A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  Counselors who were acting as liaisons with the workers at the yard, trying to advise them of possible career alternatives, reported increased alcoholism, drug abuse, and heart attacks. In the immediate aftermath of the decision to close down the yard, one counselor remembered a worker who had to be rushed to the hospital after he was found outside the union hall in tears, picking at his hands and talking of suicide.

  Mangan understood those feelings. As much as he concealed it, he knew what it was like to feel helpless, but he firmly believed that the yard was going to close regardless of how much rhetoric was spilled by politicians. He believed it because of what he knew about the yard’s history, how the place had been invented and sustained for a different place and a different time and never updated to handle the needs of the modern nuclear navy. Like so much else about the city, the original advantages of the yard—proximity proximity to the great coal mines and steel mills of Pennsylvania, the skills of a built-in workforce that knew shipbuilding inside and out—made no difference now. Steel and coal were struggling industries in the state, and shipbuilding had been worn to a whisper. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, at least eight different shipbuilders had filled the arc from Philadelphia to Wilmington on the Delaware River. But one by one they had dropped away, the business of commercial shipbuilding in America swallowed up by the Japanese and the Koreans, who could build a private commercial vessel for one-third the cost with cheaper labor and cheaper materials.

  In the spring of 1992, as Ed Rendell presided over the city, the navy yard was still holding on, visible from a grimy green bridge on Interstate 95—spindly-legged cranes and massive dry docks and lines of gray ships settled along the piers like a faded showgirl chorus. In 191 years, the navy yard, the nation’s first, had outlived thirty-nine presidents and nine wars. Of all the institutions of the city, it may well have been the most important and certainly the most overlooked. Over a million visitors flocked to the city each year to see the crack in the Liberty Bell and wander Independence Hall. Few, if any, even knew that there was a naval shipyard in Philadelphia. But in those dry docks wide enough to fit the keel of an aircraft carrier, in those cranes taller than a seventeen-story building, lay the greatest American spirit of all, the magnificent spirit of work, of fathers and mothers and sons and daughters and brothers and uncles and cousins coming together from row house and neighborhood to make something spectacular with the labor and skill of their own hands and hearts. Not just a part of the city for nearly two centuries, but the very definition of it.

  II

  The 74-gun USS Franklin was the first of the 119 ships that the yard built and gave birth to, 188 feet long at delivery, weighing 2,257 tons of wood and beam, gliding into the clear of the Delaware at precisely 3:15 P.M. on August 25, 1815. At the sight of the launching, the men who had built it, as one chronicle of the time reported, “threw their caps as they would hang them on the horns o’ the moon, shouting their emulation.”

  “I believe it is time this country was possessed of a Navy,” Joshua Humphreys, the son of a Quaker farmer and America’s first great naval architect, had written twenty-two years earlier, in 1793, to Robert Morris, a Philadelphian and financier of the Revolution. Humphreys started with a little shop on Swanson Street in the southern part of the city below Catharine. He was an apprentice to a master shipbuilder who died before the apprenticeship was complete, but Humphreys’s gift was such that in the late 1700s he designed six frigates notable for their speed and power: the United States, built at his own private shipyard in Philadelphia; the Chesapeake, at Norfolk, Virginia; the Constellation, at Baltimore; the President, at New York; the Constitution, at Boston; and the Congress, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Of all these seaboard cities, none became a greater builder of naval ships than Philadelphia.

  In 1801, the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard officially opened at the foot of Front Street, and that is where the Franklin was built and launched. Seventy-five years later the yard moved to its current location in the southern part of the city, an inhospitable swath of land known as League Island. There wasn’t much to recommend League Island from a human standpoint or even from an animal one. Only the muskrats sought pleasure in its marsh, and a syndicate of boosters from New London, Connecticut, hoping to lure the navy to build a new yard in their home port, floated claims in Washington that League Island was awash with fever that would surely strike all those who worked there. But the fresh water of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers protected the ironclads from rust, and its inland position, some ninety-five miles from the place where Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic, offered sound protection from attack. Most important of all perhaps, Philadelphia could legitimately boast of itself as the greatest and most diversified manufacturing city in the United States.

  The steel and iron needed to build the new ships of the modern navy were close at hand, and so was an inexhaustible supply of skilled labor. So the yard was built there, thriving in times of war, when nearly fifty thousand men and women crammed its gates in traffic jams that ran the length of Broad Street from City Hall to the nexus of the yard entrance, barely hanging on in times of peace and power politics, when slow-drawling politicians from Virginia and Mississippi tried to sweet-talk and strong-arm military brass into closing it down so ship work could go to yards in their own states. In 1970, the yard built its last ship from the keel up, the 18,646-ton USS Blue Ridge, a specially designed amphibious command ship. But the yard continued to endure, shifting from the building of ships to the huge task of overhauling and modernizing the navy’s fleet of non-nuclear aircraft carriers.

  Even on the grayest of days, when the city seemed too tired and too beaten down to ever pick itself up, a certain sensation still stirred in the motorist who saw the yard from that grimy green bridge. The yard was quiet then, in the spring of 1992, almost ghostly, but memory and myth and the considerable powers of nostalgia took hold, and if you knew any of the stories, it was impossible not to think about them. You imagined that insufferably hot July day in 1837 when the banks of the Delaware filled with some two hundred thousand people, butchers and bankers and drunkards in the momentary suspension of inebriation, watching in awe as the largest ship ever constructed in America, the 120-gun Pennsylvania, 3,234 tons and 283 feet from keel to masthead, was launched from the yard. You imagined the thousands who had overflowed the decks of the Kansas and the Maine and the Georgia for a Sunday-afternoon sailor dance in 1919, at which the piano player drummed “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Ain’t You Coming Home to Old New Hampshire, Mollie” in earnest but soft spirit to not offend those who disapproved of dancing on the Sabbath. You saw Hedy Lamarr taking a bite out of the sandwich of a surprised shipbuilder and Judy Garland singing two whole choruses of “For Me and My Gal” right after the lunchtime whistle. You could still hear the sounds of ships rising out of the dry docks like the Egyptian pyramids, steel and iron shaped and hammered by a cast of thousands—

  The Franklin. The North Carolina. The Dolphin. The Raritan. The Pennsylvania. The Vandalia. The Relief. The Dale. The Mississippi. The Princeton. The Germantown. The Susquehanna. The Wabash. The Arctic. The Shubrick. The Lancaster. The Wyoming. The Pawnee. The Tuscarora. The Juniata. The Miami. The Monongahela. The Shenandoah. The Tacony. The Tonawanda. The Yantic. The Kansas. The Neshaminy. The Shackamaxon. The Pushmataha. The Swatara. The Antietam. The Omaha. The Quinnebaug. The Henderson. The Relief. The Dobbin. The Sandpiper. The Vireo. The Warbler. The Willet. The Kearsarge. The Constitution. The United States. The Minneapolis. The Aylwin. The Cassin. The Shaw. The Campbell. The Ingham. The Duane. The Taney. The Philadelphia. The Wichita. The Rhind. The Buck. The Washington. The PT 7. The PT 8. The Terror. The Butler. The Gherardi. The Andres. The Drury. The New Jersey. The Scott. The Burke. The Enright. The Coolbaugh. The Darby. The Blackwood. The Robinson. The Solar. The Fowler. The Spangenberg. The Currituck. The Rudderow. The Day. The Wisconsin. The Crosley. The Cread. The Ruchamkin. The Kirwin. The Antietam. The Los Angeles. The Chicago. The San Marcos
. The Princeton. The Valley Forge. The Whetstone. The Dhalgren. The Pratt. The Okinawa. The Guadalcanal. The Guam. The New Orleans. The Newport. The Manitowoc. The Sumter. The Blue Ridge.

  As you continued over the bridge on Interstate 95, past the jumbled stench and sprawl and spew of oil refineries and the endless fields of row houses where many shipyard workers once lived, as you entered a city that seemed so shiny and steely on one side and so dilapidated and deflated on the other, simultaneously resurrected and obliterated, you thought about the yard as it was now, in 1992. Regardless of nostalgia, its fifty-two miles of streets were nearly deserted, its dry docks virtually empty, its cranes at a standstill.

  In a commemorative book that had been prepared for the 150th anniversary of the shipyard in 1951, Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews wrote, “I have every confidence that one hundred and fifty years from today Americans will repeat this salute to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard when it celebrates three hundred years of distinguished service to the fleet and to the nation.” But Matthews was wrong. Forty-one years after he wrote those words, the yard was on its knees, laboring mightily and, some thought, fatally this time to save itself from becoming another relic of the city, a symbol not of the magnificence of work but of the very absence of it.

  Rumors had coursed through the workforce over the years that the yard was on its last legs, ready to be shut down by a navy brass in Washington that found it outdated and ill-equipped to handle the needs of the modern nuclear fleet, but after a while those rumors seemed as much a part of the territory as were the whine and heat and claustrophobia of the ships’ crawl spaces. Somehow, in some way, another ship always came trudging down the Delaware needing an overhaul and the Philly finish. The old-timers had been there long enough to know that nothing was more subject to old-fashioned horse-trading in the corridors of Washington than military contracts—who got them and who didn’t get them and who had them taken away after they did get them. But scream and cry and threaten as politicians always did when it came to the need to cut spending and reduce the fatty tissue of pork, the old-timers knew that no politician was dumb enough to touch the yard, not with its legacy and its history. “In 1985, when I was working as a pipefitter, I went to one of the older fellows in the shop about a rumor that the yard was closing,” a shipyard worker told the Philadelphia Daily News. “He was puffing on a cigar and he said: ‘Listen, kid, this place has been shutting down for 240 years. It ain’t never going to close. So shut up and get out of here.’ ”

  But it was different now, and the latest volley of rumors about the impending closure of the yard—that it was real this time and not some private game of battleship between Republicans and Democrats in Washington—had never been this intense. In April 1991, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney proposed closing thirty-one major military bases around the country, including the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. The navy yard had been on closure lists before, and this one still needed approval from Congress and the president, but there was something different about this announcement, particularly since it was made by a Republican administration and the leading senator of the state, Arlen Specter, was himself a Republican. “There’s a bad feeling this time,” said a shipyard worker named Gene Smith, echoing the feelings of thousands of military and civilian workers, and newspapers covering the story came up with a chilling statistic: if in fact the yard and base did close, the net effect in the region would be a loss of forty-seven thousand jobs and a hike in the unemployment rate from 6.5 to 8.5 percent.

  As soon as Cheney produced his list, politicians from all over the state went on the offensive. One promised a “war bigger than the Persian Gulf” to save the yard, and others quickly added their own versions of outrage and vitriol. The most sincere expression of what the yard meant came at the beginning of June 1991, when six women dressed in red, white, and blue attended a federal hearing on the proposed closure and somewhat mysteriously hauled a large plastic bag to the front of the room. Inside were 100,000 signatures on petitions begging that the yard be saved. Quietly and methodically the women had gone to bowling alleys and supermarkets and Phillies games to collect them.

  On the last Sunday in June, when the decision on the fate of the yard was to be announced, Pat D’ Amico, one of the women who had fanned out all over the city collecting signatures, cooked a big family dinner. She had grown up in the southwest section of the city in an Irish Catholic neighborhood, and beyond belief in God and pub the only other automatic assumption in life was that when you got old enough, you could always go to work at the yard. She had fulfilled that prophecy. So had her father, her husband, her brother, her sister, her father-in-law, and her brother-in-law. That previous Friday rumors had floated that the federal Base Closure and Realignment Commission, in charge of deciding on Cheney’s recommendations and overwhelmed by the outpouring of support for the yard, not to mention crucial data showing its efficiency, might keep it open. The vote was televised live, and Pat D’Amico and her family watched. The decision was stunning: a unanimous seven votes. In favor of closure.

  As the impact of the vote set in, Pat D’Amico thought that what had just happened could not have happened—that somebody would listen and grasp the importance of the yard, not just as a place that efficiently and expertly overhauled ships but as a place that was too much a part of the city’s lore, America’s lore, to be rendered silent. “You kind of thought in your heart of hearts that this is America, that this is the United States, and somehow somebody would have to say that this couldn’t happen,” she later told an interviewer. “You really didn’t think that this was really possible, and I had a really naïve belief, I’m sure, that somehow my government wouldn’t do this to me.”

  But her government had done it, to her and to her city.

  Sponsored by Senator Specter, a suit was filed claiming that the criteria used by the navy to close the yard had been faulty and filled with purposeful omissions. In effect, the suit argued that the fix had been in, that the navy had vowed to shut the yard down regardless of how efficient it was compared with other yards around the country. Other politicians and union leaders fell in line behind Specter, their battle cry once again brimming with confidence. They claimed the suit was on sound enough legal ground to keep the yard open, and many of those who worked there were flooded with a sense of hope or, at the very least, ammunition for their own self-denial.

  But one politician who did not join the bandwagon was Ed Rendell. When he took office, he spoke little of the navy yard publicly, and much of the reason for that was purely practical. With the city sinking financially and the union negotiations heating up, to give time to anything else was difficult. But he was aware of what was happening at the yard, and as he heard Arlen Specter and other politicians fire away about the merits of the suit and how it would be the yard’s savior, he saw their pronouncements as political and more than just political, as a form of cruel and unusual punishment of the workers, supplying them with the one emotion they could not afford to have—a misguided sense that their careers and futures were eternally safe.

  The navy had previously agreed to send one final aircraft carrier to the navy yard, the John F. Kennedy, for overhaul. Because of the amount of work an aircraft carrier overhaul required, such a job would keep the yard open until the fall of 1995. But no more work was scheduled after that, and Rendell privately believed that it was ludicrous to think the navy was going to supply any. Instead, the yard would close in September 1995 once the work on the Kennedy was completed, at just about the same time his term as mayor would end. As a result, the issue for him wasn’t how to keep the yard open but what on earth to do with the massive facility when it closed and, equally problematic, what to do with the nearly ten thousand workers who, outside of some miracle, were destined to lose their jobs, their livelihoods, and their way of life.

  III

  Had Mangan’s mind-set been different, he might have been able to convince himself of a different fate. During the spring of 1992, there w
ere even some glimmers of hope, if it was your inclination to be hopeful. Vice President Quayle, at a political stop in Wilmington, said the administration was looking into the possibility of using the yard to service and maintain the navy’s fleet of cargo and support ships. In addition, the lawsuit filed by Senator Specter had made a miraculous recovery from the dead. The previous November, it had been dismissed by a federal judge on the grounds that Congress had clearly worded the base-closure law to preclude any court appeal. But in April 1992, a federal appeals court revived the suit on the grounds that various aspects of the decision to close the yard were appropriate for judicial review. “Their jobs are a lot safer today than they were yesterday,” said Bruce W. Kauffman, a former justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, arguing the case for the plaintiffs.

  But Mangan was still reluctant to put much stock in such comments. He knew what these bromides of optimism were largely about, telling workers what they so desperately wanted to hear, giving them a scrap of good news that they might well remember in the voting booth later in the year, when Specter was up for reelection in a nasty dogfight against Democratic challenger Lynn Yeakel. His memory for political semantics was a good one, and he could still recall being at the once thriving Frankford Arsenal in 1975 when Walter Mondale, running on the ticket with Jimmy Carter, vowed that that facility would never close. In its heyday during World War II, the Frankford Arsenal had employed more than twenty-two thousand people and had produced eight million bullets a day. Much like the navy yard, it had not equaled such dizzying heights of production and employment since then, but still, there was Mangan at the arsenal listening to a political speech in good faith, and there was Mondale, as honest a man as you could ever find in all of government, promising that the arsenal would stay open, which of course is exactly the opposite of what happened after Carter became president. Carter did decide to close the arsenal in 1977, and it was after that that Jim Mangan generally stopped voting for mainstream candidates and listened to what politicians said as if it were some form of exotic theater. “It starts to sound like a rerun after a while,” he said of the battery of politicians and lawyers coming to the defense of the yard. “There’s nothing they can do.”