A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  The car pulled up alongside the funeral home, and for a brief moment the phone wasn’t ringing and there wasn’t anyone scratching at the window wanting something. Rendell thought some more about that nine-year-old boy, thought some more about what it must be like to have your father taken away when there has been no time to prepare for it, no warning at all, not even the time to say good-bye. “For whatever I’m good or bad, it’s mostly the reflection of what my father believed. He loved the seashore. He loved sports. He loved politics.

  “It’s sad that I lost him when I was fourteen,” said the mayor. He seemed almost completely isolated at that moment, a man so totally at the whim of public appetite and such a creation of it that he had lost his inner life long ago. Given his innate gregariousness, it was hard to think of him as lonely, and yet there were many moments when he seemed acutely so, a prisoner of the performance of public life. He had a wife, and he had a child, but on a daily basis he gave far more of his time to strangers than to them. It wasn’t selfishness but the nature of what he did, acting in front of people he didn’t even know on the dilapidated stage set of the city, focusing on them as if they were intimate confidants when in fact he had learned their names only moments beforehand.

  “Where the fuck is Tucker?” he suddenly snarled to Sergeant Buchanico, as if slapping himself in the face. He came out of the car and was immediately surrounded by a sea of reporters in the gray and the drizzle, comforted by their presence and the obligation of their questions.

  II

  In large part through the masterful participation of Cohen, the teachers settled with the school district in the early part of September. As a result, the municipal unions’ hope for mass chaos to be used as leverage in their dispute with the city went down several notches. But the unions still made their presence felt. Police reported roughly $10,000 of vandalism at the city’s sewage treatment plant, and several days later an employee of the Water Department was surrounded by several militant union members, assaulted, and taken to the hospital for cuts on his forehead and under his eye.

  In the middle of September, just as the mayor was boarding the Choo Choo Trolley at Broad and Walnut to kick off a new retail and restaurant promotion in the city called Wednesday Night Out, an unlikely visitor suddenly boarded the train. It was David Cohen, and the very fact that he had left his office and walked four blocks to see the mayor was significant. Cohen clutched the pages of something in his hands, and he slipped them to the mayor aboard the Choo Choo Trolley with that slightly devilish grin he inevitably wore when he had information that he knew everyone else coveted.

  Two months earlier, in July, as a way of trying to break the unions’ blockade of delay, the city had elected to make the appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court challenging the fact-finding. When the idea of such an appeal had first been raised, various members of the city negotiating team were aghast. Placing your fate in the hands of the state’s highest court was a little bit like playing Russian roulette with every chamber of the revolver loaded. Whatever happened, it could not possibly be pretty. As painstakingly chronicled over the years by the Inquirer, the court was a morass of internal politics, with temperaments so out of kilter that Sol Wachtler would have been considered a model of reserve. In succeeding months, one of its justices would actually be impeached.

  There was just no way of knowing how the court would react to a case as explosive as this one, with the political forces of labor on one side and the city on the other. But there was genuine concern that actual legal considerations might be at the very bottom of the court’s decision. “Once this petition is filed, a political process starts that is uncontrollable,” a member of the negotiating team told the mayor. “You basically put [your] fate out of your control, because those animals will do anything. They’re too powerful. It’s like letting a tiger out of the cage.”

  Given the history of the court’s conduct, this view made eminent sense. But as day after day ticked by and the negotiations continued to founder and the unions held as tight as Londoners during the Battle of Britain, Cohen came to the conclusion that the only way to break the vise of delay was with the court challenge.

  In the tactical warfare of the city, this was a highly risky move, one that could do significant damage to the union front but could also explode within the city’s own camp. If the supreme court granted the petition, the city would finally overcome the blockade of the fact-finding. More important, the way would be cleared for the city to declare contract negotiations at an impasse and unilaterally implement its latest offer, an offer that would naturally be enormously favorable to the city. Implementation would place the unions in a do-or-die situation. To combat the effects of implementation of a contract by the city, they would really have only two choices: take their chances on a strike and hope it would create havoc, or creep back to the table to discuss some sort of honorable surrender. On the other hand, a supreme court ruling against the city would give the unions an enormously important victory in the war and bog the negotiations down even more.

  Now, on the Choo Choo Trolley, Rendell took the sheaf of papers from Cohen and saw the result of the gamble. Answers in legal opinions were sometimes difficult to find, a thicket of impenetrable citations and legalese that seemed to make the issues only more complicated and more fractious than ever. But here the answer was easy: the supreme court had ruled in favor of the city.

  After seventy-seven days, the blockade of delay had finally been broken, and because of that, there was no other choice but for both sides to fire up their guns again in the war of the unions, this time to the point of no return. One way or another either the unions or the city administration would be leveled. Either there would be a strike the likes of which had never been seen in the history of the city, or there would be a contract with concessions the likes of which had never been seen in the history of the city.

  Two days after the supreme court ruling, Rendell announced that the city and the unions had reached an impasse in negotiations. He was therefore laying out his “last, best offer” to the unions and giving them five days, until 5:00 P.M. on Wednesday, September 23, to accept it. If no settlement was reached by the deadline, Rendell announced, he would go ahead and implement the contract with the terms he had just laid out, terms that of course benefited the city in every way possible.

  The announcement was a bombshell. Scurrying for cover, District Council 33 sought safety and refuge among the city’s black politicians. In early September, a letter from a black politician had privately circulated demanding that the city negotiate in good faith, and according to Cohen, there was an implied threat of violence. The letter was a typical but masterful stroke of racial politics, clearly suggesting, without the slightest proof, that the mayor was trying to force the unions to accept a contract that was not only antiunion but also antiblack. Recognizing the enormous damage the letter could wreak, Cohen lobbied, with the considerable help of Council President Street, to get it killed. The lobbying was successful, but in return black elected officials placed their trust in the hands of Street to mediate a fair contract. Momentarily at least, it was hard to know whether Rendell and Cohen would have been much better off with the letter.

  No other politician in the city, no other politician in the entire state, was like John Street. No other politician was more unpredictable in terms of mood. No other politician required more homage and subservience. No other politician had shown more pugilistic willingness during a fight with a fellow city councilman in the early 1980s.

  Inside his inner office, accessible only by a buzzer (not even Rendell’s inner office had a buzzer), there was a wall covered with memorabilia of Street’s career. Most politicians, most people, used their walls as a place to display complimentary plaques and letters and clippings, little reminders of all the good they had done. John Street had covered his wall with just the opposite—negative clippings about him, negative letters, negative headlines. Some who had seen the wall said it served to remind Street o
f how far he had come. But to others, the Wall of Shame was a Rorschach of what motivated him—the ridicule of others, the lack of respect from others, and not simply getting mad or getting even but completely and totally obliterating those who had scorned him. And yet no other politician, with the exception of Cohen, was more dogged in trying to determine the gritty financial mechanics of what made the city work. And among blacks, no other politician was more willing to make decisions that might actually be good for the entire city, not just for the black neighborhoods.

  Aware of the yin and the yang of John Street, Rendell and Cohen had played him like a precocious problem child right from the very beginning of the administration, a problem child capable of doing great good if coddled the right way, capable of doing great harm if he sensed even the slightest whiff of insult. Aware of his need for respect, of his need to be treated not simply as the city council president but as the chosen prince of government, they fed his ego constantly, caressing it and stroking it to the point where Rendell, whenever something good happened in the city, generally gave John Street credit regardless of whether or not he deserved it. Once a week the mayor held a private briefing with Street, or Council President Street as all but a select few were required to call him, and it was Rendell who trundled up the two flights of stone steps to Street’s office and not Street who trundled down the steps to see Rendell. It was Rendell who waited dutifully as Street’s secretary buzzed him in, Rendell who didn’t seem to mind that about the only memento of levity on the Wall of Shame was a picture of the mayor himself on his hands and knees cleaning a City Hall bathroom. When public fanfare was made over the banning of parking on the apron surrounding City Hall, meaning that city council members who had parked their cars there would be allotted spots on the sidewalk instead, a city official received a call from Street’s office requesting that one of the coveted spots go to a friend of his. “The city is not in the business of providing private citizens with authorized parking,” said the memo to Cohen. “I would appreciate your resolving this matter with President Street before Mr. Gibson’s car is ticketed and towed.” In response to the memo, Cohen instructed the city official to “take no action at this point.” When Street wanted tickets for a sporting event, Rendell worked the phones to get them as fast as he could. When Street became incensed by a series of editorials in the Daily News criticizing the conduct of the council, the mayor helped to arrange a meeting with two of the paper’s top editors in an ostensible effort to clear the air. At the meeting, Rendell was largely silent, doing little to direct the meeting toward any constructive end. Street in the meantime yelled so much that Richard Aregood, the paper’s editorial-page editor, later wrote a little note to the mayor saying, “Although I had been expecting a reasoned, if spirited conversation about the Daily News’s editorials, it was interesting to spend all that time being berated by a deranged asshole.”

  But then there was the other Street. As council president, he had done a remarkable job of keeping the rest of the council in line, a task as formidable as that of a grade school teacher presiding over a classroom of hyperactive students, all of whom had forgotten to take their Ritalin. In the battles over the budget, council members, instead of making life miserable for the mayor, as was their historical inclination, had offered virtually no resistance. They had also stayed out of the fractious atmosphere of the union negotiations. As a result, when Street entered the war, in effect acting as a go-between for District Council 33 and the administration, there was cause for hope.

  Two days before the September 23 deadline for settlement set by the mayor, Sutton and Street reportedly met at Street’s house and actually seemed close to hammering out an agreement. But once Sutton returned to his own camp, the agreement unraveled, and the demands of the unions suddenly spiked again like an uncontrollable fever. A day before the deadline, both Cohen and Alan Davis became convinced that Sutton, simply to save face with his union, would have to take a strike and then hope that his workers would beg to return to work given the general economic climate.

  That night, after an elaborate shell game played to keep the media from finding out the chosen location, a lengthy negotiating session was held between the unions and the city. The following morning, seven and a half hours before the mayor’s deadline, the unions sent a proposal to Cohen. He perused it briefly and took note of some of the demands, such as wage increases of 8 percent over the life of the contract and $76 million in payments to the health and welfare fund. He then organized a little pool among the city negotiators to see who could come the closest to guessing the accumulated deficit such a proposal would create in the budget at the end of five years. (The correct answer was $340 million.)

  “I’ve always asked you this question, and you’ve always evaded the answer,” said Rendell to Cohen. “What are they thinking?”

  “It is not susceptible to an answer,” said Cohen.

  As the hours to the deadline wound down, the pressure on Rendell was incalculable. Regardless of the tough talk over the past several months, he wanted a settlement, not a strike, but now more than ever he was prepared for the worst. On the phone with an investment adviser from Pittsburgh, he was all too aware of what had recently happened there—acts of violence and horrific headlines as the result of a contentious newspaper strike. “I think the strike will be violent, and that will be bad for the city. Of course, you had your violence. It subsides, doesn’t it?”

  Alternating between rage and an uncharacteristic twilight calm, he reacted to the pressures of the job the way he usually did, by going after those who were the most helpless and posed the least resistance. An innocent tailor was cursed with having to measure him for white tie and tails for a wedding. Scurrying in tow like a terrified mouse, he somehow managed to measure Rendell’s massive shoulders and inseam as the mayor gritted his teeth, slapped his hands, and stomped about the room. Away from the tailor, Rendell regained his composure, particularly when the reporter Scott Simon followed him around for a little while in preparation for a segment on the Today show.

  “I’ve often wondered over the past several years why one with a promising future would want to be mayor?” Simon asked from the backseat of the mayor’s car.

  As the car made a slow loop around City Hall, Rendell talked convincingly about the challenges of the job. He talked about how utterly bored he would be as a governor or a senator. He talked about how a mayor of a big city was always in the thick of the action. It was the perfect sound-bite answer, until he added one more thought. “I gotta tell you, I’m not sure how much of a promising future I had. If I hadn’t won this election, this would have been it.”

  Simon gave a little gulping laugh and chose another line of questioning. So much for the mayor as sacrificial angel on behalf of the urban time bomb.

  At 2:00 P.M., with three hours to go before the deadline, Cohen got a revised proposal from the unions so drastically different from the one he had received earlier that it suddenly reduced the accumulated deficit by $140 million. The abrupt turnaround by the unions was mystifying, but there was hope among the city negotiators that a settlement could still be reached.

  “It’s not over yet,” said Davis.

  “God only knows where we are,” said Cohen.

  At 3:30 P.M., chief union negotiator Willig called Cohen’s office to speak to Davis. Asked for his reaction to the day’s initial union offer, Davis was ravenously eager to comply, like a prisoner getting his first meal after a prolonged hunger strike.

  “I can start from the top. We don’t like the wages. We don’t like the health care. When you’re talking about scheduling, transfers, working down, classification—all of that are things that we want and we need—there’s none of that in there.” He hung up, and his smile fell over the stone of City Hall like a meteor shower. “It’s conversations like that that make the whole six months worth it.”

  At 4:07 P.M., fifty-three minutes before the deadline, Ginnie Lehoe, Cohen’s secretary, who worked almost as method
ically as he did, typed up a letter from Davis to Sutton officially notifying him of the city’s rejection of the union’s proposals:

  In light of the continuing impasse, we hereby reaffirm our offer of Sept. 18, as the city’s last and best offer, which, if not accepted, will be implemented today at 5:00 P.M.

  During the past several days, informal discussions have been conducted through intermediaries. Regrettably, such discussions have failed to resolve the impasse.

  At 4:17 P.M., forty-three minutes before the deadline, Rendell called Street for one last update.

  “There’s no chance, right?”

  “They want to set something up.”

  “When? We got forty-five minutes.”

  III

  Rendell seemed calm after he made his decision. But he knew that the contract he was implementing was so favorable to the city that it would inevitably back the unions into a desperate corner. Sensing his vulnerability, an aide to the mayor told him that articles and television news shows all over the country were depicting him as a hero for having the courage to face the unions head-on. He was clearly the new political flavor of the month at The Wall Street Journal. The Chicago Tribune had been in town. So had U.S. News and World Report, and many others would follow. But in the face of an ugly strike, those clips would be of little consolation.