A Prayer for the City (9 page)

When the moment was finally his, Edward G. Rendell, then forty-eight, shuffled to the edge of the stage of the Academy of Music. With both hands firmly on the podium, he made the speech that he had waited a lifetime to make.

Make no mistake, our situation is worse than we thought it could ever be. Projected deficits in the years ahead number in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And the shame of it is that those deficits do not even begin to tell us the costs of their consequences. These costs—the costs of unsafe streets, of dirty neighborhoods, of struggling schools, of shut-down health clinics and recreation centers—these costs are simply incalculable.

We have put off difficult choices for far too long. We have been too willing to accept the old way of doing things. In the face of long-term challenges, we have opted for short-term fixes. And we have shown virtually no courage or backbone in standing up to pressure against outside interests.

Change must surely come, but the good news is that if it does come, this city cannot only survive; it can come alive again with a thriving economy, strong neighborhoods, and a dynamic downtown that can serve as a magnet to conventioneers, tourists, and suburbanites alike.

To make this change a reality, I want to issue a few challenges:

To everyone involved in government, to no longer accept the old way of doing things, but to challenge them, change them, and get results.

To the seventeen city council members on this stage with me today, to put aside politics, partisanship, and personal gain to forge a working relationship with me second to none in this city’s long history.

To our municipal unions and their four fine leaders, to join with us and help this city survive and flourish as other unions have joined together with their employers to keep those businesses afloat.

To the people of Philadelphia, to be willing to accept short-run sacrifices and pain that will allow us to get through the near future and lead to tremendous long-run gain for all of us.

And lastly, a challenge to myself, to stand tall, to stay the course, and make the difficult choices unflinchingly, regardless of what the pressure to do otherwise might be and regardless of the political risks involved.

I cannot and will not falter.

We cannot and will not fail.

The stakes are too high.

The cost of our failing is unthinkable.

Roughly twelve hours later, the pomp of the day finally tucked away, Ed Rendell appeared at an inauguration party at the city’s Reading Terminal Market. Amid the pungent smell of spices and fish from the rows of eclectic food stalls, he was greeted by a Chinese dragon spinning its papiermâché tail, then by the furry green fuzz of the Phillie Phanatic mascot. A crush of people surrounded him as if he were a boxer making his grand return to the ring, and his brown eyes were electric and lit with a little boy’s anticipation. Through perseverance and luck and the strength of his own confidence, he had made a startling comeback in a city that had given him up for dead. As he walked across the concrete floor, people reached out to grab his hand and touch him. For some, it was a matter of connecting with someone who was now important. For others, it was the simple act of reaching out to someone who, after all he had been through, was still the same old Ed.

Rendell reacted to it all without a trace of self-importance. He blew kisses. He posed for pictures. He squeezed arms. He didn’t turn down a single request for attention, regardless of where it came from, but he also paid attention to his own needs. When a resplendent plate of pastries was brought his way by a waiter, his eyes turned almost moist. “I’ll take two!” he said, grabbing at them as if he had just heard a rumor that the caterer was about to leave the country. Music pulsated from a stage that had been set up in the center of the terminal, and Rendell joined in with relish. He clapped as the band played “In the Midnight Hour.” He got up onstage and sang the old Beatles song “Twist and Shout” without a twitch of self-consciousness, even though his singing style resembled a doglike croon. He did a little chain dance to another song. When the leader of the band yelled to the feverish crowd, “How many people are happy that Ed Rendell is the mayor of Philadelphia?” the applause in the room was loud and strong, except for one tiny voice of dissent.

“Not me,” said Rendell with a devilish smile on his face.

At the stroke of midnight, a cake in the shape of the city was brought out, and it didn’t take long before little chunks were being stuffed into Rendell’s mouth as if he were the groom at a wedding. From several feet away, Bob Brady, the chairman of the city’s Democratic party, watched the proceedings with a grandfatherly benevolence. Political decorum
would dictate that chunks of cake should probably not be forced into the mouth of the mayor of the fifth-largest city in the country even under the most joyous of circumstances. But Brady had been down this road many times, and he seemed to know instinctively that the best night of a mayor’s life was usually this very first one. “Let ’im have fun,” said Brady. “Tomorrow he’ll wake up and say, ‘I’m the fucking what? What the fuck happened?’ ”

Behind the swell of hope and optimism lay the unraveling of a once glorious American city. And there were also issues of Rendell’s character. Several weeks before the election in November, Cohen had gotten word from a variety of sources that the
Inquirer
was delving with a vengeance into allegations that Rendell had engaged in acts of sexual harassment while district attorney. Cohen received nearly thirty phone calls from individuals who had either been contacted by the newspaper or were aware of the investigation, and so he knew intricate details of it: the names of the reporters assigned, the supervising editor, and the kinds of allegations being pursued. He knew that the investigation had generated considerable controversy within the paper’s newsroom—some thought it was a legitimate story; some thought it had nothing to do with anything. Cohen questioned the timing. Such rumors were not new. Virtually every time Rendell had run for office, they had cropped up. So why all of a sudden were they being vigorously pursued? The more Cohen learned, the more he became convinced that the paper was conducting a kind of witch-hunt, contacting a secretary in one instance to ask her whether Rendell had once chased her around the office in the nude. The paper never published a word of what it learned or didn’t learn. But from this episode alone, it seemed likely that questions of Rendell’s character and behavior were not simply going to disappear.

As Ed Rendell danced and sang and rocked back and forth in a red cap that said
RIZZO
’
S PIZZA
on the front, David Cohen stood on the fringes, away from the music and the stage. He wore a tuxedo, but given the way his eyes scanned every detail, he might as well have been at the top of a ridge dressed in dark glasses and camouflage, armed with binoculars and a map pointer. He too received his share of congratulations, but whereas there was a grace period for the mayor, there was no grace period for him. Much of his evening, in fact, had been taken up with people who wanted jobs with the city now that a new mayor was coming into office. Amid the pulsating swell of the music, one such job seeker came forward to ask Cohen whether he had received his covering letter and résumé. Cohen listened
to the name thoughtfully and then politely offered acknowledgment: “Buff-colored paper with a signature on the left-hand side.”

It
had
been buff-colored paper. The signature
had
been on the left side. How could anyone have remembered that?
Why
would anyone have remembered that? “That’s right,” said the man with a strange look on his face. Cohen gave a modest shrug. After all, why wouldn’t he have remembered the résumé?

There had been only four thousand of them.

It was a grand party and a grand day, and no one begrudged the mayor a single second of it. When he woke up the next morning and went to work, the first item on the agenda, among roughly a thousand, would be how to somehow right the city’s financial condition and stave off bankruptcy. Beyond that, one could already feel the first rumblings of the war with the unions that would take place in the coming summer, not a war simply about the usual territories of wages and benefits but a war over the ability of government to reclaim itself and act as an instigator of bold change, not an impediment to it. These were immediate crises that might somehow lend themselves to reversal with ample amounts of luck and miracle. Beyond them lay problems that seemed impervious to hope or even the barest outlines of solution.

There was the disgrace of public housing, where the vacancy rate hovered at 20 percent and children got third-degree burns from exposed pipes that melted the skin in a sizzle. There was the shame of the schools, whose teachers taught with contempt in a system where 60 percent of the elementary school students lived at the poverty level. There was the flow of manufacturing jobs, 80 percent of which had been lost, and there was the vast industrial heritage of the city, whose once proud moniker, Workshop of the World, was now just a cruel taunt. There was the despair of the neighborhoods, where in many cases the only answer to these once sturdy blocks, as bleached of life as a skull in the desert, was to borrow a chapter from Vietnam and save them by demolishing them. There were the pockets of despair in the city’s black neighborhoods, where heroic grandmothers who had already raised their grandchildren were now raising their great-grandchildren and were hoping to veer them somehow from the path of dice games and drugs and drive-by shootings that had become rhythm and regimen. There were pockets of anger in “changing” neighborhoods, where those who worked and suffered through the wage tax and believed and luxuriated in the heartbeat of the city felt they were being driven out
by those who didn’t work and didn’t care and had no respect for themselves, much less for anyone around them. There was the fear of the men and women who worked at After Six stitching tuxedos or at Whitman’s making chocolates or over at the navy yard at the foot of Broad repairing ships suddenly being told to find new lives and new means of employment because these places were closing up for good.

“There’s so much work to be done,” said Nellie Reynolds, who had lived her whole life in the city and had been a longtime activist on behalf of housing for the poor. “The city looks like it has gone to the dogs. Everybody looks to the mayor like he is the gospel, but everyone knows that it’s going to take more than one person to clean up this mess.” But in the giddiness of that inaugural night nobody seemed to believe that at all.

Shortly after Rendell’s victory in November, political strategist Oxman had written a confidential memo with fourteen points that the new mayor needed to tackle to succeed. The memo had a political framework, but it went beyond politics and urged Rendell to do what was right, regardless of how hard that might be, regardless of the virulence with which others might fight him. The very life and future of a city was at stake now, and the hard choices, the choices that no politician made anymore, must become the only choices.

“Remember, Ed Rendell has won a huge mandate for change,” wrote Oxman. “You can take over everything. Fuck them all.”

I
t was somewhere around 2:30
A.M.
when David L. Cohen and F. John White ran the model through the computer to discover whether there was even the slightest prayer. White was the managing director of a company called Public Financial Management, which specialized in helping municipalities discover creative financial paths out of seemingly intractable financial disasters. He knew the hidden arteries and veins of big-city finance as well as anyone else, and so did Cohen, who, by the arduous and tireless embrace of foot-thick documents, had become the city’s leading budget expert. They were in White’s corner office on the sixteenth floor of a downtown office building, huddled over the computer next to White’s desk, and the sense of anticipation was palpable. After hundreds of hours
of interviews with city department heads, a few of them fruitful but most of them ending in
Waiting for Godot
–like curlicues—
Is this your budget? Is this not your budget?
—they were finally going to get a number,
the
Number, that would quantify the extent of the city’s budget mess and show the cumulative deficit over the next five years if no corrective action was taken.