A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  In the spring of 1992, just as the war of the unions was heating up, Linda wrote a letter to a member of the Rendell administration suggesting that the city use the privatization of union work as a tool for achieving significant savings in the budget and as leverage in negotiations with the unions. The contents of the letter found their way to David Cohen, who was impressed.

  She started out in a volunteer capacity. Then she ultimately became the director of the city’s competitive contracting program, which put her in the maelstrom of the city’s efforts to begin the delicate and controversial process of contracting out work that had been the domain of the city’s unions. There was something refreshingly exuberant about her that contrasted with the hangdog caution that could be seen in the people she worked with. With her straw-colored hair and her vintage Midwestern face, oval and ruddy as if it were still feeling the effects of a winter cold snap, she was utterly lacking in the dead-eyed look that most lifelong bureaucrats invariably acquire after a while. She spoke English, not bureaucratese. She laughed sometimes. She approached the whole issue of privatization with exuberance, even excitement. She also seemed to have been seized by something else, a sense of personal urgency that went beyond politics and personal philosophy. As she and the others sat around the table in David Cohen’s office, taking careful notes on what to privatize and what not to privatize, insulated by the loud scream of an air conditioner that shut out most other sounds, they were running out of time. Out there was the city, and while there were thousands who were trapped and had no choice, there were also thousands who did have a choice and weren’t feeling like citizens of the city at all, but like endangered species.

  II

  Linda did what she did out of love, love of the city.

  Born in Peoria, where her father had worked for Caterpillar, she spent her growing-up years in a series of suburbs and towns and ended up going to high school in Clintonville, Wisconsin. Linda went through a diet of piano lessons and ballet lessons, but when she looked for places to actually enjoy such culture, there were none. Life in Clintonville, a town of five thousand so far north that it was even north of Green Bay, was particularly insufferable to her. She longed for the city, any city. She won a National Merit Letter of Commendation and could have had her pick of colleges around the country. But her parents wanted her close by, so as a compromise she chose the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee because it was situated in the state’s largest city. She left after a year and headed east to school, to study dance. A year later, in 1969, she headed for her version of the promised land—a crotchety apartment in the East Village five blocks east of the Fillmore East. She loved New York. The stimulation was greater than even she could have imagined—the Feast of San Gennaro, the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island at 2:00 A.M., the clubs that stayed open till dawn. She later moved to Forest Hills, Queens, and became an executive for a division of International Telephone and Telegraph involved in the export business.

  After eight years, she returned to Milwaukee and went back to the University of Wisconsin to get a degree in business. She also opened a restaurant near the campus. Her father had been a political curmudgeon to begin with, but it was through the running of the restaurant that Linda began to evolve a political philosophy of less being more. The regulations heaped on her by various government agencies, not to mention the taxes, made the difficult job of running a business almost impossible. She couldn’t help but think that government, instead of nurturing the notion of personal responsibility, had become an impediment to it. Instead of being praised for her initiative, she was being treated as a pariah, she thought. But if Milwaukee was the incubator for new ideas, she also hated every single minute of being back there, particularly since she had no sustaining interest in what she described as the troika of “beer, brats, and bowling.” In 1981, she received her degree, and two years later she headed back to New York and what she thought would this time be a place in the promised land for good.

  Linda came to Philadelphia the way nearly everybody came to Philadelphia, because it was on the way to someplace else. She knew about the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, in large part because she had seen them once on some geeky trip with her class at Clintonville High. But as she and a friend who was settling there drove through the city on a summer day in 1983, making a meandering loop from Rittenhouse Square to South Philadelphia, feasting on cheese steaks and Italian ices, she was smitten by what she saw. People were sitting on steps, kids were playing in the street, neighborhoods were still intact and had not been savaged by the permanent scars of expressways providing easy access for the diaspora to the suburbs.

  Hanging out the window of the car, Linda Morrison took in a city that still had scale and rhythms, a place that was charming not because it was trying to be cute and charming, like some mugging child actor, but because of its very lack of artifice and contrivance. New York was New York, electric, wonderful, intoxicating. But so much of New York was like living in the grouts of a water well, where one became thankful for the thinnest thread of space and fresh air. It had also become outrageously expensive. Philadelphia was a city with a sense of proportion and humanity and humility that New York would never have.

  There were three books that Linda had largely depended on to figure out the mysteries of life. One was Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman, another was Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and the third was Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Linda had always wondered whether there was some way of describing the unique draw and pulse of the city, but she had never seen it successfully articulated until she read Jacobs’s book:

  Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city.… This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

  To Linda, who settled in a neighborhood of the city called Fairmount, about a dozen blocks north of City Hall, that was it, exactly it—a sidewalk ballet with new impromptu performances every hour, reawakening the senses with an unpredictability that became its very guarantee. In her own way, she became a one-person convention and visitors’ bureau for city life, extolling its virtues to anyone who would listen. She found a New Yorker cartoon showing a highway with a stream of cars passing under a sign marked LEAVING THE CITY and only one car passing under a sign marked STAYING IN THE CITY. Linda took the cartoon and jiggered it so the one lonely car was driving under a sign marked LEAVING PHILADELPHIA and the steady stream was passing under a sign marked NO INTENTION OF LEAVING PHILADELPHIA. It wasn’t accurate of course. The city, like most cities, had been steadily losing chunks of population by the hundreds of thousands since 1960. But she hung the cartoon right inside her front door, framing it with a mat as red as a fire engine so people couldn’t help but see it. “I had a thing about living in cities,” she later said. “I wasn’t born and bred here. I actively chose it because I actively liked it. It was a kind of defiant statement to have it hanging in my house.” She felt a similar surge of pride and commitment in 1987, when she left Fairmount after roughly four years and moved to a neighborhood south of City Hall called Queen Village.

  “Great cities are not like towns, only larger,” Jacobs had written. “They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.”

  Linda clung to that description, to that idea of the city being celebrated, and not endless
ly condemned, for the very qualities that make it different from other physical places in American life. She later bracketed that section in a copy of the book that she gave to someone, to make sure that if he read nothing else, he would at least read that. She did not bracket the following paragraph, but it had just as much meaning:

  The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers. He must not feel automatically menaced by them. A city district that fails in this respect also does badly in other ways and lays up for itself, and for its city at large, mountain on mountain of trouble.

  III

  In 1990, Linda and her husband of two years, Jon Morrison, learned something wholly new about city life: when someone is stabbed near an artery, the blood doesn’t flow evenly but spurts in syncopation to the beats of the heart.

  They were in Queen Village when they discovered this fact, a “tidbit of urban wisdom” as Linda later called it. In 1990, the neighborhood was still going through a healthy period of growth. It was gentrified enough to appeal to a professional, two-income couple like the Morrisons but not gentrified enough to be just another “yuppie barracks,” in the words of Jon Morrison. There were dozens of restaurants within walking distance, from the sensory overload of the Italian Market to the eclecticism of South Street, the wonders of South Street Souvlaki, and a particularly good Italian restaurant at Ninth and Catharine called Longano, where under a glitter-pasted ceiling the owners addressed you by your last name and the waiters called you “hon” or “sweetheart.” If you liked to walk, and the Morrisons liked to walk, Queen Village was a wonderful, ever-changing maze with delicious surprises no matter how well you thought you knew it—street next to alcove next to alleyway without some conscious attempt to turn it into the Main Street of Disneyland, factory next to row house next to candy store because that’s what made sense at the time. As far as they could tell, there was only one troubling aspect to it—three decrepit high-rise buildings that loomed in the sky like diseased redwoods, so completely out of scale and out of character in the neighborhood that it was hard to believe they had been put there as anything but some form of punishment and condemnation. They were part of a massive public housing project known as Southwark Plaza, and as far the Morrisons were concerned, they symbolized everything that was wrong not only with public housing but with government policy as it applied to the American city.

  The Morrisons knew about Southwark Plaza when they settled together in Queen Village. But the essential character of the neighborhood overrode any concerns they had, particularly since Linda had already lived there for three years and felt familiar with it. The house they decided on, at 327 Queen Street, was irresistible anyway, a three-story row house with a red brick façade. The shutters and front door had been painted a mustardy yellow, but that was easy enough to fix with a coat of new paint. In back was an ample yard, and that was a major attraction as well. The view from there wasn’t much: a narrow alleyway called Kauffman Street and across Kauffman a low-slung interconnecting series of drab and slightly grayish apartments. But in the excitement of purchasing their first house together and thinking about all the time they would spend together in that wonderful backyard, they paid little attention to what lay beyond the sliver of the alley.

  Tired and exhilarated that first night in their new home, with boxes spread everywhere, they managed to find some clean sheets and throw them onto a mattress. They fell asleep—until they were awakened at 2:00 A.M. by the sound of screams coming through the sliding glass of the bedroom window. They rushed to see what was happening, and they saw a man stumbling down the alleyway of Kauffman Street. They heard his screams—“Dad, you killed me, Dad, you killed me”— and as they watched him step and stumble, they saw how the blood did not flow evenly from the stab wound, as one perhaps might have thought it would, but gushed out in syncopation to the beats of his heart.

  The Morrisons tried to tell themselves that what had happened was the kind of isolated and horrific crime that just happens sometimes—and what good were the bragging rights of living in the city if you didn’t have at least one tale of horror from the urban war zone to tell your suburban friends? But the wave of incidents emanating from the area of that drab, grayish-looking apartment complex across the sliver of Kauffman Street did not cease. Every week, it seemed, as Jon Morrison played in the backyard with the dog or did some planting, a police car would whiz down the alley responding to some call or other. Every night, it seemed, kids were playing and screaming and yelling, unsupervised, until 1:00 or 2:00 A.M. Linda herself began to call the police on a regular basis, asking them to do something about the noise. In response, she received an unannounced visit from a member of the city’s Commission on Human Relations, who suggested that the problem was not with the parents, many of them single mothers, but with Linda and her own intolerance.

  Feeling both desperate and angry, Linda Morrison made a determined effort to find out who owned the complex, and she was told that it was a so-called Section 8 apartment complex. Under the Section 8 program, administered by the federal government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, tenants contributed a portion of their monthly income in rent to a private landlord. What gap existed between the payment by the tenant and the actual market value of the rent was subsidized by HUD. Linda discovered the name of the agent for the Kauffman Street complex. She called several times trying to find out the name of the owner, but the agent refused to divulge the information and finally just told her to “fuck off.” The forces of Kauffman Street overwhelmed Linda and her husband. They tried asking the parents to supervise their children, to keep them from screaming and yelling at all hours of the night, but more often than not they were met by amused half stares, as if such a request were not only impossible to comply with but also comical. The screams and yells continued, the only respite coming when it rained.

  Linda and Jon Morrison began to feel surrounded, the glower of the Southwark high-rises on one side, the chaos of the Kauffman Street complex on the other. They literally went underground, particularly in the summer, burrowing into the basement to escape the noise, outfitting it with rugs and a television set and a couch. The yard, the very reason for buying the home, became unusable. They didn’t want to be outside, not if it meant staring into Kauffman Street, not if it meant hearing the wail of another police siren. Through her contacts in the city, Linda had a friend in the upper echelons of the police department. Analytical by nature, she asked him to do a computer search of all the calls that the police had made in the area of the Kauffman Street complex. She found out that there had been more than ninety calls to the complex in one year, for such offenses as drug overdoses, fights, domestic disturbances, noise, gunfire, and several shootings. The police actually asked whether they could use the Morrisons’ third-floor deck off the master bedroom to conduct surveillance of the complex because of its perfect vantage point. But not wanting to turn their house into a precinct, they said no. In the meantime, their car, an old Toyota, was stolen.

  They went to community-association meetings in an attempt to change the situation somehow, and they were outspoken in their views. Political correctness was not part of their style, particularly when it came not only to the Kauffman Street complex but to an issue of far greater controversy within the Queen Village neighborhood: what to do about the high-rises of Southwark.

  IV

  In a way, the saga of Southwark was so predictable that mustering outrage about it was almost hard. Like similar high-rises in every city in America, Southwark wasn’t some towering symbol or metaphor for public housing but was the typical embodiment of it. If Southwark stood out at all, if there was anything that distinguished the complex, it was in the color of those three twenty-five-story towers—a clammy, sickly yellow the human skin gets from chronic fever and stale air.

  Public housing hadn’t always been the festering sore that it was in 1992. When the first public-housing
act was passed, in 1937, in the throes of the Depression, it was never intended to establish a form of permanent housing at all but was meant to provide temporary shelter for those requiring assistance until their income stabilized. While promoting many of the New Deal entitlements and other social programs, President Franklin Roosevelt himself recognized the danger of creating a permanent class of persons dependent on government. “Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber,” said Roosevelt in his State of the Union Address to Congress in 1935. “To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.… We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance and courage and determination.”

  Public housing ultimately did evolve into a form of permanent shelter for many of those who lived in it. But into the late 1950s, it had neither the physical dilapidation nor the overwhelming preponderance of single mothers on welfare that it has had in the 1990s. According to a study of nineteen public-housing developments in Philadelphia in 1959, 63 percent of their residents were married, 58 percent were employed, and only 18 percent were receiving public assistance. The specter of so-called manless families was a problem then, but it was thought to be a solvable one. In fact, the local agency that administered public housing in the city, the Philadelphia Housing Authority, was the first in the nation to establish a social service division to deal with the issue.