A Prayer for the City (17 page)

It wasn’t nearly as rosy as that. Conditions were often brutal, but one thing Kensington always promised was work, its factories alive with what America wanted and could get only from the American city: novelty toys and miniature pianos and beer and textiles and carpet and dyed goods and gingham and diapers and hosiery and yarn and silk upholstery. By 1920, the population had ballooned to 155,000, and Kensington led all American cities in the value of its carpets, rugs, hosiery, and knit goods.

With the Depression and the postwar shift in factory production from the gritty neighborhoods of the cities to the placid suburbs and the South and the third world, the steady might of Kensington began to crack. The multistory factories built there weren’t desired anymore. In the age of automated mass production and robotic assembly lines, they were unwieldy and technologically obsolete. Businesses wanted plentiful space for factories that the suburbs could easily supply. They also wanted to avoid the
contentiousness of unions. The population of the area, which in 1950 was 149,000, dropped to 95,000 in 1990, a loss of 36 percent. The factories that reflected the very heart of the area, its very essence, were abandoned.

For much of its history, race had not been much of an issue in Kensington, largely because of its refusal to accept blacks. There were blacks who worked there in the mills and the factories, but as author Peter Binzen noted in
Whitetown, U.S.A.
, they weren’t likely to be assaulted as long as they observed the unofficial curfew and were out before sundown. But in the 1960s, as the dynamics of race in the city changed and the percentage of blacks in the population multiplied, Kensington reacted violently. In October 1966, after a black family rented a home near a local high school, there were five nights of riots. The family ultimately moved away, but the issue of race in Kensington did not. Between 1980 and 1990, the Latino population of Kensington and the adjoining neighborhood of Fishtown increased by more than 40 percent while the number of whites decreased by nearly 14 percent.

In looking for ways to displace their anger and frustration, young whites in Kensington seized upon Hispanics as the culprits, and Hispanics all too willingly returned the fire. It was one thing to have to share the neighborhood with them, and as long as they never crossed the invisible border of Front Street, things would be OK. But it was another to watch them encroach upon their playgrounds and favored street corners as if they somehow had a right to be there, particularly when these were the only reliable institutions they had left. “Scum.” “Animals.” “Not human.” That was the way some of the young whites referred to Hispanics. In response to Hispanic encroachment, a group called the Swoop Troop was formed, a kind of makeshift SWAT team.
SPICS GO HOME
said giant-size graffiti on a wall.

In the early 1950s, a sociologist named Peter Rossi had visited Kensington to do research for a book he was writing on why people move, and he found, much to his amazement, that residents of Kensington did not want to move despite its dearth of amenities. He found the loyalty to it astounding and the rituals of the place—buying soft pretzels under the El, going to soccer games over at the Lighthouse Field—had a hold that was almost spiritual. But over time, that sense changed—a neighborhood in the city that was no longer a place to live in but a place to escape from if you were somehow lucky enough to have the means of escape. “Kensington today is a passed-over, deteriorated, forgotten section of industrial Philadelphia,” wrote Jean Seder in a book called
Voices of Kensington
. “Almost
all the mills have gone. They’ve moved South, or gone out of business. Periodically the children set fire to the empty shells of factories, and the city levels the ruins into another empty lot.”

Rendell did not equivocate, nor, unlike some politicians, did he seem the slightest bit insulted by it. Placing himself in their own shoes for a moment, he wondered why anyone in Kensington would be remotely happy to see him. He could make a few promises, increase the presence of the police, repair a basketball net, and patch up a rec center roof. But how could he do what was needed most—make the echoes of those factories and mills into real sounds again? If it were just he and a group of public officials up on the stage of the McVeigh Recreation Center gym tonight, the crowd would be inclined to scream and yell, heap the legacies and histories of their anger on him.

That’s why he called the cardinal.

“I don’t know these people as well as you do, but I know them from my days as district attorney,” said Rendell in a meeting with advisers in City Hall that Monday morning. “They probably don’t believe in God, but they are not one hundred percent sure.”

Several hours later Rendell spoke with Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua over the phone and made his pitch for accompaniment. “We have an enormously difficult problem in the Kensington area. Essentially what it is is a recurring problem; it’s Hispanic and white. It’s a very, very explosive situation. These are the hardest hit whites in the city of Philadelphia, and they blame their problems on minorities, which is not correct. They share everything in common with minorities in confronting problems.”

Bevilacqua, the head of the archdiocese of Philadelphia, said he would be happy to attend the meeting and asked for some background material.

“Sure,” said Rendell, thoroughly up-to-date on the changes in modern religion. “What’s your fax number?”

The mayor and the cardinal met secretly in front of the Ascension of Our Lord Church on Westmoreland Street at about 8:00
P.M.
Rendell quietly exited his car and then, as in one of those films about Mafia informants, slid into the backseat of the cardinal’s before anyone knew what was really
going on. During the short trip to the gym, the cardinal was relaxed and pleasant, his one major concern his breath, since he had just eaten a large Italian dinner with lots of garlic.

The gym was packed when they got there, a sea of white—about five hundred people pushed against the grimy green walls, women with puckered faces and sweaty brows and blond hairdos as hilly as the moguls of a mountain, men in baseball caps and droopy mustaches and fleshy arms with a dollop of a tattoo near the blade of the shoulder. Initially the gambit of the cardinal paid off. As soon as he walked in, there were oohs and ahs and breathless greetings of “Your Eminence!” He received a standing ovation, and his initial words helped to soothe the crowd. “To correct an evil or injustice, you don’t perform another evil. Wrong does not correct wrong. We are all Christians, and we know the message of Jesus Christ.… We are called on to be people of peace. Each of us must be peacemakers.”

Rendell spoke as well, and his words too seemed to have a positive effect, in large part because of their lack of pretense and bombast. “We’re not going to come here tonight and promise the things that we cannot do. If you hear us say we will do something tonight, we will do it. If we keep fighting each other, keep killing each other, wasting our time on things like that, this city doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of turning things around.”

The crowd seemed both dazzled and wooed by the duo of the cardinal in his impeccable vestments of red and white and the Jewish mayor in the creases of a blue suit, and their odd-couple fox-trot seemed to be working in an area of the city where outsiders, any outsiders, were almost never embraced. But then other public officials spoke, and the mood dissolved, the illusory moment of a united city unfettered by race and class giving way to the very rawness of race and class that now seemed destined to divide it eternally.

Sneers of distrust crept onto the faces of the women. The men placed their hands on their hips in a gesture of challenge. In the heat and humidity, a layer of mist rose toward the ceiling. Bodies in the crowd became soaked and glistened; the gym seemed more and more like an overcrowded boxing arena, gauzy and smoke-filled and ominously overcrowded, heat and suspicion and sadness and anger all vying for too little space.

Acting Police Commissioner Thomas Seamon tried to explain that the two Hispanics questioned the night of Robbie Burns’s shooting had been falsely accused. “We were convinced they were not the right people,” said
Seamon, the large pair of glasses affixed to his face seeming to get larger and larger every time he spoke. People jeered and booed, belittling this pasty-faced man with his Sad Sack jowls. He vowed that the department would make arrests in the case as quickly as possible, and he was greeted by more boos, more catcalls. Almost at once a dozen voices filled the gym—

“Bullshit!!”

“We’re just sick and tired.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Shut your mouth!”

It became clear what the people of Kensington thought of the Philadelphia Police Department. The police were spic sympathizers, shameless panderers in the name of political correctness and ethnic diversity and all too willing to turn their backs on the blue-collar whites who had filled the factories and labored in the sweatshops and made this city what it was. The cardinal sat speechless at a long table on an elevated stage at the front of the gym, those impeccable vestments looking like a Halloween costume. Rendell sat there too, sweat dripping down his face like thick drops of summer rain, acutely aware that the floodgates of race and racism had opened and would not be closed. His finger tapped over and over at the top of a microphone, but for one of the few times in his political life his kinetic energy had no place to go.

The meeting had disintegrated.

There were claims that the police responded to calls from Hispanics and not to those from whites who lived in the area, claims that it was unsafe to have a cup of coffee on the front stoop. Whenever Seamon tried to speak and counter emotion with fact, he was shouted down. When it was announced that a Hispanic police officer would no longer serve within the district, there were loud cheers. Within the charged crowd someone passed around a pamphlet for the Ku Klux Klan that included a number to call in New Jersey. “Are you Fed up with: Murders, Rapes, Muggings, Disintegrating Neighborhoods, Illegal Aliens?” it asked. “Then join the Invisible Empire.” A fight almost broke out, and plainclothes police officers had to step in to fend it off.

The meeting ended after about an hour. Rendell walked outside, where hundreds more angry residents had gathered. Despite the best efforts of the police surrounding him, he became engulfed by dozens of sweat-drenched teenagers glistening under the hard lights of the television cameras. The
blaze of the lights was blinding; every bead of sweat and every grimace was intensified and made almost surreal. The teenagers verbally confronted the mayor, but he did not shy away.

“This country is really fucked up,” he said out of earshot of the media, as if there weren’t anything else you really could say, and suddenly the tension of the situation melted away.

“He’s human,” said someone in the crowd with admiration.

Driving home that night back along Allegheny Avenue, Rendell admitted to a feeling of complete futility. There were no physical confrontations, but the sense of anger and rage had been visceral, not simply in Kensington, but in so many other swaths of the city. There had been eight murders over the weekend, and Rendell had grave concern that it was going to be a brutal summer. In his public speeches, he had talked with passion about the difficulties that cities all across the country were facing. He openly warned those who thought they were so safe and so secure in the suburbs that they had better start building towering walls to fend off those who would eventually, out of despair and desperation, besiege them.

The obliteration of Allegheny passed by, but as usual he really didn’t pay attention to it, perhaps because he was tired of looking at it, tired of dwelling on something that seemed immune to the best intentions of anyone. He wasn’t a miracle man, he was just a mayor, although he wasn’t immune to praying for another miracle.

“What we need in this town is on every fucking weekend between now and September for it to rain,” he said from the whirring quiet of the car. “I don’t mean sporadic rain. It has to pour.”

But it didn’t rain the next day. Instead, there were only more issues of race and the all too predictable byproduct of racial politics, the charge of favoring one ethnic group over another pointed at the bull’ s-eye of the mayor.

Roughly twelve hours after meeting with angry whites at the McVeigh gym, Rendell found himself meeting with Latino leaders in the City Hall Reception Room. They claimed oppression. They claimed misunderstanding and underrepresentation in the mechanism of the city. Without even knowing it, they made the exact same claims the whites had made the night
before, only with the targets of persecution reversed. “The problems are still there,” one of the leaders told the mayor. “The hatreds still exist. The white sheets are coming back out.”

Rendell agreed that whites in Kensington, in venting their frustrations, had chosen Latinos as a scapegoat. “The reason we don’t have blacks involved is because they’re not readily available to be scapegoats.”

But various black leaders in the city, watching white and Hispanics dominate the headlines and personally address their frustrations to the mayor, felt like scapegoats anyway. The mayor might be trying to heal a city and hold it together in the aftermath of a terrible series of shootings, but this was no time for understanding or commiseration. To the contrary, with the mayor’s belly exposed by the Kensington shootings, now was the time to launch the harpoons because in the world of city politics, no mayor was a better mayor than a mayor who was wounded and bleeding.

Rendell had been actively involved in politics in the city for nearly twenty years. He was no neophyte to the unseemly wars that had to be fought, to the compromises of racial appeasement, particularly in a city that was almost evenly split between whites and minorities. But when he became mayor, even he seemed taken aback by the power plays of racial politics between white politicians and black politicians and by how little of what they seemed interested in had to do with the common good of the city or with matters of racial injustice but, instead, had to do with amassing their own bases of power.