of the 911 operators, but not the contents of the tapes, started making its way into print. Then, on the day before Thanksgiving, the tapes themselves were released to the media, and what was a personnel and procedural problem with 911 became an unmitigated disaster. The transcriptions were shocking enough, but the audio took listeners to the very limits of belief, for it revealed an almost surreal give-and-take between callers who were in hysterics and begging for help and 911 operators who were rude, arrogant, and disdainful. The story of the tapes led the Thanksgiving Day broadcast of the ABC nightly news, which from Rendell’s perspective meant he now had a national story on his hands. He was in North Carolina, vacationing with his wife’s relatives, and so was temporarily insulated from reporters and questions, but Cohen knew the situation was “white hot.” Reporters were staking out the mayor’s house, and talk of the tapes was everywhere, and media requests from all over the country were piling up, and almost the second the mayor returned, Cohen told him he had to do something and do it quickly.

  Rendell listened to the tapes, found the conduct of the 911 operators appalling, and publicly announced that three operators would be fired and three suspended. It was a decisive action, motivated by genuine outrage, and it produced a remarkable but all too predictable result.

  The mayor was accused of racism because all six of those disciplined were black. It was a ridiculous and spurious charge prompted by black politicians who were obviously trying to shore up their strength within their own constituencies and by those who were obviously hoping to induce Dwight Evans to challenge the mayor for reelection in the Democratic primary. Almost ironically, Rendell first heard of the charge minutes before a private meeting with several powerful black ministers in the city in which he planned to ask for their political endorsement so as to shove Evans further out of the race. When the meeting began, he told the ministers he had had no idea that all the disciplined operators were black, and given Rendell’s personal and political views, this was an assertion that rang true. The Rendell administration had paid copious attention to every decision that even remotely involved race, and it seemed ridiculous to think that Rendell would have disregarded the issue now, particularly if doing so meant flinging the door open to a black challenger.

  Sitting at the round table in his office, he pointed out his efforts on behalf of the city’s black community. He pointed out the number of blacks who had been hired by the city. He pointed out that the city had both a black police commissioner and a black fire commissioner thanks to his appointments. Most important of all perhaps, he pointed out how debilitating it would be for him to engage in a bitterly contested campaign, particularly when so many obstacles were still facing the city. “I need to be able to spend one hundred percent of my time on these issues. I cannot be campaigning six hours a day. I cannot worry about having to raise money.”

  He didn’t try to bully those around him at the table. He didn’t promise them the sun, and he didn’t suggest that there was some specific quid pro quo for their support. He spoke without venality or secret motive. He did not want a challenger not merely for his own sake but for the
sake of a city that needed him not sixteen hours a day or eighteen hours a day but every single hour if the city was still to have a chance.

  “The last thing we need in this city is a black-white election,” he said with a sense of sorrow, well aware of what such an election would be like—bitter, divisive, fueled by spoken and unspoken hatred.

  He asked for their support, and the ministers, while cordial, gave no commitment one way or another. In the succeeding days, the drumbeats protesting the mayor’s behavior only intensified, spreading the gospel of a mayor who not only had turned his back on the city’s neighborhoods but also was a racist. Speculation about Dwight Evans heightened—with everything to gain and nothing to lose, he would jump in.

  Rendell needed something to diminish the chorus that he was a downtown mayor driven by the edifice complex—a desire to build monuments, just as a little boy stacks wooden blocks one upon the other. Then, toward the end of December, came a momentous announcement.

  The federal government had determined the winners of the intense competition for the six urban empowerment zones. Each zone carried with it a $100-million grant in antipoverty aid to be used to create jobs, improve education, and fix up housing. As an added incentive to create jobs, each zone would also be able to offer businesses lucrative federal tax breaks. Given his close relationship with both the president and Cisneros, many had thought the city would be an automatic winner, in particular since it had filed a joint application with Camden, New Jersey. The legislation for the empowerment zones had been written by New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, and he had inserted a provision that at least one zone consist of an urban area covering two states. Bradley readily acknowledged that the language was meant to favor Philadelphia and Camden, and only two other areas filed applications under the bistate criteria. But if Rendell had learned anything in his political life, it was that there are no guarantees. In the passing of a single second, one man’s supposed fortune could turn to misfortune, and so the city’s application was exhaustive.

  Empowerment zones were at the center of Clinton’s urban policy, and for well over a year, Rendell had been plotting a strategy to obtain one. The most direct competition came from the area of Kansas City, covering both Missouri and Kansas. It wasn’t the quality of that area’s application that worried Rendell. When it came to need, there simply was no contest, and Philadelphia’s application was a harrowing reminder of how deeply entrenched the problems were: an income gap between rich and poor that had gone up 14 percent between 1984 and 1990; a ranking of second among cities in the country in the number of people age sixteen or older not working; a number of vacant homes that was greater than that of Detroit and St. Louis combined; a mortality rate among “Philadelphians of color” that was worse than that of Panama, Romania, Jamaica, and Bulgaria. But Rendell also knew that whereas need sometimes counted in politics, more often it did not, and he feared that the president might want to offer a zone to Kansas City as a showing of goodwill toward a U.S. senator from Kansas who was thinking of seeking higher office.

  Atlanta won an empowerment zone. So did Baltimore. So did Chicago. So did Detroit. So did New York. And so did the joint application submitted by Philadelphia and Camden. The formal announcement, elaborately coordinated by the White House, had both the president and the vice president on conference-call hookups with seventeen places. Since everybody could hear everybody else, Rendell instinctively realized what was happening—a veritable “oink fest,” as he described it, in which everyone, everyone, would want to say something to the president and offer effusions of praise and thanks that would make the Academy Awards seem like an admirable model of restraint. He hoped against hope that it would not happen, and things were OK for a while, but once Zell Miller, the governor of Georgia, got the ball rolling, he knew the cause was lost, and when his turn finally came, he took advantage of it. “We want to say thanks to you and the vice president for not losing faith in American cities,” said Rendell.

  Almost at the very second after the empowerment-zone awards were announced, Dwight Evans’s name slithered first into a whisper and then into silence altogether. And without Evans in the race, there would be no race regardless of who decided to run.

  As far as Rendell was concerned, the truest measure of his rebound wasn’t in any poll but was in the cornucopia of Christmas gifts on the table in his office—canisters of Baileys liqueur, towering fruit baskets, pistachios in burlap sacks, Godiva chocolates, bottles of wine, custom-designed T-shirts. Rendell knew what these gifts were about. He called them “suck” gifts, and the way they spilled all over one another on the table was a better sign than any scientific poll.

  “If I was wounded,” he said as he eyed the bounty, “there wouldn’t be this level.”

  Visibly relieved, Rendell could sense the restoration of a political image that had been bruised not only by the possibility of a primary challenge but also by the 911 débâcle. In the difficult days following it, the White House chief of staff, Leon E. Panetta, had called and wondered if he might like to become the head of the Democratic National Committee. Rendell turned the offer down.

  He still very much wanted to be mayor. He also knew that if he left in the middle of the term, council president Street would succeed him as mayor under the city charter. Despite his personal fondness and loyalty to Street, he realized this would be untenable. The city council president had changed, but in politics, change had no chance against perception. During focus group sessions with voters that the Rendell campaign had secretly conducted the previous August, the response to Street had been hair-raising.

  “John Street is extremely unpopular among white voters,” the Hickman-Brown polling firm concluded. “Of all the personalities we discussed, no person generated so much hostility in the three groups of white voters as John Street.… The participants tried to outdo each other in saying critical things about him.” Street was described as a “pit bull,” “full of rage,” having a “big mouth, a big African rotten mouth,” “always screaming about something,” and those actually were the nicest things said about him. Their comments revealed a toxic combination of racism and the reputation of a man who seemed forever defined by whites for his histrionics and his outbursts, regardless of the fact that he had tempered such public conduct in recent years. Many of those in the focus groups acknowledged that Street and Rendell did have a good working relationship, and that Street had done a good job of presiding over the city council. But they still loathed him, a political reality that wasn’t lost on the mayor.

  “Can you imagine if I had resigned and appointed John Street as mayor?” he said the day after the empowerment zones were announced. “Can you imagine how unpopular I would be?”

  IV

  As good a courtroom verbalist as he was, Mike McGovern could produce no argument to counter that of his wife, who was ready to leave for the suburbs as soon as he gave the go-ahead. When reasons to stay and reasons to go were put on paper, the result was like trying to represent a client who had videotaped a murder he committed and then sent the tape to the police with his name and address on a return envelope. The location of the McGoverns’ home in the city, in the farthest reaches of the northeast, a block away from the Bucks County line, made them a little bit like potential refugees, dissidents who knew that if things got really, really grim, they could walk to freedom. “Do I run for it?” he had asked once.

  But there was something about the city that stirred in the blood of Mike McGovern, a lingering chemical. Much of it was based on his memory of Port Richmond when he was a child and a teenager and a young man—the kinetic energy and texture of it, the way everyone was forced to interact with everyone else, the way everyone learned when it was time to cheer together and when it was time to fight, the little things and the nuances you could learn nowhere else and stood by you as you got older. He could not say that Rendell had made it any easier for a middle-class family such as his to stay in the city, but he did think that the mayor had produced an eno
rmous spiritual change. In 1992, six months after Rendell had taken office, McGovern thought the city was dying. He kept thinking about a song by Randy Newman about the death of a city, and he also thought about the movie Avalon, in which an immigrant family bit by bit loses its roots and its sense of place in a city that has changed and splintered.

  But now he felt differently. He felt something about the city that he hadn’t felt in years. He felt pride. He did have loyalty to the city, and what drew him to the place were emotional values—the city’s heart, the city’s unique soul and character, the city’s humor and passion—values that could not be easily measured against lousy schools and spotty snow removal. He knew that his wife would leave tomorrow if given the chance, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that. He didn’t want to be a commuter from Yardley or New Hope or Warrington. He didn’t want to run for cover in Bucks County. He had aspirations of becoming a judge someday, and because of that he needed to maintain a residence in the city. But this was not the only thing that compelled him to stay.

  He wanted to be a Philadelphian, a city dweller, because it meant something special to him and gave him a certain identity that the suburbs could never supply regardless of all the presumed advantages. “I have always defined myself as a Port Richmond guy first and primarily a Philadelphian,” said McGovern one night as he was driving into Center City. “I don’t want to lose that, because I like being a Philadelphian. Once you leave Philadelphia, you lose your standing to care and complain about it.”

  The elevated road curved into the sinew of the city. The sun was trickling down beneath the horizon, and the light fell on the buildings in such a way that they seemed both enormous and vulnerable, strong and delicate, not a place of alienation and remoteness but a place of power and possibility.