A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  The largesse of one of the participants, PNC Bank, was particularly notable. In its press release congratulating itself for its participation, the bank noted that “all companies should view community investment as an integral, not supplemental, part of their business.” PNC was a good corporate citizen, but less than a year later it would inform the city that it was thinking of consolidating its back-office operations. The bulk of the jobs, about eight hundred of them, were already in Philadelphia, and the total number of jobs at stake was somewhere around twelve hundred. PNC would then sit back as the cities of Philadelphia and Camden fought for those jobs like rats fighting for the last piece of cheese. Camden, desperately trying to revive itself, wanted the jobs. Philadelphia, trying not to lose any more jobs than it already had, desperately wanted to keep them. Camden, buoyed by the pro-business policies of Governor Christine Todd Whitman, at one point offered an incentives package worth millions in low-interest loans and tax reductions. Philadelphia countered with its own multimillion-dollar package. Camden sweetened its offer. Philadelphia sweetened its offer, particularly after PNC wrote letters to state officials noting that the New Jersey proposal was $5 million better than the Philadelphia proposal and how nice it would be for the city or the state to rent two city office buildings that the bank was planning to vacate, thereby securing an income stream.

  The mayor himself knew what was happening, how he was being forced into a horrible bidding war by a corporation that knew it had the city cornered. No big-city mayor anywhere could afford to let go of this many jobs, and during one phone call with PNC Bank Corporation chairman Thomas O’Brien, Rendell became livid. He wrote a letter of apology afterward, explaining, “It has been a tough week for the city and sometimes it seems that no matter how effective our administration is, it simply doesn’t matter and we are nothing more than a very good doctor to a patient who is dying slowly but surely.”

  By the time it was over, Philadelphia would keep the jobs in the city, to the tune of various grants and loans that were worth, estimated conservatively, about three hundred times more than the first-year out-of-pocket commitment PNC had made to rebuilding a few homes as part of the Philadelphia Plan. None of that could have been known at the time of the press conference since it hadn’t yet occurred. Instead, PNC, at the time of the press conference, had to be content with the business fees that it collected of nearly $170,000 a year from the city and the fees for various securities transactions that totaled more than $1 million over the past three years.

  But none of that mattered on this flawless summer day. The swell of effusion for the plan was enormous. Dwight Evans himself spoke in favor of it and offered the mayor high praise, and that buoyed the mood of members of the mayor’s staff because, they thought, if Evans was planning on becoming a challenger to the mayor, he sure wasn’t sounding like one. The media was in full bloom, with the cameras clicking and the reporters taking notes, and when someone asked press secretary Feeley off the record whether the plan might actually work, he smiled through his Risky Business sunglasses and whispered what could have been the motto of modern-day politics: “It has absolutely no relevance.”

  What happened in private immediately after the press conference was a far better barometer of the mayor’s commitment to the city’s minority community than what happened during the press conference. As he returned to his car, he was surrounded by a group of girls in their early teens who insisted on taking him on a tour of the neighborhood. He obliged and started walking down Stella Street in his patented waddle. Three of the girls held his arm, and he didn’t seem like the mayor at all but like a father out for a walk with his children. There was a simple earnestness to him, a mood reminiscent of that first year in office when he had shown a spontaneous and unyielding passion for his city. But that first year seemed almost dreamlike now.

  The girls surrounding him talked nonstop, interrupting one another in their efforts to point out the severity of the problems in their neighborhood. As he walked down the street, other residents saw him and chimed in as well. A woman selling pretzels from her stoop asked him to do something about the stray cats that carried fleas. Another asked him to remove the debris that had been piled next to an abandoned house for almost a year. Another asked whether he could stave off eviction for her and her four children. Another pointed to a house on the corner and said it was becoming a drug den. A man in his twenties who was newly married asked him for a job. The young girls bobbing around him asked for a rec center and a swimming pool, as if he were the Pied Piper.

  He listened to their problems, and he scribbled them down on a piece of paper inside a red folder. He walked up to people standing in doorways and introduced himself as “Ed, Ed Rendell,” and he walked up onto porches. Every single need in that neighborhood was real, and Rendell himself knew that without jobs, without the reinvention of the city, there was little he could do. He could call someone to get rid of the debris and maybe even those pesky cats with the fleas, but he could not fix the fundamental flaws that existed.

  History, attitude, the tides of federal policy, had transformed the country into a suburban nation, with the American city an appendage at worst and an entertainment satellite at best. And if the trends of population and race and class continued, this neighborhood and thousands of others like it across the urban landscape were doomed, and so were the people whose pity it was to live in them.

  He kept on walking, writing furiously to keep up with the requests.

  “We need a playground, something for us.”

  “Mr. Mayor, is it possible for us to find some type of work for us young guys just sittin’ around here?”

  “I don’t want to be sellin’ drugs.”

  “Don’t forget about my phone call.”

  “Don’t forget about my job.”

  “Bye, Mr. Ed Rendell.”

  He went back to his car and was immediately on the phone with various city officials to see what could be done. One of them had been at the Philadelphia Plan press conference and was ecstatic. “That was great!” she said, as if he had just appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

  “It was great,” said the mayor in a muted voice, as if he were the only one there who understood the limitations of it. “I think some good can come out of it.”

  “That was nice!” she repeated. “You’ll get a lot of great play out of that!”

  He gave no response. Instead, he asked her whether there was any way of getting rid of all that debris one of the residents had complained about, and in that moment in the front seat of his car, surrounded by the fallen might of North Broad Street as he headed back to City Hall, trying to keep up with the list of complaints he had taken down in the red folder, he showed once again why an entire city had fallen in love with him.

  He seemed at peace, but then the next meeting started, a frank discussion of the painful social reengineering that would have to take place because of the continued cancer of blight, a discussion of which blocks of the city to save and which blocks to tear down and how the various affected residents should be removed, like war refugees, to the neighborhoods that still had a chance of survival.

  There was no lasting peace for Ed Rendell, just as there was no lasting peace in the city.

  II

  The foulness of mood, the scary unpredictability of where it would take him, whether impulsively upward or downward, showed up again several months later, in October. Dwight Evans was still in the shadows, refusing to dampen the speculation that he was going to run. In response to the threat, the mayor’s schedule was more brutal than it had ever been, a wrenching amalgam of city business meetings, regular political appearances, and campaign activities all over the city that often started at 7:00 A.M. and did not end until 11:00 P.M. War-weary staffers could sense the hair trigger, could see the snarl and the flecks of foam around the corners of his mouth. He was doing too much, extending himself beyond all limits. People who worked for him knew what happened when he got like this—chairs thrown in
his office, staffers grabbed in fury and frustration, emotions unleashed.

  Within the stirrings of the cultural community in Philadelphia in the fall of 1994, there was considerable pride in and excitement over a new book by two professional women who worked in the city. The book was called Sisters, and it was, as its title suggested, a compilation of essays about sisters and photographs of sisters, the essays by Carol Saline, a senior editor at Philadelphia Magazine, and the photographs by Sharon Wohlmuth, a photographer for the Inquirer. It would eventually become a phenomenal success and would spend sixty-three weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Among those profiled were the Masiejczyk sisters, Donna, Debbie, and Shirley. They were all Philadelphia police officers, and Debbie was on the mayor’s security detail.

  A party to celebrate the publication of the book was being sponsored on a Thursday night in October by Philadelphia Magazine, and it seemed only fitting for the mayor to make an appearance, given the inclusion of Debbie Sheeron (née Masiejczyk) in the book. Her family was going to be there, and she would be quite proud to have the mayor there. So, of course, would the authors. The event was added to Rendell’s schedule, but he clearly did not want to do it.

  When he got to the event, he kept muttering, “What the fuck am I doing here? What the fuck am I doing here?” He had seen Sharon Wohlmuth dozens of times before in her capacity as an Inquirer photographer, and that’s what he apparently thought she was now, a goddamn motherfucking Inquirer photographer. He seemed to have no idea that this was a party in her and Saline’s honor and had nothing to do with the Inquirer. He had no idea that she was one of the collaborators on Sisters. Wohlmuth herself felt honored and excited that he was there. Dressed elaborately in a Japanese jacket, she was about to thank him for coming when he looked at her with venom, clearly thinking she was there for the Inquirer—even though she was not carrying a camera.

  “If you want to photograph me, you do it!” he snapped.

  Wohlmuth was stunned by the comment. “Fuck you,” she said, enraged and insulted that a crowning moment in her career and her life, the publication of a book that had taken nearly a decade to complete, had been so utterly belittled by a mayor who thought she was there to take his picture. This was her night, not his.

  The incident should have ended there, but it did not.

  The event was public, but it didn’t matter to him. He lunged at her and grabbed her arm with such force that his hold caused the beginnings of a black-and-blue mark. He slightly tore her Japanese jacket and started dragging her along with him. Those who witnessed the incident said it was something far more than an example of the time-honored custom of a politician taking out his frustrations on a representative of the media; it was something shocking.

  “It was so scary,” Wohlmuth said later. “He attacked me.”

  And then he suddenly stopped, Wohlmuth recalled, and threw himself into a temper tantrum, acting as if what he had just done wasn’t his responsibility at all, blaming the overworked people in his scheduling office, blaming everyone but himself. “I never know where I’m supposed to be!” he wailed. “I never know where I’m supposed to be!”

  Wohlmuth found herself consoling him as a mother consoles a child, and in that moment she didn’t see America’s mayor. She saw someone who was pathetic.

  Sergeant Buchanico, the head of the mayor’s security detail, was having a drink with someone else from the mayor’s office at a restaurant bar when he was beeped by Debbie Sheeron. She was driving the mayor that night, and she sounded upset, and he asked her what was wrong.

  “He went off,” she said of the mayor.

  “What do you mean?” asked the sergeant.

  “He went off,” she repeated and reported what happened. She said that the mayor acknowledged that he shouldn’t have lost his temper and that he thought some apology was appropriate, not an apology by him personally but by Debbie Sheeron on his behalf. Buchanico, who was better than anyone else in the entire city at patting down the hills of messes until they were minor speed bumps, went to Wohlmuth himself. The photographer was polite and dignified with Buchanico, but that wasn’t the way she felt. The party had been ruined for her, and the mayor’s lunge at her only added to the aftereffects of another event: about a week earlier she and her husband had been mugged at gunpoint near their home, in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods of the city.

  Kevin Feeley, convinced that the mayor’s schedule was subjecting him to intolerable stress, suggested to Cohen that more downtime be built into it. Cohen told Feeley that it was totally unnecessary. He said that the incident had not been nearly as bad as some had claimed. The biggest problem with it, Cohen said, were members of the mayor’s staff who kept talking about it.

  Cohen had been at the party that night, but not when the incident occurred. He got there about fifteen minutes later, talked to some people about what had happened, and said later that everyone described it as inconsequential and that even Wohlmuth’s collaborator, Carol Saline, had joked about it. Saline and Cohen knew each other well: it was Saline who had written an early profile of Cohen that had started him on his ascent to mythic stature in the city. He had liked it so much that he had a framed copy in his office.

  Hours after Cohen said that, Saline was at a book-signing party for Sisters. In the midst of it, she saw Cohen’s deputy chief of staff, Ted Beitchman. Now, without Cohen present, her attitude toward the incident was anything but jocular. “Can’t you get someone to talk to him?” she asked Beitchman about the mayor. She then gestured to Wohlmuth, who was signing books at a nearby table. “Because of her, we have kept this out of the press.”

  Debbie Sheeron was also at the party that night, and she spoke again about the incident—“Oh God, it was awful.”

  But all those sentiments were expressed privately. The incident was successfully kept out of the press. And it became abundantly clear that the mayor was being shielded by the impregnable wall of power that politicians have constructed around them as if it were their birthright. And this wall now was being reinforced by the loyalty so many people had to a man whose efforts on behalf of the city had been unparalleled.

  Sharon Wohlmuth, of course, knew better than anyone else what had happened. She knew how a night in her life that should have been wonderful had been ruined. She got messages from Daily News reporters asking to interview her about what happened. But she too felt the conflict that others felt—abhorrence at the mayor’s behavior but admiration for his efforts on behalf of the city. She thought Rendell had been a good mayor in a city that so badly needed a good mayor. She did not want to hurt his campaign for reelection. She did not want to hurt the city. So she refused to talk to any of the Philadelphia media, and the mayor’s handlers, mortified by the thought that the incident might find its way into print, began to breathe a little bit easier. Feeley had sorely feared what he called the “drop, drop, drop” effect, in which the media, coupling this event with the one in which the mayor grabbed a reporter’s neck and various rumored incidents, would inevitably write something. But it didn’t happen.

  Wohlmuth briefly thought Rendell might convey some personal apology in addition to sending out a member of his security detail to do the work for him. Several weeks after the incident she hadn’t heard a word, not that it mattered at that point anyway.

  “I don’t even want an apology from that bastard.”

  III

  Through the fall of 1994, the quiet and relentless march against the shadow candidacy of Dwight Evans continued. Money was raised by the fistful, not only from those who had been loyal to Rendell in the past but also from those who might at one point have considered giving money to Evans, thereby further squeezing the opponent’s base of support. Rendell courted members of the city’s black clergy with a vengeance in the hopes of gaining their endorsement, and given the way they had related to the mayor in the past, it seemed clear they were willing to listen.

  At a meeting the previous February in the Cabinet Room, eig
hteen of the city’s most powerful black ministers armed with a list of written demands had surrounded the mayor as he sat at the table. They knew how the game was played, for the first thing on their agenda was the statement that the “clergy here this morning is a cross section of denominations representing hundreds of thousands of voters.” They said they expected the mayor’s next appointments to both the Board of Education and the Zoning Board to come from their own list. They expressed their unequivocal support for the black police commissioner, Rich Neal (despite misspelling his last name), and made a point of telling the mayor that they had heard rumors that he was planning to fire him. They suggested that “serious attention be paid” to appointing an African American male as the superintendent of the city’s public school system. At one point, Rendell left the room to get something, and right before he went back inside, he said with a chagrined smile on his face, “Being mayor means having the right to be held up—stick a gun in your ribs.” He did his best to be conciliatory, and although the meeting was tense at times, the appropriateness of the mayor’s responses to the demands was enough to induce the ministers to utter a little prayer at the end, giving thanks to “our mayor, our beloved mayor.”

  Rendell and his handlers also sought the endorsement of the Philadelphia Tribune, the city’s black newspaper. Regardless of what his critics said, Rendell had done, within rigorous financial constraints, as much as any mayor could have done for the black neighborhoods of the city. Clearly Cohen hoped that would be enough to get the Tribune’s endorsement, and he blanched at the suggestion that he might have been trying to sweeten the pot just a little when he had helped the paper get approval over the summer for adequate press parking spaces on the street outside its offices. The two issues were completely separate, he said—even if he did file the thank-you letter from Tribune publisher Robert W. Bogle under “politics.”