A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  By 8:00 A.M., the board of District Council 33 was meeting to accept or reject the proposed contract. “The longer this goes on, the more worried I become,” Rendell said a half hour later. But he was still in a good mood, still fantasizing about the tone he would use at the press conference announcing a contract settlement and how, regardless of the impulse, he would not gloat. But as minute after minute and then hour after hour ticked by, he became increasingly agitated. “Eleven fucking o’clock,” he muttered from his office, and then he yelled at no one in particular, “Let’s get it on!”

  At noon, he received word from Cohen that the union bargaining agents were going crazy over the layoff and contracting-out provisions. “If they vote this down, there is no more negotiation!” he told Cohen. “We have bent over backward—bent over backward.”

  Five minutes later he received word that the union was balking at the potential use of prison parolees to perform city labor and at changes in the disability provisions that would cut down on the ability of workers to double-dip. “The only thing disability hurts is the fucking slackers,” he yelled over the phone. “There is no decent worker that has anything to worry about.”

  Seven minutes later he spoke with Cohen again. “Let’s do the fucking thing, let’s do it! Let’s get on with the strike, and let’s see what happens! That’s life! That’s life in the big city!”

  Eight minutes later he received reports that an elderly man had been pushed to the pavement and injured by pickets outside City Hall while police at the scene had done nothing. In the Cabinet Room, he watched a tape of the incident supplied to him by one of the local television stations, and he expressed his reaction to a police inspector. “I want them fired! Terrific performance by the Philadelphia Police Department! I want everybody who was out there fired! Did the Philadelphia Police take a dive because of the unions? This is fucking unbelievable! Is this America we are in? This is not supposed to happen to citizens of Philadelphia! We all pick our noses instead of being at the site! What the fuck are we doing? How the fuck did they not see that? I want them down here in forty-five minutes! This is a despicable performance by the Philadelphia PD! God fucking Christ!”

  He said he wanted to see the top echelons of the police department as soon as possible. They arrived sheepishly in his office with the circumspection of cat burglars, hoping and praying not to be noticed, and sat for the most part in utter silence as the mayor paced behind his desk in a blind and teetering rage that went far beyond the diagnosis of wig out, approaching something otherworldly.

  “These guys don’t do a bloody fucking thing! They don’t do shit, and I want them fired! I want them fired so the message gets out that no one in the police department takes a dive!”

  One of the police officials tried to explain that no one had witnessed the incident.

  “Oh wonderful, oh wonderful! What were they doing? Were they involved in street theater? Were they feeding the homeless? What the fuck were they doing? Fire them!”

  Another police official tried once again to explain the circumstances of the situation.

  Rendell took his chair and slammed it into the desk with all his might. And then, for the first time since learning of the incident, his voice lowered to a decibel level that if not quite reasonable, was somewhere close to it. And suddenly his mood changed, from livid to almost beseeching. “Maybe the city isn’t worth saving? Is there anybody else out there who cares but me? Is there anybody else? Am I just spitting into the wind? I don’t like having people call me names and dumping garbage on my lawn. If this is what my police officers do, why don’t I just fold?”

  An hour later, at 2:30 P.M., he sat quietly at the desk of one of his secretaries in the outer office, spent and exhausted, still dwelling on the incident with the police, still waiting for a moment that seemed destined never to come, when he received word of something surreal. At first, when Kevin Feeley told him, he didn’t believe it, so he did what he always did when he needed certification.

  “Is it true?” he asked Cohen over the phone, sounding both incredulous and slightly dazed, as if the whole thing were some prank.

  Ed Rendell didn’t jump up and down when he received confirmation of a tentative settlement in the war of the unions. He didn’t hoot or holler or slap anyone on the back or break open a bottle of champagne. He didn’t hug his schedulers or his secretaries or do a jig or stand on his head. He smiled from ear to ear, but there was something strangely muted in his behavior. Like most men defined by drive and the constant taste of action, he saw life as a matter of hopscotching from one crisis to another, and as soon as one hurdle was overcome, it almost instantaneously lost its sex appeal. The war of the unions was over, and now a new problem was gnawing at him, driving him berserk and causing him to mutter obscenities with passion and gusto: how to get to that epic football tilt between Penn Charter and Episcopal in time to see his son play, particularly if he had to go down to the Holiday Inn and play kissy face with Sutton and somehow make him look like a proud union warrior when the exact opposite was the case.

  It was solely on the basis of a bluff that the city had taken the initial steps to contract out certain portions of the sanitation work performed by Sutton’s union. As the city negotiators had so openly discussed during that meeting at the mayor’s house, they had no intention of doing it. But the idea apparently terrified Sutton, in large measure because it was the support of the sanitation workers that had elevated him to his position as president of the union. Toward that end, as a secret part of the negotiations, Rendell wrote a confidential letter vowing never to contract out sanitation during the life of the contract. From Sutton’s perspective, the letter had to be secret. If news of it got out, thousands of union members who were not in sanitation would go haywire at the way they had been sacrificed. From the city’s perspective, the loss in potential savings from that concession was $30 million a year, not to mention the likelihood of improved efficiency in the one city service that affected everyone. But when someone later asked Cohen what the city got from the unions in return for the sanitation provision, his answer was both brief and blunt: “Everything.”

  The four-year contract contained no wage increases for the first two years and then minimal ones of 2 percent in the third year and 3 percent in the fourth. The health benefit was reduced to $360 a month per employee. The city for the first time would be allowed representation on the board of trustees that administered the unions’ health and welfare programs, thereby giving it access to all books and records. Just as important were the sweeping and unprecedented changes in other areas. The city now had the right to contract out work under certain conditions as well as the right to lay off workers in certain instances. Specific past practices and work rules that restricted the city’s ability to monitor performance and improve productivity were eliminated. The number of paid holidays was reduced from fourteen to ten. Double-dip disability pensions, in which a retired city employee could receive two disability pensions for the same injury, were eliminated. Overall, the city would save an estimated $79 million in the first year of the contract alone and $374 million over its four-year duration. By any measure, it was a remarkable contract, a nationwide model for what a city government could do under the right conditions of crisis.

  Somehow the mayor was able to avoid the Holiday Inn, and forty-five minutes later he was at a playing field on the leafy edge of the William Penn Charter School on School House Lane, dressed in the blue suit that he had worn for the past thirty-four hours and the white button-down shirt that had been expertly crinkled to make him look disheveled. He should have been exulting in the greatest political victory of his career. He was on the verge of becoming a nationally recognized hero, with publications from near and far about to lavish praise on him as the new guru of municipal government, the mayor who knew how to reinvent the American city. During the game, as word of the settlement was broadcast over radio and television, people came up to him and congratulated him. He accepted their complim
ents with typical graciousness and self-effacement, minimizing his role and minimizing the extent to which the city had crushed the unions. Cohen had played a remarkable part. So had John Street in his role as intermediary, confounding his severest critics. But it was the mayor who always had been at the greatest risk in the absence of a settlement.

  Quietly, as much as he could given who he was and what was happening, he inched away from everyone else. His shoes grew soiled from the dirt of the field, his gaze fixed and focused as he watched his son. In that sliver of peace and privacy before the inevitable press conference and the million and one questions from the media, before he trudged back up to the stage of politics and public life, he seemed more happy and tranquil than he had in months, luxuriating in what it was like, if only for a precious gulp of minutes, to have an existence in which the only important matter at hand was not the city, not the endless pondering of its fate, but a son playing football.

  V

  Alan Davis hadn’t known Rendell and Cohen particularly well at the beginning of the whole saga. His impression of Rendell from their long-ago days together at the district attorney’s office was of a man who was not particularly serious, and his impression of Cohen, based on their days together at Ballard Spahr, was of a cheerful workaholic who functioned masterfully as sidekick, assistant, and briefcase carrier to the firm’s head of litigation. But the two had surprised him, showing dimensions and hues that he could not have predicted, thus creating one of those rare and glorious moments when political life, instead of lowering men and women to the muck of the occasion, had done the opposite. Far from buckling, the mayor, who could still be remarkably nonserious, had shown remarkable strength and resilience. And while Davis had been aware of Cohen’s ability to synthesize huge hunks of information, he was stunned by his fearless comfort in the stinky halls of city politics.

  As Davis sat in his forty-fifth-floor office at Ballard Spahr, the city expanded before him—the statuesque presence of the art museum, the slow bend of the Schuylkill River between bridges and plumes of cloud and smoke, the gray eminence of City Hall, the once mighty waterfront of the Delaware, with its slow trickle of ships and cargo haulers. Philadelphia never looked better than it did from up here, undulating and unfolding with history and strength as far as the eye could see—river, bridge, home, office, factory, and the crisscrossing veins of a thousand streets.

  He knew that if he stared through those magnificent windows for too long, he would begin to realize how much of it was an illusion, an egg whose yolk had turned foul and muddy. He knew that the city was struggling mightily to reshape and redefine itself, to create a new skin for itself, and he knew that the effort, regardless of the intentions, might well be in vain. Avenue of the Arts, the convention center, casino gambling, Fun City, Fat City, Entertainment City, Restaurant City, the ultimate audience pool—it all rang hollow to him, particularly in a city as historically embedded in the no-frills grit of work and output and production as this one. But the glow of the union negotiations was still with him. No one could have predicted an outcome such as this. Within the confines of government, a profound difference could still be made, and perhaps the most valuable lesson Alan Davis had learned was that he was wrong: disillusionment did not always have to be reality.

  9

  Tidbits of Urban Wisdom

  I

  During those tumultuous months of 1992, Linda Morrison had watched the war of the unions with more than just a citizen’s curiosity. Over the course of her lifetime, she had thought about the nature and the function of government in the city to a greater degree than most social and political scientists who were paid to. It was her passion and pursuit—poring over Charles Murray’s words about the evils of welfare and its legitimization of illegitimate children, clipping articles from Forbes about liberalism and how the road to hell is paved with good intentions, reading Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities so many times that she could virtually recite her favorite passages.

  She had sharp and pungent ideas, but she was also practical, and the combination was intriguing to local politicians looking for a spark: in 1991, she worked as an issues director for a Republican mayoral candidate whose acclaimed ideas for reform were often the work of Linda’s position papers; before that she worked for a city councilman whose Wall Street Journal piece about government in Philadelphia, printed in the form of an open letter to Mikhail Gorbachev and remarkable for its clever insight, had been largely Linda’s creation:

  Dear Mr. Gorbachev,

  Your economy is a shambles, everyone is afraid to lend money or to invest in your People’s Republic, government-run services are costly and inefficient, your streets are filled with potholes, there is political turmoil and anyone who can leave your workers’ paradise is packing their bags. I sympathize—we have the same situation here in Philadelphia.…

  The keenness of Linda’s intellect and her considerable gift for writing had garnered praise and attention, but perhaps her most remarkable quality was an ability to become incensed about government with spontaneous combustion. She had come to the conclusion, based not only on what she read but also on her own personal experiences, that no surgery, short of something radical and untested, would be enough. A liposuction on the budget, a chin tuck on city services—even a full face-lift would do no good if the internal organs were on the precipice of failure. Won over long ago by their animus and their spirit, she had a feeling for cities that could bring her to tears. She saw that spirit being willfully destroyed, not by fate and the inevitability of a social shift from rural to urban to suburban but by programs and policies that made no sense. “Camden is dead. Detroit is dead. Newark is dead,” said Linda Morrison as if she were talking about relatives who had been eaten away by a cancer that could have been cured. “And what scares me is that Philadelphia is on the verge. It could go either way.”

  Intrigued by what Rendell was trying to accomplish, she went to work for the administration during the war of the unions and helped shape the strategy of the attack. On the surface, it was a completely incongruous match. There was nothing that she and the mayor seemed to agree on in the slightest, whether it was notions of tourism, notions of the city’s history and how to market it effectively (she liked it the way it was, pure and clean and unadorned; he had a colonial Williamsburg vision filled with costumed characters and battle reenactments), or the fundamental role that government should play in people’s lives.

  She was a Libertarian, a firm believer in the principle that government should exist only to the extent that it ensures the personal responsibility of the individual, and sometimes she uttered her political affiliation with pride, and sometimes she uttered it as if she had some communicable disease. But if she didn’t believe in the system as it currently existed, she did believe in working within the parameters of the existing bureaucracy, however frustrating, to try to achieve change. She didn’t advertise her Libertarian allegiance or try to convert others to her way of thinking. Even so, after going to work for Rendell, rumors did swirl around her. Or as one frightened city bureaucrat put it to another, “Did you know that Linda Morrison used to be a librarian?”

  There were some in the city who saw her as savvy and visionary and admired the freshness and the provocative zeal of her ideas. Why was government in the business of building and subsidizing convention centers? Why was government in the business of giving money to people through welfare when all it seemed to do in so many cases was strip them of their incentive to work and encourage them to have children who they could not care for regardless of the honorableness of their intentions? Why was government in the transportation business or the public housing business or the health business or the school business when its track record in all these spheres had been one of abysmal failure? There were others who ultimately began to see Linda Morrison as a nut, a loose cannon who didn’t understand anything about the true role of government as provider and protector and employer and edifice builder and econo
mic developer and necessary regulator. But Linda really didn’t care what others thought. Everywhere she looked when it came to government, she saw not simply the typical twin engines of bloat and waste but the perpetuation of a culture of dependence similar to a protection racket in which taxpayers are constantly being asked to subsidize an elite group of monopolistic institutions that are incompetent, above accountability, and have as their only successes employment and patronage mills for politicians. The open letter to Gorbachev in The Wall Street Journal referred to sanitation, the schools, and mass transit as Philadelphia’s “urban collective farms.” The letter argued for the privatization of these three services, but far more important, it spoke about what these functions, and others like it, represented:

  We used to understand the benefits of liberty here in Philadelphia. As I walk to my office in City Hall, I pass an old red brick building with a bell in front of it. There are always scores of tourists—many from your part of the world—waiting in line to go inside this building and touch the bell. They are just discovering something that many in Philadelphia have forgotten. Not only is liberty right. Liberty works.

  If events over there get you down, I invite you to come to Philadelphia and touch the Liberty Bell with me. What it stands for may help both of us solve our common problem.

  When Ed Rendell ran for mayor in 1991, despite his get-tough talk, she saw him as a typical liberal Democrat, which meant that she really didn’t see him at all. She spit out the term “liberal Democrat” so that it came out sounding vaguely like “liverwurst,” and as far as she was concerned, the contribution of liberal Democrats to the country was a legacy of more welfare, more public housing, more taxes, more economic-development boondoggles, more subsidized transportation, and more unworkable schools. Instead, she worked for a Republican candidate named Sam Katz in the mayoral race. A successful businessman, Katz did not win the nomination of his party, but he had innovative ideas about how to get the city on its feet again, and the position papers that Linda produced were a source of admiration in the Rendell campaign.