A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  “Look at it!” said McGovern, still captured by something he had seen a thousand times before. “It’s just super!” The look on his face was a mixture of pride and wonderment. His soul could be found in the dappled light of those buildings, and it became clear that whatever reasons there were to leave, they would not matter. He was born a city dweller, and he would remain one.

  V

  The mugging at the train station in Chestnut Hill in broad daylight had been a breaking point, but in December 1994, at just about the same time the city was being awarded an empowerment zone, there was one final slap in the face for Linda and Jon Morrison. As Jon left the house to go to work, he found the Volvo station wagon parked outside on the street, right where it had been parked the night before, but with one variation: the car was up on bricks, and all four tires were gone. If nothing else, the thieves had been maniacally courteous, piling all the nuts in a neat pile, in case the Morrisons wanted to use them again.

  In January of 1995, at about the time Rendell made his official announcement of his candidacy for reelection, the Morrisons bought a home in Newtown in Bucks County. It had aluminum siding and a two-car garage and vinyl flooring. It had none of the amenities Linda had wanted in a home, none of the charm of the Queen Village colonial or the Chestnut Hill gingerbread. “This looks like a Father Knows Best kind of home,” she said as she sheepishly pulled out a real estate brochure about it. The day she looked at it, she breezed through in about ten minutes and felt no emotional attachment whatsoever. But Linda did not want emotional attachment anymore. She wanted only the freedom to feel safe and walk the dog at night and not look over her shoulder, the freedom not to shut her windows tight in ninety-degree heat, and the house in Newtown, regardless of its appearance, provided that assurance.

  Originally she had felt angry about moving out of the city, convinced that she and her family were being driven away by a series of factors that could have been controlled. “I don’t think they believe in anything, really,” she had finally come to conclude of the Rendell administration. “They believe in efficiency, whatever that is.” She thought that the mayor, as well intended as he might have been, had never been a visionary, and she also thought that Cohen, suffering from the insulation of an office that had become his cage, had no idea of what it truly meant to live in the city and grapple with the problems that she and tens of thousands of others grappled with every day.

  “David Cohen needs to be mugged,” said Linda.

  But the closer the time came to move, the more the feelings of anger gave way to other emotions. At the beginning of June 1995, two weeks before the movers were to come, Linda took the commuter train from Chestnut Hill and returned to the old neighborhood of Queen Village to wander around one final time before leaving the city altogether.

  In a horrible space of two years, between 1990 and 1992, Linda’s mother and two of her brothers had died of cancer. And staring out the window of the train now as it lurched its way through the desert of North Philadelphia on its way downtown, she experienced a similar sense of helpless loss. “It reminds me of that cancer eating away,” she said quietly, continuing to stare out the window into the deadness of the desert where nothing moved. “I feel sad in the same way.”

  The train passed by Wister Station and entered an area of weeds and tree limbs as wild as uncut hair, and it reminded Linda of an ancient city she had once read about that had become extinct after a period of thriving. “The jungle overgrows it, both vegetative and living,” she said as she stared out the window. The train pulled into Wayne Junction, with its rub of graffiti on the station walls, and then continued on past a tableau of boarded-up stone houses and empty factories.

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” said Linda wistfully of the houses. And she was right. At a certain time and in a certain place, they had been beautiful, not symbols of despair at the end of the century but symbols of sturdiness at the beginning of it. “And these factories,” she said as she continued to stare out the window. “That’s what I think are the very saddest. They represented progress and productivity and the production of wealth. They were an asset instead of a liability.”

  The train stopped again, and Linda got off and walked back to those streets and crevices where she and her husband and tiny baby had lived before they fled in the summer of 1992. She went back to the playground where she had taken her son, Ian, to play. She went back to the colonial on Queen Street where they had lived, and she pointed to the bedroom that had been her son’s. She pointed to the white marble steps that had been splattered with blood after the young woman had been stabbed. She went back to the sliver of Kauffman Street, where the Section 8 apartment complex was, and the sight of it again filled her with rage. “I hate them. I hate everyone who lives there,” she said.

  All the horror came back, the constant din of chaos, but all the wonderful moments came back as well. She remembered how she and Jon, after work, would sit on the marble steps sipping from glasses of wine. She remembered how much she liked her neighbors and the sense of community she felt, a feeling of togetherness and of being a part of something. Her thirst for the city was unquenchable this day, every crevice taken in as if she had never laid eyes on any of it before, not a stagnant or a hopeless place at all but a place, even within the small circumference of where she walked, filled with variation. It seemed impossible that anyone with an affinity for cities such as Linda had could actually be leaving, just as it seemed impossible that anyone who had been through what she and her family had been through could stay. The ambivalence in her was abundant, and the more she wandered and remembered, the quieter she became.

  “I am really grieving,” she said. “I feel like when my family died. I feel the same way.”

  Eventually she got back on the commuter train. She went through the desert of North Philadelphia and back into Chestnut Hill, the oasis of city life that had turned out to be no oasis at all.

  She and her husband closed on the Father Knows Best house in Newtown in Bucks County in the middle of June 1995. Seven days later the movers came, and the Morrisons were gone.

  Six months and seven days from that moment, on the very first day of 1996, Ed Rendell would finish the incredible journey of his four-year term as mayor. In the absence of some catastrophe, he would begin another term. He would stand with both hands placed firmly on the edges of the podium and give an inauguration speech, just as he had before. He would make promises and offer challenges, just as he had before. He would state his best of intentions, just as he had before.

  Linda Morrison might listen to what he said on that day, or she might not, because other than as a matter of curiosity, it would have no bearing on her at all.

  She wept when she left the perfect house on Benezet Street in Chestnut Hill, just as she had mourned three years earlier when she had said good-bye to Queen Village. But the feelings were different. When she left Queen Village and moved to the suburbs, she also knew that she would return to the city, give it one more chance.

  In saying good-bye now, she knew that the chance had come and gone, and there would not, could not, be another one.

  18

  A Prayer for the City

  I

  The mayor sat in his customary spot at the table in the Cabinet Room, surrounded by a clump of executives judiciously dressed in innocuous shades of blue and gray and beige. The executives seemed as mousy and non-threatening as their wardrobes, but the mayor knew exactly what was going on, how this was little more than a setup and how, once you cut through the obsequious slick of legalese and corporate-speak, he was basically being asked to lie.

  The more he listened on this August day in 1995, the more his face turned ashen, and it wasn’t just the disingenuousness of what he was hearing that was troubling him. It was the realization that his city, and all cities like it that had once been the definition of American industrial might and strength, were on the verge of a certain kind of extinction.

  A Prayer for the City The subject
at hand in the Cabinet Room was a plant closure, and the number of jobs at stake was so small as to seem irrelevant: 240. But in the realm of the mayor and the city, where every job counted and was fought over, the loss was significant. Beyond the actual number, there were the deeper reverberations of the psychic loss. The jobs were at the Breyers Ice Cream factory. They were the jobs that had helped lay the foundation of the city, and Breyers, beyond being the maker of the country’s top-selling ice cream, was a hallowed name in the industrial arc of Philadelphia. It was here that Breyers was founded in 1866, when William A. Breyer used a hand-operated freezer to produce his ice cream and then sold the delicacy from a wagon. His “pledge of purity” caught on quickly, and in 1924 a then massive plant was built in West Philadelphia, adorned by a huge neon sign in distinctive script that could be seen from miles away on one of the city’s expressways, a stable beacon keeping an eye over the quilt of working-class row houses that spread beneath it. But Breyers, like so many other companies in the 1990s, was undergoing corporate restructuring. And although the explanation for such restructuring could be debated by economists from now until the end of the century—how to some degree corporate shedding is the natural reaction of capitalism when new jobs requiring new skills inevitably take the place of old ones—the set of victims seemed forever constant: the city and those who lived and worked within it.

  In a six-minute meeting at the end of August, the company that now owned Breyers, Unilever, a multinational conglomerate, had told its workers that the plant was closing. Several days later Rendell met with representatives of Unilever and Breyers to see if anything could be done to keep the plant open. Given his innate optimism, he refused to believe that any situation was hopeless. But his hands were clasped together instead of conducting their concerto, and this wasn’t a gesture of prayer but more a gesture of weary acceptance. He offered to modernize the existing plant or help Unilever, with its more than $2 billion in assets, build a new one. “We think we can compete,” he said softly, sounding like a parent begging a school to give his problem child one more chance. “We think we can do a better bottom line. I don’t want to waste our time, but we think we can compete.” Loans, cheap land, tax benefits—they were all available just as long as Unilever did not close the Breyers plant. “It’s got a strong identification with the city of Philadelphia,” Rendell said, hoping that might count for something.

  And then he sat there quietly as Jerry Phelan, a senior vice president for manufacturing, explained the rationale of Unilever in maintaining its competitive edge in the ice-cream business. “I hate to use the word, but we did computer modeling studies,” said Phelan somewhat sheepishly. Those models, which took every need into account except the human ones, made it clear that the only way to keep pace with the competition was through purchase and consolidation and plant closures. First it was at Good Humor, where the studies said that four plants, all of them in industrial cities, needed to be closed. Then it was at Gold Bond Ice Cream, where, as Phelan put it, they “took out” three of six plants, as if they were enemy machine-gun nests. Then it was through an investment at Klondike, where the computer studies said that two of the three existing plants had to go. Then Unilever purchased Breyers from Kraft, and the computer modeling studies said there were nine manufacturing plants, and that was too many, and there was an overcapacity problem, and some of these plants had to be taken out as well.

  “We have a great workforce here,” said Phelan, trying to be complimentary but not realizing the tragedy of what he was saying. “It has nothing to do with labor. It has nothing to do with gas rates. It’s a question of capacity, where do we take it? It is really that simple.… We have a capacity issue that we have to address if we want to be competitive, and we want to be competitive.”

  The computer modeling study gave Unilever a choice of plants to close—the one in Philadelphia or the one in the Boston suburb of Framingham. The Framingham plant was built in 1964, when the suburbanization of industry was exploding. It was all on one level, and its former owners had poured a significant amount of money into it in 1991. The Philadelphia plant was sixty-eight years old and awkwardly laid out in terms of the modern requirements of mass production—too many levels, too much useless square footage. Millions could be spent to modernize it, but other than pleasing the mayor and the workers who earned their livelihood there, what was the point? “If you do that,” said Phelan, sitting close to the mayor, on his left, “you still end up with a seventy-year plant.”

  In the 1930s, the Breyers plant in Philadelphia was the largest and the most modern ice-cream manufacturing plant in the world, capable of producing seventy thousand gallons of ice cream a day and replete with its own laboratory and a staff of chemists to ensure the “pledge of purity.” Public tours were proudly conducted. But in the ceaseless wave of technology that made things bigger and better and faster than anyone had ever dreamed was possible, with less labor than anyone had ever dreamed was possible, it was now obsolete. Even if its workers churned out oceans of ice cream twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, it could not compete. The plant, built in the density of a once-bustling city because that is where the workers were, was now an unwanted orphan. And the closing of the plant wasn’t some startling new trend but further evidence of an unrelenting one in which the number of workers employed in manufacturing nationwide had dropped from 33 percent of the workforce in the 1950s to 17 percent. In the 1960s alone, the number of blue-collar jobs lost in the country’s four largest cities—New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia—had been more than one million.

  Rendell listened to Phelan’s recitation of plant closures and consolidations and computer modeling studies, his hand now pressed against his jaw. The more Phelan spoke in his tone of sheepish apology, as if the mayor should somehow feel sorry for the company and understand its predicament, the more the expression on the mayor’s face showed traces of exasperation. On countless occasions over the past four years, he had sat at his place at that table in the Cabinet Room and with charm and guile had convinced people not to make the decision they were about to make. Dozens of times he had turned what he didn’t want to hear into something that he did want to hear. In virtually every situation, he had found the filament of hope and seized upon it to the exclusion of everything else, as if pulling a family heirloom from a fire.

  He listened to Phelan lay out the competitive rigors of the ice-cream business, the ice-cream business, and explain how the only way to respond to those rigors was to close one plant after another. He asked what it would cost for the city to build a brand-new state-of-the-art plant, and he didn’t blanch at the figure that was given, $60 million, until he heard what such an investment would yield: fifty jobs.

  When it was his turn to speak, he initially looked as if he might burst. He grimaced slightly, as if neither Phelan nor the other nervous and pursed-lipped executives around him grasped the true impact of what had just been articulated. What he said wasn’t angry; it was mournful.

  “Everything you laid out—it would make a textbook study in business school, but it is a horror story to hear for the future of our country. What is going to happen to our people between technology and competition and everything else? The older a city is—it’s harder for us to compete. What are we going to do for cities? I’ll be a two-term mayor, and I’ll get out before the carnage really starts, but what’s going to happen to our country? What are cities going to do? Our cities are going to be horrible places.”

  “I agree with you,” said Phelan. “The cities are in big trouble.” As a show of commiseration with the mayor, he noted that he was from New York, although, of course, he didn’t live in New York anymore but in that urban metropolis of Green Bay, Wisconsin. “We don’t like closing plants,” he continued, even though, by his own recital, Unilever had closed nine of them and was about to close a tenth. “We don’t like taking people from their jobs.”

  But Rendell wasn’t particularly interested in Phelan’s expressions of guil
t. As the meeting progressed, it became clear to him that the company’s major preoccupation was spin: it was hoping to convince the reporters waiting outside that what was occurring behind the closed doors with the mayor was a valiant, last-gasp effort to save the plant. Company representatives were clearly hoping to cast the meeting as some noble attempt to see whether anything could be done to avoid the closing.

  But the mayor himself knew that was ridiculous. “We were dead in the water before you came down here,” he said. “There’s no way we can compete. Why are we talking in ifs?”

  “You might have put an if on the table,” said a company lawyer whose beige suit fit much too snugly.

  “How?” Rendell asked incredulously, noting that the plant would not have been saved even if the workers had worked for free.

  “What do I say [to the reporters],” asked Rendell. “Do I go out there and lie? I don’t know what to say. If I was inclined to lie, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Our willingness to meet with you was to see if there was a glimmer—” said the lawyer.

  “There was never a glimmer,” answered the mayor.

  “I think it would be fair to characterize it as an effort of the city and the company to do something about this,” said the company lawyer.

  “That would not be fair,” answered the mayor. “I think you should not comment because everything you say would be a lie.”

  So Rendell went outside to meet with the reporters. Refusing to lie, he characterized the meeting as fruitless because a decision to close the plant had been made before the meeting. And the four corporate representatives, like prison escapees, quietly snuck out a side entrance. They went back to their jobs, while the 240 workers at the Breyers plant learned for certain that they were losing theirs. The mayor gave his impromptu press conference, then trudged the hundred feet back to his office. In the cocoon of privacy, his mood was still somber. He moved to the round table and peered at his schedule to see what was next, because there was always something next. But then he looked up, and the dispassion with which he suddenly spoke seemed far more frightening in its own way than any of his eruptions of the past four years.