A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  “We have clearly stopped and delayed the death of the city of Philadelphia through relatively heroic measures. Will the disease kill this patient? Meetings like this make me feel if I was the most competent public official in the history of the United States and was here for the rest of my life, I don’t think I could save it.”

  But like all the mayor’s moods, this feeling was momentary. In the wake of the closing of Breyers, with barely four months left before his term as mayor ended, came the opportunity of something magnificent not just for the city but for the entire country, something beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.

  It all depended on what happened down at the yard.

  II

  Bernard Meyer was from a small seaport town in northern Germany, and initially at least he knew little about the machinations that had taken place in regard to the yard during the past four years. He wasn’t familiar with any of the workers who had earned a living there. But he did know that the navy was shutting the yard down in the middle of September of 1995, and he also knew that he had an idea for it that not only made sense but also reflected a faith in and a respect for the industrial heritage of the city that virtually no one in the city shared.

  He wanted to build ships there, just as he did in his little seaport town in northern Germany. Given the moribund condition of the commercial shipbuilding industry in the United States, not to mention the foggy perception of him here as a stranger from across the Atlantic, there may have been something fanciful about that desire. A commercial cruise ship hadn’t been built in the United States since 1952, when Eisenhower took office, and who was this Bernard Meyer anyway? What did he know about the dynamics of the U.S. economy, particularly as they applied to the struggling industrial city? He came from a town called Papenburg that was so tiny it wasn’t on most maps. And the company he ran, a two-hundred-year-old family concern called Meyer Werft, had no name recognition whatsoever in the United States.

  Bernard Meyer himself was forty-seven and had inherited the company from his father, and far from being flamboyant or aggressive, he was the very opposite. He took pride in describing himself to a reporter as a tea drinker, and when problems arose at the yard in Papenburg, they were often settled over tea in his office. But he knew about ships, and his company had established itself as one of the world’s leading builders of them, controlling 25 percent of the world’s orders for new cruise liners and sophisticated tankers for transporting liquefied natural gas and chemicals. He also knew what it was like to amass an almost fanatically loyal workforce. The average length of employment for the nearly two thousand workers at Meyer Werft was fifteen years, and a staff of instructors was on hand to teach the theory and practices of modern shipbuilding, since Bernard Meyer insisted on lifetime training.

  Bernard Meyer knew that there was a potential boom in the cruise market, with Disney about to place an order for two ships and North America itself accounting for 85 percent of the passenger traffic. He knew that he was looking to gain a toehold in the United States, but he also knew the prohibitive cost of building a shipyard from scratch. When he got his first glimpse of those dry docks down at the yard, he was giddy. Looking like a tourist, with a cap on his head and a camera around his neck, he took hundreds of pictures the day he visited. He seemed to not quite believe what he had found, remarking over and over how stunning it was that these irreplaceable dry docks, so perfect for building ships, were going to be abandoned and left to corrode on the shores of America. Ironically, it was he, a foreigner, who saw glorious potential, not loss.

  “There is tremendous potential in Philadelphia,” Bernard Meyer wrote in a letter to the mayor. “The physical assets being transferred by the U.S. Navy are virtually irreplaceable. The skills of the workforce are world competitive. The enterprise that will be created from the merger of physical assets, skilled workforce, Meyer Werft management and technology will revitalize this once proud Philadelphia industry and provide a model for global partnership that will be envied around the world.”

  He spoke boldly, with infectious optimism, and in that respect, regardless of language barriers and ocean barriers and the different customs of the two countries, he bore a remarkable resemblance to a man who lived in Philadelphia and also happened to be the city’s mayor.

  A deal like this, if it was to come together, required the cooperation of everyone at every political level all the way up to the president of the United States. Land mines lay everywhere, and each one had to be handled deftly. Meyer Werft was an industrial business, and like other industrial businesses, such as automobile manufacturers, it expected public assistance. The subsidy involved, reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars, required enormous faith in the notion that commercial shipbuilding could be resurrected in the city and would not disintegrate into some economic boondoggle. The economic onus on both the state of Pennsylvania and its newly elected governor, Tom Ridge, was enormous. Bernard Meyer, for his part, had to negotiate volatile political waters in his native Germany, including a labor force that was nervous about losing jobs overseas and a government that might well be loath to let coveted shipbuilding technology wind up in the United States. But with as many as eight thousand potential jobs on the line, the kind of high-paying industrial jobs that every politician dreamed of but so few could produce, the deal was also worth every single cent of risk. “There will be extraordinary obstacles to overcome,” Meyer had written. “And many complex issues to resolve. Will the rewards be worth the effort?

  “I think so.…”

  Ed Rendell had become mayor just after turning forty-eight and would end his first term four days short of turning fifty-two. He had inherited a city that was reeling in no particular direction, and he had nursed it back to a semblance of health. He had infused hope from seemingly bottomless canisters, and he had understood the power of bread and circuses. He had taken on the unions. He had restored the budget. He had restored the faith of Wall Street in a place that had been a laughingstock. He had opened a convention center with a shower of confetti. He had assumed responsibility for the poor by assuming control of the housing authority. He had engineered a $100-million empowerment zone for the neighborhoods. The downtown never looked better, and certain pockets of the city still gleamed with the purest extract of what made it great and irreplaceable.

  By any measure, he had done so much.

  By any measure, he had done so little.

  Between 1990 and 1994, the city had lost sixty-one thousand people in spite of the almost universal admission that Rendell had been its best mayor in nearly thirty years and perhaps the best ever. The city was still losing jobs by the thousands, nearly one hundred thousand since 1988 and close to forty thousand since Rendell took office. The city was still increasingly becoming a repository for those in need and those in poverty, with nearly 30 percent of its population on the brink, as opposed to 20 percent when Rendell became mayor. The vise was catastrophic, an inverted downsizing. If a major corporation had done this kind of cutting, getting rid of its most productive employees and keeping only those with the greatest need, the result would have been a swift death. But a city does not have the luxury to choose who should stay and who should leave, nor should it.

  From a political perspective, the future of the yard had little impact on Rendell. With his term in office nearly complete, he was by any measure invincible. Three months from now, on the first Tuesday in November of 1995, he would run for reelection against a Republican challenger whose name, Joe Rocks, did little justice to the essence of his mediocrity. But the future of the yard went beyond politics. From the very beginning, in 1992, and dozens of times after that, Rendell had said over and over again that the key to the city’s health lay in its ability to maintain and create jobs. Saving the shipyard had become the defining moment not of his political future, which seemed brighter than ever, but of something far more important and awesome.

  Could the city ever be truly saved, or would it always be vainly struggling on so
me form of life support? As his four-year term in office counted down to its final breaths and the fate of the yard moved to a point of finality one way or another, death or rebirth, there would be a clear answer.

  He had made his mistakes over the past four years, the most egregious of them born of his impulsiveness and his disregard for standards of behavior. He was the embodiment of a public man, utterly defined by his place in the public eye and the way the public reacted to him, and the private acts that usually define a life—family, friendships, religious faith—seemed of little sustaining moment to him. Whatever it was, wherever it was, he hated being outside the center of the circle. But in the elusive definition of what it means to be a public servant, no one else came closer to the ideals that the concept represents. He gave of himself tirelessly, and his motive wasn’t pure self-aggrandizement or strokes of the ego, nor was it mere obligation. He was hardly a student of urban history and urban planning. He had no grand theory that could be explained on paper. But he understood exactly what a city was about—sounds and sights and smells, all the different senses, held together by the spontaneity of choreography, each day, each hour, each minute different from the previous one.

  And whatever else could be said about Ed Rendell, this much was true: whenever he had fixed in his mind where he needed to go and what he needed to do, he had never let anything get in his way. He did what all heroes do regardless of their flaws and contradictions. He refused to fail.

  III

  Bill Keller knew better than anyone else how much was at stake.

  He was a state representative whose legislative district contained the yard. He was also a former longshoreman with a rough and meaty face that looked a little bit like a pitted road in need of repair and a gruff voice like that of a harried short-order cook. He wasn’t smooth or particularly sophisticated. But he relied on judgment, the judgment that came from knowing dozens of shipyard workers who were scared to death of losing their jobs and from seeing dozens of high school kids hanging on street corners day after day without a speck of faith in the future.

  He watched Bernard Meyer that fall day in 1994 as the German businessman first set foot in the yard. He saw him run up and down the steps of the dry docks as if he had just made a remarkable archaeological discovery. He watched him take picture after picture. And he realized that this man, regardless of where he was from, was on to something powerful. Keller knew that nothing could be done to prevent the navy from closing down the yard. But he was convinced that an incredible amount could be done to get Bernard Meyer and his company to come to this city and build ships every bit as grand and as awesome as the ones that had been built there for nearly two centuries. As Keller drove down Emily and Moyamensing Streets in South Philadelphia in the shadow of the yard, as he passed by Bunny Cleaners and Pennsport Caterers and Avenue Pizza, he fretted over those high school kids hanging on the corner who never seemed to have anything to do. He also fretted over those shipyard workers who were wondering what it would be like to switch careers in midlife and become truck drivers or medical technicians, if such jobs were even available, and he knew that this was an opportunity that could not be squandered.

  Keller believed wholly in Bernard Meyer after that tour. Using his hooks that reached deep into the city’s labyrinthine corridors of labor, he contacted union leaders. Meetings were set up, and a memorandum of understanding was quickly hammered out between Meyer Werft and the various unions that represented employees at the yard. Initially some two thousand jobs would be phased in at the yard once it was in the hands of Meyer Werft. There were estimates that an additional six thousand jobs might indirectly be created. In terms of eventual tax benefits to the city and to the state of Pennsylvania, the estimates went as high as $30 million.

  In March of 1995, a contingent of local labor leaders met in Washington with Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Keller was there, and so was Phil Rowan, the charismatic business manager of Local 902 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, who had the word love tattooed on one set of knuckles and the word hate on the other, just in case his mood changed. They had no audiovisuals or fancy briefing books. In some ways, they were not very well prepared, except that they had spent a lifetime building things and making things and knew exactly what it was like to live in city neighborhoods that depend on such strength for their sustenance. In local and state taxes alone, the impact of the closure of the yard was $113 million, according to one estimate. But it was the potential human loss that was the most devastating.

  “The workers are going to go out, and they’ll never reenter the workforce,” Keller told Reich. “They’ll have side jobs as bartenders and plumbers and carpenters, and they’ll send their wives to work. Is that the kind of economy you want?”

  Extremely impressed, Reich quickly embraced the Meyer Werft proposal because of its unprecedented potential to save and create jobs and seemed willing to free up tens of millions of dollars for worker retraining.

  Reich’s support was a valuable piece of the puzzle, but only one piece. The city needed to be on board. So did the newly elected governors of two states: Ridge of Pennsylvania and Whitman of New Jersey. So did the local business community. And every piece had to fit perfectly, particularly because of the intricacies of financing such a huge project.

  In Papenburg, Meyer Werft had built the largest covered building dock in the world so that ship construction could go on year-round. It wanted to replicate this facility at the yard. The cost of this and other modernization projects was estimated at $388 million. The company, in a proposal it issued in May, sought a public investment of $167 million: $96 million from the state of Pennsylvania; $29 million from New Jersey, where a third of the workers lived; $20 million from the city of Philadelphia; and $22 million from the regional port authority.

  Bit by bit this puzzle of a myriad of pieces began to fall into place. After an initially begrudging reaction, Rendell became a believer in the project and began to support it actively. In the push and pull of the city, this was the most incredible opportunity that had come his way during his four years as mayor. There was something historic about it, about the idea of the dying industrial city proving every negativist and every naysayer wrong and bringing back the very thing that everyone in America had become convinced could not be brought back: industry.

  IV

  If Tom Ridge was remarkable for anything, it was an earnestness that he had put to political use, a self-effacement that the voters of Pennsylvania ultimately found attractive. At one point during his campaign for governor, he called himself the “guy no one’s ever heard of from the city no one’s ever been to,” and he was right on both counts, a six-term Republican congressman from Erie with a mixed voting record that made him impossible to peg politically. What was most impressive about him was his background—the son of humble Slovak-Irish Catholic parents who won a scholarship to Harvard, was drafted into the army after graduation, won a Bronze Star in Vietnam, and had suffered a severe loss of hearing that required him to wear a hearing aid. Decent was the word most used by people to describe him, and it was that quality that had catapulted him into the governor’s chair at the beginning of 1995.

  In Erie, where he had been a congressman for twelve years, a big economic-development project might require a public subsidy of a million dollars, not the hundreds of millions that were being sought here to build a new shipyard. Ridge had little direct experience in putting such deals together. He had basically run on a platform of deregulation and lowering taxes, and to some economists the Meyer Werft deal was a typical example of “smokestack chasing,” in which the public subsidy of heavy industry would never be offset by the return. It was also unrealistic to think that Ridge and his staff, within weeks of moving into the state capital, would embrace such a project without questioning every single aspect of it. “[They] didn’t know where the bathrooms were, and they were being asked to do the biggest deal in the history of the state” was the way one observer put it. And the
y seemed overwhelmed by the sheer expense of the proposal and by the ratio of public money to private money that was being sought.

  Rendell was not discouraged. He saw Ridge as solid and decent. He was thoroughly convinced that the governor, once he got over the shock of how much money the state needed to invest, would embrace the Meyer Werft proposal as something irresistible and indispensable for the future of the city and the state—the creation of a whole new industry. But Bill Keller, working within the trenches of the state capital in Harrisburg, did not share Rendell’s faith.

  Right from the beginning, he didn’t feel right about the state’s attitude. State deadlines for responding to Meyer Werft’s proposal were being missed, and all Keller kept hearing was that the amount being sought from the state was “too much money, too much money, too much money.” Instead of focusing on ways to get the project done and bridge the significant gaps that did exist, Ridge’s staff seemed far more preoccupied with the spin the governor was getting in the media.

  “Don’t you understand there are three thousand people losing their jobs?” Keller said in desperation to David Fuscus, the governor’s deputy chief of staff for economic development.

  “Well, we’re looking into it,” was the response.