A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  Southwark itself opened in 1963 and for a short period of time was actually sought out as a desirable place to live. But by the 1970s, the quality of life in public-housing towers was beginning to fissure, and not just because of the inherent flaw of a structure designed to pack the greatest number of the poorest people into the least space possible. The second great migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North, in the post–World War II era, put housing, any type of housing, at a premium. Various standards for rental properties that had existed in the past, such as prompt evictions and careful screening of tenants, were discarded. More and more, public housing became the very thing it was never supposed to be, the housing of “last resort” for those too poor to afford anything else.

  By the early 1990s, Southwark had become a dilapidated horror. Two of the three high-rises were closed, and $48.5 million was earmarked for renovation, although many housing experts thought the whole concept of high-rise housing projects was fatally flawed regardless of how much money was spent on it. The questionable folly of rebuilding Southwark then turned into possible fraud in the winter of 1992, when it was discovered that the Philadelphia Housing Authority, after spending at least $6 million of the $48.5 million in renovation money, still did not have any usable architectural drawings. As for actual refurbishments, new windows had been installed in the three high-rise buildings. But the practical effect of that was blunted somewhat by the subsequent discovery that the windows did not meet specifications and had been improperly installed.

  One didn’t have to be a social scientist or an expert in public housing to understand a place like Southwark. Any adult, regardless of education—or any child, for that matter—could look at those towers and their utterly incongruous setting and see the malarial color that had infected them and know that they had been doomed to failure from the very beginning, casting a potentially fatal effect not only on those who were sentenced to live there but also on those who lived anywhere close to them. Anyone walking through the corridors of the one high-rise that was still open, 90 percent of whose residents were single mothers and their children, didn’t need a PhD to realize that unless the social conditions inside such a place changed, no amount of money spent to rebuild and refurbish it would ever make a lasting difference. There were poor people in the city who desperately needed housing, but not like this.

  Linda Morrison began to hate Southwark as much as she hated the Kauffman Street complex. She wasn’t surprised in the least by the revelations of wasteful spending since her suspicion all along was that the rebuilding had more to do with feeding the ravenous appetites of the “poverty industry”—the architects and contractors and social service agencies, all of whom would be the greatest direct beneficiaries of whatever sums of millions were poured back in. Meanwhile, taxpayers and the urban poor, regardless of what they thought of each other, ended up as the ones who invariably benefited the least.

  The planned rebuilding did strike her as financially nonsensical, given that the average cost of rehabilitating each of the seven-hundred-odd units in Southwark, roughly $65,000, was significantly more than the average cost of a home in the city. Beyond the cost, Linda saw Southwark as a monument of social-policy failure, the very thing that predictably happens when government assumes the role of provider.

  She adored Queen Village, but more and more she began to relate to it like a widow going through the stages of grief—denial, heartbreak, anger, acceptance that what she loved had been irrevocably lost. She could still walk through its narrow blocks and alleyways and feel the city in her heart, but more and more she began to feel a certain coldness.

  The Morrisons now had a son, named Ian. He was born in August of 1991, and that only added to their feelings of fear and insecurity in the neighborhood. To protect themselves, they bought a gun, and they went out to a firing range to practice shooting. The target could be set from far away but Linda had no interest in the delicacy of sharpshooting. She knew what the gun was for—self-protection and self-defense. She asked that the target be brought into close range, between six and eight feet away.

  Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!

  She fired off the six rounds from the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 10 without the slightest flinch, decimating the target, the smoke and the smell of gunpowder soaking the air.

  “That’s all I want to know how to do,” she said.

  By the spring of 1992, around the time Linda had decided to become involved in the war of the unions, she and her husband had run out of solutions. They were tired of living in a state of siege, tired of holing up in the basement, tired of walking out of a restaurant and scanning the street in all directions, tired of that horrible sense of being on guard all the time. “We felt there was no civilized way to solve the problem,” said Jon Morrison as he later looked back on it. “If it were some sort of business or industry that was a nuisance, you could imagine legal ways to solve it. This was a problem without a handle on it.”

  They put their house up for sale, and on a Saturday night in the spring of 1992 they received further lessons on the rhythms of the human heart.

  It was the night before an open house for prospective home buyers, and they had spent part of that day getting everything clean and shiny. They were asleep, just as they had been that very first night in 1990 when the exhilaration and giddiness of moving—sheets thrown happily over a mattress—had given way to terror. They heard screams, just as they had that very first night. But the victim was a woman this time, not a man. She had been shot, not stabbed, and she was staggering down Queen Street, the imprints of blood on the smooth stone of the sidewalk forming an orderly trail as delicate as a cat’s paws, down a marble cornerstone and a black metal railing and an oval flower pot. The woman was a neighbor of the Morrisons, and she had been shot and mugged on her way home. She made it to her house, her blood splashing on the bottom two steps. Then she was carried to Linda and Jon’s house, the blood splashing onto their steps as well. A pillow and a comforter were fetched for her to use until the ambulance came.

  That Sunday morning, Linda worked diligently to cleanse her front steps of blood. At a certain point, the steps, like everything else—the shutters, the slight angle of the roof, the small symmetrical windows, the brick facade—embodied exactly what Linda had wanted in a house in the city. But now the splash of blood on those steps, seeping into the indentations and cracks, seemed only appropriate, as did Linda’s efforts to clean it. Part of her efforts was an act of purification, but part was something far more practical: with an open house scheduled for that afternoon, it would be difficult to explain to prospective home buyers how part of the hidden charm of the neighborhood was those unexpected moments when a neighbor started bleeding on your front steps after getting shot. That was Linda’s personal “tidbit of urban wisdom.” Others who moved in would have to discover it on their own.

  So after cleaning her own front steps of blood, Linda did what was only natural under the circumstances: she washed her neighbor’s white steps of blood as well.

  During the July Fourth weekend in 1992, Linda and Jon Morrison and baby Ian left Queen Village for good. They had no agreement of sale for their home, but they didn’t care anymore. They made a deal with the person carrying the mortgage to take the house back. In return, he got all the equity and all the improvements, so the loss to the Morrisons was somewhere around $20,000. But they didn’t care about that either. They dreaded the prospect of spending another summer holed up in the basement. Certainly in their short span of time in Queen Village they had witnessed some catastrophic crimes. But it was the little incidents, repeated over and over day after day, that had been even more wearing, “a hundred little things” as Linda called them—a broken window, a fight, a car alarm suddenly wailing into the night. None of these things made the news. None of them was particularly dramatic. But their buildup only reinforced, as Linda put it, the “chaos and self-destruction” of those living around her.

  The bitter ir
ony of leaving on July Fourth weekend could not have been lost on her. Of all the occasions and celebrations in Philadelphia, she liked July Fourth the best, and whenever she could, she went to Independence Hall on that day. She loved the perfect scale of the building, human and graceful and simple. She loved what it said about the nature of government, and she couldn’t help but compare it with the federal buildings that now surrounded it, the courthouse and the IRS frowning and imposing and humorless like something out of the Stalin era. She reveled in the swell of the music and the reenactments at Independence Hall. She loved hearing the rereading of the Declaration of Independence.

  We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.…

  Every time Linda read the words of the Declaration, it seemed impossible to square them with what the country had become and the kind of government that had been created, a government that instead of ensuring liberty ensured dependence, a government that instead of fostering a sense of individual responsibility had created a group of people addicted to the handouts of welfare and public housing and everything else. There were some who might have argued that Linda and Jon Morrison were simply paying the price of life in the big city. But the Morrisons refused to accept that. And they were convinced that what had happened to them wasn’t the price of life in the city but the price of a certain type of government.

  In 1990, Linda and Jon had bought a house in Queen Village because it was the fulfillment of a dream—to live in a house in a real neighborhood in a real city. On that first weekend in July in 1992, as she and her husband placed their belongings in boxes and fled to a house in the suburbs, Linda Morrison mourned the loss of that dream.

  V

  As the competitive-contracting coordinator for the city, Linda continued to perform with typical gusto and enthusiasm. In the aftermath of its stunning victory in the war of the unions in October of 1992, the Rendell administration continued serious pursuit of various privatization initiatives. This buoyed Linda even more since she had assumed that as soon as the war of the unions was over, the concept of privatization would disappear. Instead, it seemed likely that just as a start the security-guard functions at the art museum would be privatized. So would the union functions at the city nursing home and the maintenance functions at City Hall. Progress was being made, and Linda couldn’t help but wonder whether Rendell really was on the cusp of something amazing. Perhaps she had been wrong about him all along. Perhaps he really wasn’t a liberal Democrat, but underneath the creased suits and the herky-jerky carnival-barker exterior was a new kind of urban mayor altogether who was truly willing to pursue the tough steps that had to be taken if cities were somehow to stay alive.

  In December 1992, the Inquirer’s Donald Kimelman wrote a column questioning the wisdom of rebuilding Southwark, particularly in terms of its impact on the Queen Village neighborhood. Morrison read the column with keen interest and several weeks later wrote a three-page memo to David Cohen, outlining her and her husband’s personal experiences there. Unlike most memos David Cohen received, so laden with the arcane script of bureaucratese that they read like the tract of some secret religious sect, this particular one was different:

  Last June, my husband and I made the decision to abandon our house near Southwark, and we fled the area in July. In doing so, we lost everything—all our equity in the house, all the improvements we made, all the neighborhood friends we had.…

  Besides all the money we lost, being run out of my City neighborhood makes me very sad. I consider myself a City-loving, hard-boiled urban person, used to putting up with a lot and tolerant of many things. But we had complained to every government agency you can think of for relief, and we finally realized that the vested interests in these projects take precedence over endangered species like ourselves: ordinary City people who work, respect others and their property and are good neighbors. But we escaped with our sanity and our lives, and we feel lucky for that.

  I think the last straw for us was scrubbing the coagulated blood of our neighbor off our steps one Sunday morning after she had been shot the night before by a Southwark resident. That and the terrifying thought that only about 120 units are occupied now in Southwark’s 700 unit capacity. Imagine the neighborhood when Southwark is renovated and filled again!

  Almost everyone agrees that hundreds of bored, jobless, low-self-esteem women with fatherless, unsupervised children concentrated in high-rise public housing is an unworkable concept. Why are we proceeding with the madness of spending $70,000+ per unit fixing Southwark so it soon can become a larger and more menacing ghetto, when the average sales price of a decent home in Philadelphia is less than $40,000? The argument that “the federal government is giving us the money to spend like this, so we must” is ridiculous. If they bought us a rope with a noose, would we hang ourselves with it?

  The renovation of Southwark will be bad for the tenants, bad for the neighbors and bad for the taxpayers. The only people it will be good for are the poverty industry special interests who expect to cash in.

  The Mayor’s office can use the influence you have locally and in Washington to put a stop to the madness of Southwark… There are a lot of nice, decent people of all races and ethnic groups still holding on in Queen Village, Pennsport and the South Street area, but no one speaks for them. These are the kind of people the City desperately needs to keep to remain viable.

  It’s too late for me, but I hope you will speak for them.

  Since neither Cohen nor the mayor ever responded to what she wrote, she had no idea what they thought, if they thought anything at all. The administration was aware of the dilemma of Southwark, and there was basic agreement that such a high concentration of poor families wasn’t good for anyone. But beyond plans to spend several million to tear down several low-rise buildings that were part of the project, there was no master plan. Between the city’s financial crisis and the war of the unions, the fractious issue of public housing, a problem that had to be dealt with politically, not socially, had received little more than a reactive response from either Rendell or Cohen. But public housing was also one of those issues that could not be deflated or even well camouflaged. It would inevitably explode again during the course of Rendell’s term, not just once but several times.

  Linda didn’t seem terribly surprised by the lack of a direct response to her memo. Rendell and Cohen were, after all, busy men running a government that was still in chaos. And beyond the immediate crises that greeted them every day, there was always something to attend to, given the very nature of politics—a request for zoo tickets, a request for a transfer for a favored policeman, or the ire of a major fund-raiser who called Rendell on his private line and without even bothering to say hello jumped all over the mayor for taking city legal work away from a certain local law firm; rather than hang up or tell the fund-raiser that his private line was for emergencies, the mayor hemmed and hawed and became visibly nervous, as if this were a dire emergency, and gave repeated assurances that the law firm would be made whole.

  The house the Morrisons rented in Bala Cynwyd, a well-heeled suburb just beyond the western border of the city, had a short-term lease; they would stay there long enough to figure out what to do next. As a place to live temporarily, Bala Cynwyd was perfectly acceptable. The home was near public transportation. It was leafy and quiet. Given what they had been through in Queen Village, it was both an escape and a refuge. They were thankful for that, but Bala Cynwyd was absent even the faintest signs of sidewalk ballet. “It’s very quiet,” said Linda one wintry day in 1993. “It’s very peaceful. It’s green, and I hate it. You walk down the street, and you don’t see one thing that’s interesting.” But it wasn’t fair to blame Bala Cynwyd for that. After all, it was exactly what it wante
d to be. “It’s a suburb.”

  Once a week she and her husband talked about moving back into the city—if they could find a neighborhood that wouldn’t subject them to the same horrible surprises that had unfolded in Queen Village. Certainly if Linda was going to continue working for the city, she needed to live in the city anyway. But the decision was wrenching, and the trade-offs in both directions were enormous—the deadened placidity of the suburbs with its assurance of peace versus the ever changing texture of the city, where fear could gloss over everything. “We’ve been so burned [by living in the city],” Linda admitted that wintry day in 1993. “It’s like having a love affair. You’re afraid to go back into it.”

  And yet despite all that Linda Morrison had been through, she also knew that she was still very much in love.

  10

  Getting Paid

  I

  GOOD MORNING, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY …

  On a cold Thursday morning at the end of January in 1993, around the time Linda Morrison wondered whether there was still a place in the city where one could feel safe, Assistant District Attorney Mike McGovern was back in that space between the rows of spectators and the judge’s bench, spinning a new story of his city to a mostly empty courtroom.

  He had moved to a courtroom on the sixth floor of City Hall to tell the story of Commonwealth v. Carlton Bennett and Giovanni Reed, the story of a twenty-one-year-old and an eighteen-year-old accused of being part of a trio that had robbed and killed a twenty-two-year-old man. The third member of the trio, Dwayne Bennett, had pleaded guilty to first-degree murder the day before.