A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  And so was the city.

  1

  Ego and Id

  I

  Less than twenty-four hours before the new job became his and the grace of speculation gave way to crisis, David L. Cohen was ensconced in a suite of offices on the second floor of City Hall doing what he always seemed to be doing: sorting out the mess that had been unceremoniously handed to him by someone else. He was quite brilliant at it.

  Municipal government in Philadelphia had never been known for the hum of its efficiency. It was Lincoln Steffens, in his oft-cited quote, who had once described the city as “corrupt and contented.” But even this sight seemed more peculiar than normal, as if occupying forces, finally realizing the futility of the war, had staged a midnight evacuation. Rooms that should have had furniture in them were barren. What few desks did remain had been emptied so that nothing was left, not even a paper clip. In the aftermath of the upheaval, a few items had been left behind. A half-filled bottle of wine lay inside the drawer of one file cabinet, and given the fortune at the end of the administration of the city’s outgoing mayor, W. Wilson Goode, it seemed remarkable that the contents hadn’t been downed in one merciful gulp. A pile of binders in pale blue covers had been unceremoniously dumped on top of another file cabinet, as if whoever had put them there just hadn’t gotten around to throwing them into the trash. They seemed innocuous enough, binders that might contain press releases announcing ribbon cuttings and holiday street festivals and other events that so often had passed for earth-shattering milestones in the sputter of a city on the brink of bankruptcy. But as David Cohen thumbed through the binders, he discovered they contained something else altogether: the executive orders that Mayor Goode had enacted during his tenure. Many of them were still in effect. They still had a significant impact on the 1.6 million people who lived in the city. Cohen gave a short burst of laughter that sounded a little bit like a car alarm, rising out of nowhere in the silence of the office he was about to inherit. Then he just shook his head, his way of acknowledging that he was entering a world where rules of logic and reason did not have the remotest application, light years beyond the Peter principle or Murphy’s law or anything else commonly used to explain failure. Why had someone left the executive orders of the mayor of America’s fifth largest city in a heap on top of a file cabinet?

  Why not?

  Dressed in gray jeans, a plaid work shirt, and sneakers on a Sunday morning, Cohen labored methodically to restore some semblance of balance and order. With all the details to attend to before tomorrow’s mayoral inauguration at 10:00 A.M. at the Academy of Music, he hadn’t slept in nearly seventy-two hours, and that was a literal calculation. But with the exception of a skin color that looked like instant oatmeal, he didn’t seem affected in the slightest. He went about his unpacking, unwrapping the little trinkets and memorabilia that he had brought with him from his former employer, the prestigious law firm of Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, where he had been a legend by the time he was thirty. But the phone kept ringing. And when the phone didn’t ring, the beeper he wore on his belt like a six-shooter went off. The mayor-elect, Edward G. Rendell, was calling with the breathless agitation of a child. He was supposed to give an inauguration-eve phone interview to one of the local radio stations, and he didn’t have the right number. Cohen had it at his fingertips, as if he had been expecting the call. He continued to unpack, delicately lifting each item from the paper towel in which he had wrapped it—a tray for memos and correspondence, a little wooden box with a calculator inside—and arranging them in the room so they stood at perfect right angles. He seemed unfazed by the thick coat of grime on the windows, which looked as if it had been there since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, or by the cockeyed view showing little more than the dark rumps of other buildings, or the way the air conditioner was held in place with a concoction of plywood, gray duct tape, and old rolled-up newspapers that had turned yellow. The scalded-brown color of the shades, as if someone had once tried to iron them flat, didn’t seem to bother him. Nor did the yap of the beeper at his belt. He just went on.

  Little by little his office began to take shape. On the left was the framed picture of the man who had been perhaps the greatest inspiration in his life, former federal judge Joseph S. Lord III. Cohen had clerked for him after law school, in the early 1980s, and at the bottom of the picture was an inscription that said, “If every judge had colleagues like you, the law would approach perfection, and so would friendship.” On the ledge behind the desk were pictures of his two children, Benjamin and Josh. On the right were framed diplomas from Swarthmore College, from which Cohen graduated in 1977, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he had been among the top three in his class. Since law school, his only professional job had been at Ballard Spahr. He had loved it there, and up until the aberration that had landed him in the Dr. Seussian world of City Hall, where hallways stopped and stairways went nowhere, he had never shown the slightest inclination to leave. “I’d be crazy if I didn’t have a little bit of the feeling, Have I done the right thing here?” he said on this Sunday at the beginning of January in 1992. “There’s no doubt about that.”

  Cohen then fell back to work, so deeply shrouded within the cocoon of the task at hand that he didn’t even seem to hear the questions of others, much less respond to them. He was like that for hours, but then, just as nighttime fell, he grabbed his coat and left the building. He headed west on Market Street until he came to a stunning skyscraper that took up much of the block of Seventeenth Street. He searched his wallet for his security card and inserted it into the neat little slot, whereupon a responsive and gleaming elevator whisked him to the forty-sixth floor. He got off the elevator and opened the doors to the Ballard Spahr law firm. He went to the corner office that was still his, but, with overtones of “Cinderella,” only until the stroke of midnight. After that, he would have no association with Ballard Spahr, beyond memories and friendships. After that, he would draw a paycheck from the city of Philadelphia at a pay cut of well over $200,000 a year.

  He began to pack up a few remaining things, but as he did, he was momentarily drawn to the window. It was a brisk and serene night with an unfettered view stretching west to the Schuylkill River and east down Market Street to City Hall. In the quiet splendor of that office, suffused with shades of cream and gray and beige, any decision to leave, even for lunch, seemed unfathomable. For someone like David Cohen, it was hard not to think something quite terrible had happened. Behind the veil of work and compulsion and perfection, he had gone mad.

  By any stretch of logic, this office, so removed from all the trouble that routinely took place so far below, should have been his forever. “I am basically an extremely conservative, steady person,” he had said earlier in the day. “It would not have been shocking to me that I would have spent the rest of my life [at Ballard Spahr] and literally not left. That would not have been an unexpected result for me.” It was true that he had gone on a reduced schedule at Ballard to serve as campaign manager when Rendell had run for mayor the previous year, but even then he had managed to bill close to two thousand hours, and it had been assumed he would return to the firm full-time once the election was over.

  Certainly the senior partners at Ballard Spahr were hoping that, for it wasn’t simply by a stroke of hyperbole that Cohen was known at the firm by the acronym COE—chief of everything. Nor was there anything accidental about the nature of his success. Even in law school at Penn, his aura had been considerable. Fellow students recognized it—his nickname then was Chief Justice Cohen. Some students couldn’t stand him, were repelled by his alacrity, but others marveled at the way he read not only all the cases that were assigned but all the footnotes, carefully underlining everything in a rainbow array of color-coded markers. They even liked him outside class, amazed, even puzzled, by the lack of pretense in this kid from Highland Park in northern New Jersey whose father had spent much of his life as a salesman for Bulova.

&nb
sp; If fellow students found him special, so did his teachers. One in particular was Arthur Makadon, who was also the hiring partner for Ballard Spahr. Makadon taught Cohen appellate advocacy, and almost instantly he recognized something uncanny about this second-year law student, something that went far beyond his work in class. It wasn’t simply his base of knowledge—plenty of students at Penn had that from their endless hours of studying and their impressive genetic strands of neurosis and paranoia. Plenty of students functioned with no sleep. What Makadon saw in Cohen wasn’t the earnestness of an extremely hardworking law student but an ability to size up events in a way that was remarkably suited to the realities of the world. Although he was still in his early twenties, Cohen somehow understood, even in the artificial atmosphere of law school, precisely what it took to get things done, how to get from point A to point B without getting diverted by anything in between. To Makadon, it was remarkable to see someone who had mastered that elusive side of life at such a young age, who already seemed so unfettered by idealism, impulse, or dreams but instead was completely practical, not a brilliant legal scholar but, in a world measured by production and results, something far better—a brilliant pragmatist. “Who was I to ask law students for practical advice?” remembered Makadon. “He was the one exception.”

  A city power broker in his own right, Makadon would ultimately bring Cohen and Rendell together. In the beginning at least, particularly given that Cohen had no experience in politics save a stint in the office of a New York congressman between college and law school, it seemed like a mismatch. But Makadon knew both men intimately. If it was he who had discovered the gift of David Cohen as corporate litigator, it was also he who had discovered the gift of Ed Rendell roughly a decade earlier, when they had worked together in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office. Perhaps on the theory that opposites really do attract, instinct told him that this was a political marriage that would endure and maybe even thrive.

  Cohen’s wife, Rhonda, who was a year ahead of her husband at Penn Law, remembered the same quality that Makadon witnessed, an almost mystical ability to know precisely what is important. Already married, they had breakfast together on the day of a major examination in a course they both were taking. David started firing potential questions at her. He cited material from the footnotes, and Rhonda told him he had gotten it all wrong, his studying had been completely off the mark. Footnotes—who on earth would base his studying on the footnotes? Later that day she got the exam and saw the questions. The footnotes—the damn footnotes. It was as if he had written it.

  As a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1981 and executive editor of the Law Review, he could have gone anywhere in the country. Law firms beckoned and hoped to impress him. At least one had him picked up in a limousine outside the federal courthouse in Philadelphia—a senior partner at the firm had thought Cohen would be flattered by the attention. Instead he was mortified and after the lunch insisted that he be dropped off a block from the courthouse so no one would see him. Makadon desired Cohen as well, for Ballard Spahr. But since he knew David Cohen and understood better than most the basic paradox of his personality, he also knew how laughable it was for anyone to think that Cohen might be dazzled by a limousine. In law school, Cohen was the master of his domain. Outside that sphere, he was so rounded and average that it was hard not to wonder whether some piece of him—the piece that seeks flamboyance and extravagance for the sheer frivolity and fun of it—had somehow been removed at birth. In a certain way, it made David Cohen seem very, very bizarre.

  Makadon, knowing that one of Cohen’s outside interests was sports, sought his attention by sending him The Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam. It worked, and Cohen agreed to the job at Ballard by hiring a woman to go to the offices with a bouquet of balloons and sing his words of acceptance.

  Among the various gifts that Cohen received during his tenure at Ballard Spahr was that little wooden box with the calculator inside. On the front an inscription read, BILLING KING. The general rule of thumb at Ballard was a secretary for every two lawyers to handle the paperwork and filing and all the rest. But David Cohen didn’t have just one secretary to handle the volume of work he produced. He had two. He billed close to four thousand hours, the legal equivalent of winning a batting title by a hundred points while hitting .450. But it wasn’t just his prodigious capacity for work that made him so good at what he did. It was his patience as a negotiator, the way in which he determined the result that he wanted and then, as Makadon put it, exhibited a “willingness to stay with something forever”—until he got there. In the meantime, he never got frustrated. He never personalized or railed or sought vendettas. Once again the normal human impulse, to get angry and become agitated, never even surfaced. He went in for the kill by listening, by making eminently clear that he really didn’t mind, he could sit in some shitty conference room like a prisoner of war for a year, maybe two, without a single speck of emotion other than affability until he got the result he wanted. Other lawyers would have gone mad. They would have relished the delicious moment when they reached across the table and strangled the pinstriped bastard on the other side who had made their lives so miserable for so many months. But not David Cohen. “I saw him sit with lawyers I couldn’t even bear to be in the same room with for days and work out a resolution,” said Makadon. “It was amazing to me.”

  Rhonda Cohen also worked at Ballard Spahr. In 1985, both she and her husband suffered personal trauma when their first son, Benjamin, was born, in a true medical rarity, after an ectopic pregnancy. Benjamin would go on to become a happy and enchanting child, but the initial period of his life was a nightmare. He spent more than a year at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where he was on a respirator for much of that time and enduring operation after operation. Cohen’s routine, according to Makadon, almost never varied: he arrived at the hospital at 5:30 A.M. to be with Benjamin, got to work around 8:00 A.M., and worked nonstop for the next twelve hours, then returned to the hospital for several more hours. Makadon was Cohen’s closest friend in the firm, but never once did Cohen discuss his feelings. The quality of his work never faltered. He never sought a sympathetic ear. His outward demeanor never changed.

  Makadon couldn’t think of a worse ordeal than those daily hospital visits. He also knew he could never have handled it the way Cohen did, by somehow managing to compartmentalize every single speck of it, as if, in the sphere of work and cases and thousands of billable hours, the emotion of what he was feeling had no place and was somehow separate and distinct.

  By the time David Cohen was in his mid-thirties, he was one of the top business getters in a firm filled with notable rainmakers. He was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and yet he showed little inclination to parlay it into something, to do something with it. He drove an old-model Saab. He lived with his wife and two children in a house on Lombard Street in the downtown section of the city that was shockingly modest for a family that was producing close to half a million dollars of income a year. He had a style of dress distinguished by the holes in the soles of his black shoes and the fraying collars of his button-down shirts. As the man he was about to go work for, Ed Rendell, would later say of him with true awe, “If you took David to a motel room, and there was a beautiful naked woman on one bed and a legal brief on the other, there would be no question. He’d head straight for the legal brief.”

  In the sublime silence of this Sunday night that would be the last silent night for the next four years, the moment of reckoning had come for David Cohen. As he quietly continued to pack what little was left, the grand tower of City Hall, some 548 feet high and until the mid-1980s the single highest point in the entire city, loomed from the window. It was a strange and remarkable building—Walt Whitman once described it as both “weird” and “beautiful”—positioned in such a way, smack in the middle of Philadelphia, that much of the downtown vehicular traffic had to circle around it in forced homage.
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br />   Started in 1871, at a very different period in the city’s life, it took thirty years to build and at completion was the largest office space in the United States. Presumably it was built to symbolize the magnificence of government. The council chambers on the fourth floor were larger than the House of Lords in London. The walls on the first floor were twenty-two feet thick, and the twenty-seven-ton cast-iron statue of city founder William Penn, designed by Alexander Milne Calder, was, and still is, the largest single piece of sculpture atop any building in the world. But over time, as both the city and its government began to unravel, City Hall began to symbolize something else entirely, not a citadel for the majesty and machinery of government, but a symbol of the very mockery of it—a favored place for suicides (either from the 360-foot-high observation deck or from the six-story stairwell on the inside), knee-deep bird droppings, basement rats so big that only psychotic cats dared to stalk them, and false fire alarms so routine that no one bothered to budge.

  In its mass of contradictions, City Hall was ornate enough to rival Versailles, with its red Egyptian-marble columns and alabaster walls; depressing enough to rival a local jail with the soupy gloom of its dimly lit hallways and cigarette-stained floors; bizarre enough to rival a psychiatric ward with the disparate elements housed within it. The mayor and his immediate staff had offices there, of course, as did the seventeen members of the city council and their staffs. The majority of the city’s criminal courtrooms were in City Hall as well. As a result, it wasn’t unusual for the solemn flow of a meeting in the mayor’s Cabinet Room on the second floor to be interrupted by the wail of a convicted felon. Among the hundreds of sculptures decorating the exterior of the building were four figures, Folly, Repentance, Pain, and Prayer. They were placed over the western archway in the hopes that prisoners being led into the building would see them and perhaps feel some inspiration to lead a proper life. In this regard, they also seemed apt figures for David Cohen.