A Prayer for the City (33 page)
Read A Prayer for the City Online
Authors: Buzz Bissinger
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 irony 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.
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 wanted 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
G
OOD 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.
A heater hissed in the corner, and the windows were speckled with grime, and the courtroom seemed weighted down by something beyond the creep of age. Each gesture—the practiced innocence of the defendants with their heads turned toward the floor, the shrug of a police officer in a chair waiting to testify, the judge taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes, the court-appointed defense attorneys earnestly scrutinizing pictures of the crime scene—had been scripted and played out a thousand times before.
McGovern refused to succumb to the stupor. He placed his hands gently on the front railing of the jury box as he gave his opening statement, lifting himself up on the balls of his feet for emphasis. He was calm and clear, letting the story he was reciting do most of the emotional work for him. He likened his opening statements to a jury to telling his children a story, but with one major difference: when he told his children a story, he wanted to soothe them and help them go to sleep; when he told these particular listeners this story, he wanted them to go home with nightmares.