A Prayer for the City Read online

  Acclaim for

  Buzz Bissinger’s

  A Prayer for the City

  “There has never been a better portrait of how a big city functions and how one mayor operates to push, pull and prod the cement of bureaucracy as well as the souls of individual citizens toward a better place. This is actually more of a novel than it is current history, filled with insight and anecdotes that make you feel good about politics and people, too.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “A fascinating, humane portrait of the ills of urban America.”

  —The New Yorker

  “A sad, gripping and important book.”

  —Business Week

  “An impressive, engrossing, amazingly intimate behind-the-scenes account.… Bissinger is a splendid writer, terrific at imbuing a story with dramatic tension and leavening it with occasional blunt humor.”

  —The Plain Dealer

  “Written with grace, humanity and life-affirming irony.”

  —People

  “Bissinger renders with remarkable clarity the crisis facing America’s once great cities.”

  —Newsweek

  “A funny, irreverent and page-turning read.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Buzz Bissinger’s remarkable book could be about any of our troubled cities across the country.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “A classic.… Bissinger sheds new light on the intractable nature of urban problems through his brand of immersion journalism.… It is a great book.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “A remarkably gripping narrative.… Bissinger’s story shines in the telling.… He’s written a rich, textured account.”

  —The Grand Rapids Press

  “This is a terrific book.… With a central character who’s as colorful as most modern politicians are bland, this book is reminiscent of novels such as Robert Penn Warren’s All the Kings Men.… This saga is more fun than recess.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  Buzz Bissinger

  A Prayer for the City

  Buzz Bissinger spent five and half years writing this book, during which time he had exclusive access to Mayor Ed Rendell’s administration. From 1981 to 1988 he was a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, and later he worked for the Chicago Tribune. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1985–86 and is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. He is the author of the acclaimed bestseller Friday Night Lights.

  Also by Buzz Bissinger

  Friday Night Lights

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 1999

  Copyright © 1997 by H. G. Bissinger

  Photographs © Robert Clark

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1997.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:

  Bissinger, H. G.

  A prayer for the city/Buzz Bissinger.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 0-679-42198-X

  1. Rendell, Edward G. (Edward Gene). 2. Philadelphia (Pa.)—Politics and government—1865— 3. Philadelphia (Pa.)—Social conditions.

  4. Mayors—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia. I. Title.

  F158.54.R46B57 1997

  974.8′11043′092—dc21 97-9637

  Vintage ISBN: 0-679-74494-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-96991-5

  Author photograph © Robert Clark

  www.randomhouse.com

  v3.1

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of nonfiction. All the names used are real. There has been no melding of characters, nor has there been any rearrangement of the chronology to heighten drama or suit the convenience of the author. Much of what appears in these pages was personally observed. Scenes I was not present for were reconstructed on the basis of interviews with the actual participants, correspondence, memos, and other documentation. There has been no guesswork.

  To Mom and Dad,

  two of the world’s great city dwellers

  Cohen: That was interesting. And totally useless.

  Rendell: Like most meetings.

  Cohen: No. Most meetings aren’t interesting.

  Preface

  The seeds of this book came from many sources, but the first inspiration was a deep feeling of sorrow I did not know how to shake.

  I was on my way to a newspaper assignment. I remember neither the precise route I took nor the particulars of what I was supposed to be covering, but I do remember what I saw that day in the city of Philadelphia: an assemblage of vacant houses and boarded-up windows and collapsed porches that seemed to stretch forever, one block bleeding into another without relief.

  I knew little of urban policy and even less about urban planning. What I understood of the mechanics of cities came from books I admired—Common Ground by Anthony Lukas, The Power Broker by Robert Caro. The condition of what I saw was unimaginable, but I remember feeling overwhelmed by a sense of loss. Even amid the horror, delicate touches had somehow survived—an inscription over a doorway, molding around a window, a row of porches, a set of front steps.

  Why had this happened?

  This question kept returning, as did some other ones. Were these conditions somehow inevitable due to a process of progress and civilization in which older areas die so that new ones can grow? Or were they the result of something willful, a deliberate sacrifice? The delicate touches told me that whoever had built these blocks had not intended them for doom. Finally, there was the most nagging and difficult question of all:

  Could anything be done?

  The questions came and went until a May night in 1991. I was living in the Midwest, and fiddling with the radio, when I heard a scratchy report from a station in Philadelphia announcing that Edward G. Rendell had just won the Democratic nomination for mayor. I had known him when he had been the city’s district attorney, and I had covered his failed campaign for mayor in 1987. When I heard of his victory, the questions that had been set aside percolated again.

  I called David Cohen, Rendell’s campaign manager. I told him about my desire to write a book about urban America in a way that was wholly different, not exclusively a book of history or a book of policy, but a book of heart and humor and humanity rooted in the present. Then I dropped the question: Would Rendell, if he won election the following November, consider letting me be at his side not just for a year, but for the political equivalent of a season in sports—a full four-year term in office?

  I met with Rendell several months later. I had not seen him in three years, and in literally the same breath as he said “hello,” he also said “yes.” If he did become mayor, he would give me access to anywhere I wanted to go in the administration.

  He ultimately won the election in a landslide. I was there in January 1992 on the eve of his inauguration, and there I stayed for the next four years, observing events from this remarkable vantage point. Cohen, who served as the mayor’s chief of staff, opened his office to me. So, as promised, did the mayor. Aware of what happens when people learn that a journalist is in the room, how unvarnished truth turns into calculation, both men not only provided me with virtually unrestricted access but also went out of their way to make sure that my presence did not affect the agenda.

  The mayor never once asked me what I was planning to write about, but he understood the major aims of my project—to create a vivid and unique portrait of
a politician trying to save a city, and to create an equally vivid and unique portrait of the politics of self-interest that must be negotiated daily, almost hourly, to even attempt to act in the public interest. It didn’t take four years, but closer to four hours, to learn that Ed Rendell was a complicated man of many hues. But it also became clear from the very beginning that he represented the very essence of what a politician should be in this country but almost never is, a man unafraid to be human.

  That humanity was made all the more remarkable by what he inherited on that first Monday in January 1992. The literal second he became mayor, he found himself at the helm of a city utterly on the brink, so many hundreds of millions of dollars in debt that it could not pay its own bills. Almost simultaneously, he entered into negotiations with the municipal unions the likes of which had never been seen in the modern history of the American city, and sought givebacks and concessions so enormous it seemed almost lunatic to publicly talk of them.

  Intertwined was the crisis of unabated job and population loss, and the crisis of public housing so nightmarish that even the president himself became aware of it, and the crisis of trying to create new jobs. For each and every day Rendell was mayor, he also had to grapple with the fate of the Navy Yard—the city’s most fabled employer, builder of 119 of America’s greatest ships over a span of nearly two centuries, and a place of spiritual presence in the psyche of the city. What eventually happened to the yard was something that no one, not even the mayor, could have possibly predicted.

  As I did my research, I realized that this book, to attempt to be a full portrait of urban America, must extend beyond the walls of City Hall and the offices of the mayor and his chief of staff. As a result the book is interwoven with the lives of four different individuals who live in the city. I chose them because they provided vivid windows into the types of issues that affect city dwellers everywhere in the country—fear of crime, the plague of drugs, prohibitive taxes, loss of faith in the public schools, the disappearance of work through plant closure, the fissures of race. I also chose them because of their love for the place in which they lived.

  This book is about one city in the United States. But it isn’t hyperbole to say that it could have been written about virtually any major city in North America. No two cities are alike—each has its own character and identity and spirit—but in all of them, the struggle for survival and finding a place in the changing landscape of the country goes on without relief. During my research, thousands of documents found their way into a black file cabinet, but none was more disturbing than a study showing poverty rates for children in our cities: 69 percent in New Orleans, 58 percent in Cleveland, 49 percent in Washington, 45 percent in New York, 43 percent in Houston, 41 percent in Baltimore, 40 percent in Los Angeles, 38 percent in Philadelphia.

  I still drive through the streets of Philadelphia and see the vacant homes and the slabs of metal where windows used to be. I see the swirls of trash and the piles of discarded tires. I can’t help but think that here, in the United States, lies our own shameful holocaust. But then I drive through other streets and see beautiful row-house blocks. I see places that are crowded and energized and filled with people who are unique and vibrant. I can’t help but think that here, in the United States, lies the very best definition of us.

  This book may have been originally spawned from a feeling of loss, but it has its foundation in the strength of the human spirit. It seems strange that I spent so many years researching and writing about people who never once sat together in the same room. The mayor and his chief of staff could not have been more different from the four other people whose lives I also followed. Yet all were linked by resilience and hope and a refusal to succumb. In their own powerful way, they all understood why a city is worth saving and why it is worthwhile to live in one. Regardless of background or circumstance, each of them was heroic, each of them offering, in their daily acts of living and survival, a prayer for the city.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Preface

  Prologue

  No More Money

  1 Ego and Id

  2 The Number

  3 The Yard

  4 The Racial Trifecta

  5 “Watch Out”

  War of the Unions

  6 “Fast Eddie, We Are Ready”

  7 Crisis of Faith

  8 Profiles in Courage

  Bread and Circuses

  9 Tidbits of Urban Wisdom

  10 Getting Paid

  11 Urban Sacrifice

  12 The Last Sermon

  13 Hot Dog Day

  America’s Mayor

  14 “We Hardly Knew Ye”

  15 Vision for the City

  16 “Inappropriate Conduct”

  17 Don’t Mess with Ed

  The Yard

  18 A Prayer for the City

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About Sources

  Selected Bibliography

  Photo Captions

  Prologue

  I

  Success followed success, and as he persuaded more and more people with the spontaneous symphony of his hands and the infectious rhythm of his voice to see a place that he saw, it became easier to believe that there was something wondrous about him, regardless of the patches of hair sprouting from his head like a failed English garden, not to mention the balled-up blue suits that looked as if they had been burrowed away in gym bags.

  National story spawned national story, each one better than the last, stories so gushing that even his own press secretary, Kevin Feeley, seemed a little embarrassed. The Wall Street Journal basically started it with a front-page profile that Feeley described as a “blow job,” and then the rest of the national media eventually followed like coins from a slot machine: Forbes, Reader’s Digest, U.S. News and World Report, Newsweek, The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Washington Post. They all proclaimed him the miracle man who at Mach speed had reversed a seemingly irreversible spiral of decline and decay. The war was over, they so strongly implied in what they wrote. The impossible had become possible. A dying American city had been drawn back to life by the man Vice President Al Gore had ordained “America’s mayor.”

  Ed Rendell read most of these clips. Sometimes he liked them because the accompanying pictures were big and showed him with an affable smile and more hair than he could take credit for in person, and he knew such a sight would make his eighty-four-year-old mother in New York happy. Sometimes he cringed over the effusion of them because it raised the bar of his success ever higher, and he knew that fellow mayors, while offering congratulations in public, would start sticking little pins into the ears and eyes of their voodoo dolls in private. Sometimes he obsessed over the three or four paragraphs out of two hundred that described him as impulsive, because he hated the idea that he was impulsive, and he hated having it pointed out, even though, of course, he was totally impulsive, and after five minutes with him it was impossible for anyone not to point it out, whether the visitor was nine or ninety. But he knew better than to pay a whole lot of attention to the cacophony of what was written.

  He knew it that day in Washington when he went before the Senate Finance Committee to testify about the urgent need for urban enterprise zones to stimulate investment in America’s depleted inner cities through the use of business tax credits. The senators sat at the front of the room in an elevated semicircle, a little bit weary, a little bit pleasant. Some actually seemed to care, but others listened to snippets of testimony and then, like the revolving door of a department store, just disappeared behind a back door altogether. If there was any urgency in Washington that day, it wasn’t in the obligatory chill of this solemn room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, with its cavernous ceilings and Wuthering Heights gloom. Senator Dani
el Patrick Moynihan of New York was there, with that long, persnickety face that always seems on the verge of smelling something rotten, expounding on the historical precedents of enterprise zones like a precocious schoolboy. Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey was there, looking sleepy and unfocused. Senator Bob Dole of Kansas was there, with that brow of perpetual brooding as heavy as a ship’s anchor. So was Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, with that silky twang of whiskey and smoke that sounds almost British. So was Senator John Breaux of Louisiana, who seemed as interested in his own territorial rights as he did in the tired tales of horror from the urban crypt, at one point giving his podium several sharp whacks so a photographer would stop leaning against it.

  In his prior life as a district attorney, Rendell himself had been to Washington countless times, and he knew the routine: you came for a two-hour meeting; you were introduced; then everyone else in the room was introduced; then, in the thirty minutes that were left after the introductions, you spoke quickly and told the grizzled lions of the capital in five hundred words what was needed; then they spoke slowly and told you in ten thousand words what they thought was needed, until the two-hour meeting had suddenly become four hours, and then you went back home on the train as if the whole thing had been some vague dream. This event had seemed no different, particularly when Moynihan and another of those testifying, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, got into a spirited argument, as if they were the only ones there, over where enterprise zones had first been used to promote investment, in the Philippines or in Puerto Rico.

  “I wasted a half day of work so I could hear about the Philippines and Puerto Rico?” whispered Rendell to an aide as he waited his turn to testify, his leg pumping up and down so furiously that it looked as if he might become airborne at any second. At another point, as Kemp made reference to talmudic philosophy and talked with fevered gesticulations and finger-pointing about how the great entrepreneurship of the inner city had been pushed underground, Rendell whispered to the aide, “I like Jack, but he’s crazy.”