A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  The mordant sound of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” being played on a flute emanated from the City Hall courtyard through the open window of the mayor’s office. Of all the sounds from the courtyard, it was the only one that carried into the office, as if there were a certain destiny to it. The musician played the same song every day, so lonely in the pierce of its notes that it evoked one of two reactions—a desire to fling oneself into the courtyard or a desire to take the flute and break it over the head of the musician playing it. Rendell did neither. Instead, he tried to be as upbeat as possible. Speaking over the phone to Cohen, he fantasized about the possibility of a prolonged strike, during which he could temporarily dump the mayor’s job, get out of that teak-lined prison where everyone was trying to hold him hostage for something, and just go around the city collecting garbage. “Just think, if we had a three-week strike, I wouldn’t have to do any real work. I wouldn’t have to see any community groups. I wouldn’t have to go to any meetings. I wouldn’t have to give any speeches. It would be fabulous!

  “Fuck it, I’m ready.”

  The following night, Rendell and Street got on the phone to each other and went through the elaborate choreography of the mayor begrudgingly giving in on two outstanding issues: one involving the use of prison inmates for volunteer work and the other an agreement to notify the union of the intent to contract out any work that cost more than $10,000. Rendell was convincing in expressing his reluctance, in showing how much it killed him to give up on these two issues. It was vintage Rendell, and it was also a vintage bit of Rendell acting. Before the call, the mayor and the city council president had agreed to give up on these issues. But they also assumed that Sutton and Willig would be listening to the conversation, since Street was calling from the union camp. The mayor and the council president went through the charade to give Sutton the opportunity to report to his union membership that he had faced down the mayor on these two pivotal issues. So close did the mayor and Street feel to a settlement, a settlement that would be incredible for the city, that one of their primary worries had become how they could make Sutton look like a union president who had shown some backbone and not like a union president who had flung away his membership. They knew he needed victories, something he could take back to the executive board as a show of toughness, and they were trying to feed them to him. Along the same lines, the mayor also agreed to a union request that former labor secretary Ray Marshall come to Philadelphia, go through the transparent act of bringing the two sides together, and then proclaim the contract a fair one. The way the plan would work, according to city negotìators, was that Marshall would meet with the mayor for a grand total of five minutes, but his presence in the city would give Sutton further strength with his executive board.

  Despite the flurry, there was still no settlement by Friday. During the previous three nights, Cohen had slept a total of three hours, but he seemed utterly unaffected by the deprivation. As he told someone over the phone, “Actually I don’t feel too bad.”

  Despite the sense of optimism that everyone on the city side felt, Cohen was still the ultimate realist. “There’s actually a lot that’s agreed to,” he told the mayor. “The problem is they are so unhappy with what they’ve agreed to, moving a comma at this point is enough to make them throw up their hands and say the hell with it.”

  Early that afternoon, Rendell, Cohen, and Street convened around the table in the mayor’s office. Street was hunched over the table, clearly luxuriating in his role as go-between for the city and the unions, the perfect man in the middle. “I like this shit,” he said at one point, sounding like the Robert Duvall character in Apocalypse Now waxing enthusiastic over the smell of napalm in the morning. Expansive in private in a way that he almost never was in public, he told a story about his son, how he had lost count of the number of laps in a track-meet relay and so had stopped in the middle. The more he exposed his son’s utter confusion, the happier he became, and by the end, tears of laughter were running down his face. He told another story about the city councilman named David Cohen, admitting that he didn’t have the heart to yell at him since he was old and somewhat frail. “I don’t want to be responsible for him having a heart attack,” said Street, and he continued in his unique vein.

  “I did that once.”

  Rendell and Cohen nodded.

  Through the open window came the sound of “Amazing Grace” from the courtyard flutist.

  “Fuck him!”

  Street was referring to Tom Cronin, the head of District Council 47.

  “He’s a piece of shit.”

  Rendell and Cohen nodded.

  Street was angry with Cronin for his general bombast as well as for blasting proposed efforts by Street and Rendell to reform the city’s charter. Street said he had once worn the same style straw hat that Cronin fancied but then gave it up when someone from a distance mistook him for the union leader. Now he was reveling in the fact that Cronin, as head of a major union in the city, was being virtually shut out of the negotiations. “Crone Pain-in is being subjected to a humiliation that is completely justified,” said Street.

  “He’s getting paid back for shit that he did.”

  Rendell and Cohen nodded.

  Street estimated that there were still nineteen issues the unions and the city had not resolved. But he was supremely confident they could be resolved. “There is no way this thing shouldn’t be done today,” he said.

  Cohen showed the same sense of urgency, born not out of confidence but out of a feeling that it was only a matter of time before the unions would wake up to the reality of what they were doing. “We really should aim to get it done today. The longer it sits, the worse it smells.”

  “What?” asked Street.

  “This deal.”

  And quite clearly there were some within the unions who were the embodiment of Cohen’s very fears. The day of implementation of the city’s final offer, Rendell had sent a letter to all city employees, outlining the administration’s position on the negotiations. The letter was humane and decent, expressing sadness and regret that the negotiations had escalated to such a point. Several days later his office received a message for the mayor that had been scribbled in raw and stilted print on the back of one of the letters:

  You are punk pussy jew racist who should be killed the way Hitler broiled Jews in his ovens. What goes around, comes around. You better get extra body guards to watch that fat jew ass, but even that won’t stop armor piercing bullets.

  IV

  Ten days later the unions and the city were still negotiating, still attempting to effect the terms of a surrender. Progress was being made, but it was slow and inchlike, fraught with paranoia and suspicion—not to mention that from a union perspective this contract, if actually agreed to, would likely go down as the worst ever in terms of public-employee bargaining. Or as Cohen told the mayor in one of his status updates on the union’s approach, “This is half my labor negotiations. This person can’t meet with that person. We have to talk about that issue, but not with this person.” Every time a settlement seemed within reach, the union backtracked or stalled or came up with a totally different proposal snatched from the mists, and city negotiators became convinced that the strategy of the unions was exactly the same as it had been since the end of June—to stall and obfuscate and pray for some sort of natural disaster that might kill Rendell and Cohen and Davis and all the rest of those bastards.

  It got so bizarre that the union lawyers did not even show up for the hearing on their request for an injunction against implementation of the city’s final offer. Their absence made no sense to Rendell, and he, like virtually everyone else, was growing frazzled. “Part of me says if they’re not serious about [the court case], go on strike and get the fucker over with.” But inch by inch, progress had been made, to the point where there was confidence that the economic issues had largely been settled. Under the tentatively agreed upon new four-year contract, there would be no wage increases in
the first two years, a 2 percent increase in the third year, and a 3 percent increase in the fourth year; a contribution of $360 a month per employee to the health and welfare fund; and an up-front lump-sum payment of $39 million to District Council 33. All in all it was a remarkably favorable deal for the city, close to what had been asked for initially, and in past negotiations it would have been cause for celebration. But the commitment that Rendell had made to Alan Davis and the rest of the negotiation team over the summer had stood, and the non-economic issues, instead of being given away, were still being negotiated with ferocity. Among the myriad of issues, significant differences still existed over the city’s right to lay off workers as well as the city’s right to contract out work.

  On Monday, October 5, there loomed a new deadline, this one set by the unions: a strike deadline of 12:01 A.M. Tuesday, October 6, if there was no settlement.

  Negotiations between the two sides went on all day Monday and deep into the night, but movement was still painfully slow. Hours would pass, and a few meager sentences of contract language would pass between the two sides. Then hours would pass again. During the marathon session, which had actually begun the day before, on Sunday, Cohen watched as the Vikings made a remarkable comeback against the Bears. While members of the media scurried about the Holiday Inn Midtown to capture what they believed to be a tense and taut drama, city negotiators played hearts or caught up on magazines they hadn’t been able to get to at home or read The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler or bonded together as if at a bad frat party without girls, kegs, or stale potato chips. What the city proposed was rejected by the unions. What the unions proposed was rejected by the city.

  “I’m inclined to think they don’t know what the hell they’re doing,” said Joe Torsella about the unions, and like others, he was leaning more and more to the view that there would still be a strike.

  The mayor himself vacillated. Early Monday morning his mood was good, and with typical optimism, he still thought there was a fifty-fifty chance of a settlement. But as the hours ticked by and the updates from Cohen, while not entirely grim, also indicated that no real progress was being made on the remaining issues, he began to prepare for the worst and take steps to place the city on alert. A flyer had been circulated among city employees, telling them to congregate that night for a rally at Veterans Stadium, where the Eagles were playing the Dallas Cowboys on Monday Night Football, and to the mayor that only meant trouble. He met with Deputy Police Commissioner Seamon and told him to have police at all electrical and communication receptacles in the area of the stadium to guard against sabotage, as well as a dozen tow trucks in the area to be ready to counter any union attempt to play havoc with the traffic. “They should have the right to demonstrate,” said Rendell of the union workers, “but it should not be anywhere near ingresses or egresses. The last thing we want is anything near a bloodbath.”

  “Any possibility of a settlement?” asked Seamon.

  “Yeah, there’s a possibility, but it’s the kind of thing that won’t happen until a minute before the deadline. There’s all sorts of possibilities for violence before then.”

  Questions were also raised about the accessibility of City Hall to various groups that had scheduled events in the Reception Room. A German American group had conveyed word that it was coming on Tuesday regardless of what was going on outside in terms of protests and picketers, but an Italian American group had no plans to be anywhere near the building—a chain of events that the mayor found utterly predictable.

  “If they’re Germans, I would take them seriously,” said Rendell. “The Italians canceled, proving once again that they’re lovers, not fighters.”

  Several hours later, in the afternoon, Cohen returned once again from the bargaining war room at the Holiday Inn and had little new to report. A press conference had been scheduled for 5:00 P.M., and as the two were going over what Rendell should say, Cohen was handed a walkie-talkie by Sergeant Buchanico, presumably to use once the strike was on. He looked at it with total puzzlement, as if it were a foreign object, and Rendell immediately understood the source of Cohen’s apprehension. “Don’t you know Jews don’t know how to work instruments like that,” consoled the mayor. “It’s impossible. It’s not in our background.”

  The sound of the clock atop the City Hall tower struck 5:00 as Rendell paced back and forth in his office by himself. He was taking deep breaths as he mouthed aloud what he would say at the press conference, making sure to remember Cohen’s admonitions about not saying anything about the status of the negotiations (it was so hard to remember everything David told him to do sometimes), pacing behind the desk, then back and forth across the Oriental carpet, then to the edge of the round table—no jokes, no temper tantrums, no asides, just the grim reality that a strike, a goddamn strike, was about to hit the city.

  Rendell, Cohen, and press secretary Feeley left the mayor’s office and walked down the hall to the press conference, wing-tipped gunfighters in their dark suits. “There is a possibility that as of midnight tonight there will be a strike,” said the mayor with both hands on the podium at the front of the Reception Room. He was calm and somber, reflecting not simply the tenuousness of the situation but also a genuine sadness about who would lose the most and suffer the most. “What we’re fighting for here are the poorest ten or fifteen percent, because they simply have no alternative. Those who have the money to leave Philadelphia will.” And then, like virtually everyone else in the city, he could do nothing else but wait.

  On the phone with Cohen a couple of hours later, he told him to convey a message to Sutton “to settle this fucking thing,” particularly after hearing that a mere 150 union protesters had showed up at Veterans Stadium even though the game was on national television. “If that’s the best they can do, they should settle.” He sat down to watch the game on the set in the console in the middle of the office while doing paperwork, proclaiming with gusto and enthusiasm “This baby is over!” when the Eagles forged ahead to a quick 7–0 lead, only to proclaim “Oops, that changes the whole complexion” minutes later, when the Dallas Cowboys’ Michael Irvin broke off a long gain on a reception. He then went out to the game, sitting in the first row of the mayor’s box with a plate piled high with chicken wings and macaroni salad that was immaculate by the time he left to return to the office forty-five minutes later. In moments of stress and anxiousness, the mayor liked nothing better than to eat and eat mightily—spaghetti, popcorn, vats of ice cream. He wasn’t at that precipice when he left the game, but on his way back he called directory assistance for the number of the White Castle on South Broad, to make sure it was still open. The connection wasn’t great, and the operator hung up on him, making clear that in the eyes of the phone company it didn’t really matter whether you were the mayor or a major felon, but he got to White Castle anyway and ordered a ten-pack to go as a kind of reserve measure.

  A half hour later, back in his office watching the game, he had eaten six of the burgers and was yelling “We get the ball! We get the ball!” as the Eagles recovered a Dallas fumble. Fifteen minutes later, at 11:15 P.M., forty-five minutes before the strike deadline and now eating a pear, he attempted to reach Cohen on his beeper. When Cohen didn’t respond right away, he thought something might be going on, a glimmer of hope. But he was wrong. The strike had started.

  At five minutes past midnight, Rendell watched on television as the Channel 6 news showed union protesters shouting “Rendell, go to hell!” in a unison so wobbly and thin that Rendell himself laughed. At the same time Cohen was calling: Sutton wanted to talk.

  At 12:15 A.M., while Rendell held an impromptu press conference as a ruse to occupy the media, Sutton and Street quietly slipped into his office. The mayor and Cohen arrived fifteen minutes later, and the four men sat at the round table in the office. By prior agreement, Rendell played the good cop and Cohen the bad one, which had the effect of making the mayor’s assurances to Sutton all the more holy and sacrosanct. When Rendell said he wa
s willing to soften some of the language on management-rights issues, Cohen balked, but Rendell, as if on cue, quietly overruled him anyway. When it came to the issue of contracting out labor, the mayor promised not “to jam it down people’s throats.” He gave the same assurances on layoffs. But although he was willing to give some ground in these and other areas, he did not back down or waver on his basic contentions that the city must have the right to manage its workforce and that the unions must be held to some standard of accountability. “I’m not going to fuck you, I’m not going to lie to you,” he told Sutton, but “you gotta give us the right to manage.”

  There was no yelling or histrionics during the meeting. Sutton, a decent and reasonable man, spent much of the time listening, and when he spoke, he was so quiet and self-effacing that he sounded like he was in church, whispering delicately to get someone’s attention halfway down the pew. He had walked into the meeting looking frail and furtive, his crane-like features almost crumpled. When he left, at 2:20 A.M., he didn’t look much better. He was in an almost impossible situation, with the sway of public opinion, so masterfully shaped by Rendell, overwhelmingly against the unions.

  At 2:50 A.M., Sutton called the mayor on behalf of District Council 47 and asked for a $5.7-million lump-sum payment. The mayor agreed to it. At 4:00 A.M., after fielding one more update call, Rendell made a little nest for himself in the middle of the Oriental carpet with some pillows that had been brought from home. He slept on and off until 7:00 A.M., when Cohen called with that schoolmarmish voice he sometimes got when he sensed that the mayor, contrary to Cohen’s specific instructions, had said more to the media during the course of the night than Cohen felt wise or appropriate. Rendell took a shower and put on a new white shirt, which one of his staffers crinkled a bit so it would look suitably rumpled, and purposely did not shave to add to the effect that he described as “not quite cinema verité.” He removed the little nest of pillows that he had slept on, but then he put it back, knowing that reporters would undoubtedly want to see it for their inevitable reconstructions.