A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  III

  By the summer of 1987, Ed Rendell had been given up for dead, a fallen politician wandering about in a fallen city, the lumbering walk that had once been so endearing, so strangely lovable in a way, now seeming more like a limp. Embarrassed by Goode in the Democratic primary, he went back to private life and practiced law. Sitting behind a shiny and empty desk, playing with a little pile of paper clips that his secretary had set out for him, bending the metal ends back and forth, he seemed lost. There was something sheepish about him, something insecure, and he talked of how strange it was to go home at night and watch television with Midge and their son, Jesse. Those who knew him and saw the law firm he worked at, Mesirov Gelman Jaffe Cramer and Jamieson, or saw him socially after work, could feel the anxiousness that still welled inside him, the bolts of energy still running through him, but with no place to go. He held court. He gave opinions, but fewer and fewer were inclined to listen. It was hard not to feel sorry for him, hard not to think of him as one of those baseball players who after that great rookie season just fade away because the timing of the swing has gone sour.

  “Ed was a lost soul,” Arthur Makadon remembered. “He was back in the Mesirov firm trying asbestos cases. It was just awkward.”

  Rendell himself, despite his outward buoyancy, knew what it was like to hit rock bottom. In 1988, he was the head of the Michael Dukakis campaign in the Pennsylvania presidential primary, and because of that he thought he would be named a “super” delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. Rendell had been a fixture at the Democratic conventions since 1980 and had even addressed the delegates when he had been district attorney. (He was the first to admit that no one paid attention. “Thirty seconds into my speech, it dawned on me that I could have been reading the best parts of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and it wouldn’t have mattered. Not a fuck or put it in her or anything. No one was listening.”)

  In 1988, Robert Casey, then the governor of Pennsylvania, and Mayor Goode didn’t want Rendell as a super delegate. If he wanted to come to the convention, he could come as an alternate. Rendell had thought he was still big enough politically that various Democratic forces around the state—the governor, the mayor—would have to show him respect. He thought he still counted for something, had some clout. Instead, as Rendell later put it, he was “squished like a bug.”

  There were other moments as well, like the time he found himself trying to photocopy something at his law firm as if he were little more than an office clerk. Rendell was not very good with machines. In fact, he hated them, and they hated him, and when the copy machine at Mesirov Gelman failed to respond to his increasingly desperate commands, he couldn’t take it anymore. “This is how my luck has been for two years!” he wailed as he banged his head against a wall.

  While others deserted Rendell after 1987, David Cohen did not join the ranks. They remained close friends, and when Rendell decided in 1990 to run for mayor again, Cohen was there, this time in a much greater role, as campaign manager.

  Like many others in the city, Makadon had a crisp and distinct reaction when Cohen told him that Rendell was thinking of running for mayor again and that he was thinking of helping him: “You must be out of your mind.”

  Rendell’s initial efforts seemed futile, almost painful. He held a dinner at the Union League on South Broad Street, hoping to raise money so that he could be ready to announce his candidacy officially if the outcome of a poll that was being taken and paid for by an old classmate from high school proved favorable. But for the thirty-five people who gathered at the dinner in the cold shadows of one of the club dining rooms, there was hardly a sense of buoyancy. They liked him. Anyone who met Ed Rendell for more than a minute liked him. But when it came to raising money, how could they convince anyone that he wasn’t a perpetual loser? They also knew how high the stakes were this time around. “This guy was looking at death at the time,” said Alan Kessler, who had an office near Rendell’s at Mesirov Gelman and was a key political fund-raiser. “He knew that this was pretty much it for elective office.”

  When the poll was done, it showed something that perhaps only Rendell himself had believed—he could win the Democratic mayoral primary. Like a Fuller Brush salesman selling his wares out of a suitcase, he carried that poll from office to office, showing the white men in the dark suits who contributed the money and also raised it that he was back and his time had finally come. On the basis of that poll, money was raised. On the basis of that money, bits and pieces of momentum were gained, but it still wasn’t easy. He announced his candidacy against a backdrop of humble and quaint row-house homes on Myrtlewood Street, but there was hardly a sense of anticipation in the air. Cohen watched the proceedings nervously, convinced that the media, the first time they mentioned Rendell in their stories, would immediately refer to him as a two-time political loser vainly trying to make a comeback. His fears were not unfounded. “Edward G. Rendell, the former district attorney who has not won an election in nine years, yesterday became the first official candidate in the 1991 mayoral campaign,” wrote the Inquirer. But bit by bit, the tag of “loser” began to fade. People who had stopped listening began to listen again, and when they did, they heard a different man, someone who finally had a sense of who he was and what he was and what he should be, someone who spoke about the city deep from his heart and not as if Cohen had just handed him a position paper about it. Humiliation, as it turned out, had been very good for him, for it had forced him to seize the one quality that had proved most elusive in his life—a sense of purpose beyond the immediacy of the moment.

  “Somehow,” recalled Neil Oxman, “he woke up in 1990 and said, ‘I’m going to do this the right way.’ ”

  As he campaigned, he did something he had never really done before in his entire life in any genuine way. He listened much more than he talked, and in a city so far down at its heels, there was no shortage of what needed to be done. Ten-year-old members of the Fishtown Soccer Club asked him to fix up the field they played on, which had been reduced to hard-packed dirt. Thick-fingered butchers in white shirts and bloodied aprons at the Thriftway supermarket over in Port Richmond asked him to please remember that not all union men were scofflaws. A black woman outside Helen’s Wig Fashion in Point Breeze asked him whether there was any way of finding jobs for young kids so they wouldn’t roam the streets. A man in his thirties at a shopping center in North Philadelphia told him that he and his family were economically drowning. “We’re sinking every day,” he said. “The slightest thing that comes up, we’re in the hole. We’re under the gun. We worry to the point where we’re thinking of moving out of the city.” But he didn’t want to leave. “I have lived here all my life. I know no other place.”

  When Rendell spoke about the city, there was a passion in his voice, and not some thin veneer of playacting. He didn’t minimize the city’s problems, particularly its financial ones, but instead of deflecting and blaming and saying the answer lay in increased help from the federal and state governments, he said that the city had no right to ask anyone for anything until it got its own house in order. Radical change must come from within, he said, and voters admired him for that.

  The unpredictable factors of political luck, which had not kicked into place in the nearly fifteen years since that first district attorney’s race, suddenly went to his advantage. Those who should have dropped out of the race in the Democratic primary stayed in. Those who should have stayed in dropped out. Instead of facing a single black candidate head-on, he faced two black opponents. They splintered the city’s formidable Democratic black vote, and Rendell coasted to easy victory in the primary. In the general election, his opponent was the legendary former mayor of the city, Frank L. Rizzo. But Rizzo died suddenly over the summer, and Rendell’s path to victory became effortless. He won the general election in a landslide with nearly 65 percent of the vote, and there he was on January 6, 1992, at the head of the line at the Academy of Music on Broad Street, about to give his inaug
ural speech as the newest mayor of the city. Pacing back and forth in the Academy’s reception room backstage, he shaved and then gargled with mouthwash. He went over a few last-minute details with Cohen, then left the reception room a few minutes before 10:00 A.M.

  “Here we go,” he said in a voice that was nervous and almost bemused, like a parent suddenly finding himself in the lead car of the newest roller-coaster ride at Six Flags with no time to take it all back. It was a crowning moment, taking place in this splendid hall where for ninety-two years the Philadelphia Orchestra had spun symphonies and concerti as magical as any on earth. In a box to the left sat Rendell’s family, Midge beaming and vindicated after those dark election losses of 1986 and 1987, when her husband had lost those two elections back-to-back. Next to her was their eleven-year-old son, Jesse, at that age of perpetual gawkishness, when the blue blazer and the button-down shirt and the penny loafers all seem slightly out of kilter.

  In the fourth row sat some of Rendell’s closest friends and advisers: Cohen, Oxman, Makadon. The three had spent endless hours together during the campaign, acting more like fraternity brothers than grown professionals, needling, cajoling, screaming, cynical and suspicious of any need or suggestion that didn’t come from the sanctity of their own lips, but as Rendell moved to the podium, they were clearly overcome with emotion, and their eyes seemed moist.

  Behind Rendell on the Academy stage was a short row of state power brokers—Governor Casey and U.S. Senators Harris Wofford and Arlen Specter. Certainly they could do a great deal to make or break Rendell’s term in office with their power of the purse strings. But they didn’t wield nearly as much clout as the group that sat behind them on the stage, a mélange of city council members and city commissioners and city judges with necks too big for their shirt collars and dresses more suitable for a high school prom than an inauguration. Over the past decade, more than a dozen of their former brethren had been sent to jail for selling their offices to a variety of bidders. But this group still had power, the kind of power that if dispensed vindictively and capriciously, as it usually was, could make Rendell’s life as mayor miserable.

  Mixed in with this group was someone who wasn’t a council member or a commissioner or a judge. Relegated to the back of the stage, he seemed virtually anonymous, an afterthought. But eight years earlier in this same hall, with many of the same people watching and wondering, he had ignited the city with his own best intentions.

  We are a diverse people and we share a deep optimism about our future. Today, we begin to shape that future. Let the word go out loud and clear: Philadelphia is on the move again.

  The man who said those words was the son of a North Carolina sharecropper. He was also the city’s first black mayor, W. Wilson Goode. During his first hundred days in office, he promised to attack the problems of the city with a swiftness and a savagery never witnessed before. He did not produce as much as promised, but his best intentions continued to generate enormous goodwill, until one of the strangest and most horrifying days in American urban history, May 13, 1985, when police dropped a bomb on a West Philadelphia row house containing members of the radical group MOVE. Paralyzed by fear, torn by a set of choices that offered no easy answer, Wilson Goode sat in front of a television set in silence hour after hour after hour, watching a fire burn out of control until sixty-one homes had been reduced to rubble and eleven people had died.

  From that moment on, the best of intentions were not enough to save the mayor. The city, like a living creature, began to devour him. The problems of the homeless, crack, a sinking economy, race, and his own tragic indecisiveness did him in without remorse. “He still stands around believing in the power of good intentions, which are fine if you’re running a soup kitchen, but not if you’re running a hard-luck city teeming with a mutant strain of political hacks,” wrote Steve Lopez, a columnist for the Inquirer and the city’s leading voice. By the time of Rendell’s inauguration ceremony, Goode was like a ghost, the wisp of a man who had once stood in this very same building and had said in that confident and clear voice: “Philadelphia is on the move again.”

  For much of the inauguration ceremony, his eyes were dull and his lips tightly pursed, whatever emotion he had started with as mayor seemingly drained by the end of his administration, when everyone, even those who had worked side by side with him, seemed determined to betray and humiliate him with endless anecdotes about his isolation and incompetence. Shortly before the ceremony, Goode had seen Cohen backstage. It seemed like the perfect time for something private and maybe even inspirational, the passing of the torch from the outgoing administration to the incoming one.

  “Hi, David.”

  “Hi, Mayor.”

  “Good luck.”

  That was it.

  The only change in Goode’s expression during the ceremony came during a prayer, when he closed his eyes so hard it almost seemed to hurt. That was Goode’s final act as mayor. The job, mercifully perhaps, wasn’t his anymore. Someone else could stand before the gathered crowd, promising miracles and betterment and the best of intentions. Someone else could imbue himself with the notion that the impossible, the salvation of a dying and obsolete city, was still possible.

  IV

  When the moment was finally his, Edward G. Rendell, then forty-eight, shuffled to the edge of the stage of the Academy of Music. With both hands firmly on the podium, he made the speech that he had waited a lifetime to make.

  Make no mistake, our situation is worse than we thought it could ever be. Projected deficits in the years ahead number in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And the shame of it is that those deficits do not even begin to tell us the costs of their consequences. These costs—the costs of unsafe streets, of dirty neighborhoods, of struggling schools, of shut-down health clinics and recreation centers—these costs are simply incalculable.

  We have put off difficult choices for far too long. We have been too willing to accept the old way of doing things. In the face of long-term challenges, we have opted for short-term fixes. And we have shown virtually no courage or backbone in standing up to pressure against outside interests.

  Change must surely come, but the good news is that if it does come, this city cannot only survive; it can come alive again with a thriving economy, strong neighborhoods, and a dynamic downtown that can serve as a magnet to conventioneers, tourists, and suburbanites alike.

  To make this change a reality, I want to issue a few challenges:

  To everyone involved in government, to no longer accept the old way of doing things, but to challenge them, change them, and get results.

  To the seventeen city council members on this stage with me today, to put aside politics, partisanship, and personal gain to forge a working relationship with me second to none in this city’s long history.

  To our municipal unions and their four fine leaders, to join with us and help this city survive and flourish as other unions have joined together with their employers to keep those businesses afloat.

  To the people of Philadelphia, to be willing to accept short-run sacrifices and pain that will allow us to get through the near future and lead to tremendous long-run gain for all of us.

  And lastly, a challenge to myself, to stand tall, to stay the course, and make the difficult choices unflinchingly, regardless of what the pressure to do otherwise might be and regardless of the political risks involved.

  I cannot and will not falter.

  We cannot and will not fail.

  The stakes are too high.

  The cost of our failing is unthinkable.

  Roughly twelve hours later, the pomp of the day finally tucked away, Ed Rendell appeared at an inauguration party at the city’s Reading Terminal Market. Amid the pungent smell of spices and fish from the rows of eclectic food stalls, he was greeted by a Chinese dragon spinning its papiermâché tail, then by the furry green fuzz of the Phillie Phanatic mascot. A crush of people surrounded him as if he were a boxer making his grand return to the ring,
and his brown eyes were electric and lit with a little boy’s anticipation. Through perseverance and luck and the strength of his own confidence, he had made a startling comeback in a city that had given him up for dead. As he walked across the concrete floor, people reached out to grab his hand and touch him. For some, it was a matter of connecting with someone who was now important. For others, it was the simple act of reaching out to someone who, after all he had been through, was still the same old Ed.

  Rendell reacted to it all without a trace of self-importance. He blew kisses. He posed for pictures. He squeezed arms. He didn’t turn down a single request for attention, regardless of where it came from, but he also paid attention to his own needs. When a resplendent plate of pastries was brought his way by a waiter, his eyes turned almost moist. “I’ll take two!” he said, grabbing at them as if he had just heard a rumor that the caterer was about to leave the country. Music pulsated from a stage that had been set up in the center of the terminal, and Rendell joined in with relish. He clapped as the band played “In the Midnight Hour.” He got up onstage and sang the old Beatles song “Twist and Shout” without a twitch of self-consciousness, even though his singing style resembled a doglike croon. He did a little chain dance to another song. When the leader of the band yelled to the feverish crowd, “How many people are happy that Ed Rendell is the mayor of Philadelphia?” the applause in the room was loud and strong, except for one tiny voice of dissent.