A Prayer for the City (13 page)

The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to discuss the most effective use of lobbyists on behalf of the city and the most effective way in which the administration could push through its agenda at the state level. It was suggested that Rendell meet privately with Governor Casey when he came to town at the end of the month. Of course seeing the governor was a good idea. More than ever, good relationships between the city and the state were crucial to any chance of future success. But there were complications.

“One of the reasons I can’t see the governor is because I’m seeing a mayor from Chile and the president of Botswana,” said Rendell. Sitting so comfortably in a chair in his den at five minutes to midnight, feeling a sense of peace and the security of knowing that he had at least another five hours, maybe six, before it all started over again the next day, he rolled his eyes and shook his head.

“I do some unbelievable shit.”

The next day, the inexhaustible Kathleen Sullivan was back with Mickey Mouse. The day before, the mayor had been strident. Now he just seemed defeated and tried one final time to make her understand it all from his perspective.

“It’s appearing next to a mouse,” he said sadly.

“Why, you’ve been in worse company,” she shot back.

“But not with my picture in the paper.”

When that didn’t work, Rendell made an appeal to practicality: why appear with a fake mouse when there were several real ones rummaging around his office on a daily basis? That didn’t work either. Sullivan shook her head in disappointment. She also saw a clear case of scandal: Why, she
wanted to know, was the mayor seemingly willing to appear with the Diet Pepsi Uh-huh girls and not Mickey Mouse? He looked at her for several seconds with an expression that was somewhere between a grimace and a cry for help. He was thinking, as if pondering the possibility of a Justice Department bias suit on behalf of the world’s most beloved mascot. In a deposition, how
would
he explain that appearance with the Pepsi Uh-huh girls? It was never easy.

“All right. I’ll do the fucking mouse.”

Not all his meetings were like this. Some were even more bizarre, and many were wrenching and sober. The five-year plan and the union negotiations and the city’s attempts to balance the budget were important enough to occupy his attention for all of 1992. But hovering over Rendell, always in the back of his mind, was something else even more crucial and vital to the lifeblood of the city than any of these issues, the very essence of its soul. Looming was the future of the city’s largest smokestack employer, still holding on to the kind of industrial jobs that had built this city and dozens of other cities like it. Looming was the fate of the yard.

B
eyond a wife and six children, ranging in ages from three to sixteen, Jim Mangan had no constituency. When he pondered the future of the navy yard, he didn’t worry about how to convert the fears of a workforce into votes by making assurances that could not be kept; he had more personal concerns: the cost of clothing, the price of food, the payment of the mortgage on the modest home on Haworth, the feelings that would overwhelm him if that moment came when he no longer had a job and, in the absence of finding a comparable one in a marketplace uninterested in his skills, would no longer be able to provide for his family.

He was a quiet man, thirty-seven years old, with a wryness that served him well in terms of the fate of the yard or at least took off some of the edge
of hurt and fear. His voice had the raspy roughness of the Philly twang, various words filed off to a blunt point. He smoked his cigarettes to the stub, and he yearned to move from the cramped house that he had bought over in the Frankford section of the city because that was all he could afford. He was in many respects a working man in what had been a working city, but he also had a philosophical and intellectual side that seemed incongruous among the uniform porches and men in undershirts that dominated his neighborhood. He was perfectly at peace talking about Plato’s philosophy of government or watching, with a bemused smile on his face, the bizarre wonders of the legislative process as it unfolded on C-SPAN.

He heard the politicians give their fighting chants that the navy yard would stay open even though a federal commission had voted for its closure. He knew how many of the workers, particularly the old-timers, still believed that, still believed that if they did a good job, the Navy or the Pentagon or the Defense Department or someone in power would see the error of their ways. Given the strain of forced career change, particularly for men and women who had survived by the strength of their hands and did not have the college degrees and the computer skills that every employer seemed to want, it was easier, perhaps even safer, to run from the truth. Just about everywhere you looked now, the news was bad for the working man, particularly for the working man who had made his wages off heavy industry. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in its exhaustive occupational forecast, predicted a 3 percent drop in the number of manufacturing jobs nationally while the number of jobs in the service sector was expected to rise 35 percent. Occupations requiring little formal education, the report said, were expected to “stagnate or decline.”

Counselors who were acting as liaisons with the workers at the yard, trying to advise them of possible career alternatives, reported increased alcoholism, drug abuse, and heart attacks. In the immediate aftermath of the decision to close down the yard, one counselor remembered a worker who had to be rushed to the hospital after he was found outside the union hall in tears, picking at his hands and talking of suicide.

Mangan understood those feelings. As much as he concealed it, he knew what it was like to feel helpless, but he firmly believed that the yard was going to close regardless of how much rhetoric was spilled by politicians. He believed it because of what he knew about the yard’s history, how the place had been invented and sustained for a different place and a different time and never updated to handle the needs of the modern nuclear navy. Like so much else about the city, the original advantages of the yard—proximity
proximity to the great coal mines and steel mills of Pennsylvania, the skills of a built-in workforce that knew shipbuilding inside and out—made no difference now. Steel and coal were struggling industries in the state, and shipbuilding had been worn to a whisper. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, at least eight different shipbuilders had filled the arc from Philadelphia to Wilmington on the Delaware River. But one by one they had dropped away, the business of commercial shipbuilding in America swallowed up by the Japanese and the Koreans, who could build a private commercial vessel for one-third the cost with cheaper labor and cheaper materials.

In the spring of 1992, as Ed Rendell presided over the city, the navy yard was still holding on, visible from a grimy green bridge on Interstate 95—spindly-legged cranes and massive dry docks and lines of gray ships settled along the piers like a faded showgirl chorus. In 191 years, the navy yard, the nation’s first, had outlived thirty-nine presidents and nine wars. Of all the institutions of the city, it may well have been the most important and certainly the most overlooked. Over a million visitors flocked to the city each year to see the crack in the Liberty Bell and wander Independence Hall. Few, if any, even knew that there was a naval shipyard in Philadelphia. But in those dry docks wide enough to fit the keel of an aircraft carrier, in those cranes taller than a seventeen-story building, lay the greatest American spirit of all, the magnificent spirit of work, of fathers and mothers and sons and daughters and brothers and uncles and cousins coming together from row house and neighborhood to make something spectacular with the labor and skill of their own hands and hearts. Not just a part of the city for nearly two centuries, but the very definition of it.

The 74-gun USS
Franklin
was the first of the 119 ships that the yard built and gave birth to, 188 feet long at delivery, weighing 2,257 tons of wood and beam, gliding into the clear of the Delaware at precisely 3:15
P.M.
on August 25, 1815. At the sight of the launching, the men who had built it, as one chronicle of the time reported, “threw their caps as they would hang them on the horns o’ the moon, shouting their emulation.”

“I believe it is time this country was possessed of a Navy,” Joshua Humphreys, the son of a Quaker farmer and America’s first great naval architect, had written twenty-two years earlier, in 1793, to Robert Morris, a Philadelphian and financier of the Revolution. Humphreys started with a
little shop on Swanson Street in the southern part of the city below Catharine. He was an apprentice to a master shipbuilder who died before the apprenticeship was complete, but Humphreys’s gift was such that in the late 1700s he designed six frigates notable for their speed and power: the
United States
, built at his own private shipyard in Philadelphia; the
Chesapeake
, at Norfolk, Virginia; the
Constellation
, at Baltimore; the
President
, at New York; the
Constitution
, at Boston; and the
Congress
, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Of all these seaboard cities, none became a greater builder of naval ships than Philadelphia.

In 1801, the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard officially opened at the foot of Front Street, and that is where the
Franklin
was built and launched. Seventy-five years later the yard moved to its current location in the southern part of the city, an inhospitable swath of land known as League Island. There wasn’t much to recommend League Island from a human standpoint or even from an animal one. Only the muskrats sought pleasure in its marsh, and a syndicate of boosters from New London, Connecticut, hoping to lure the navy to build a new yard in their home port, floated claims in Washington that League Island was awash with fever that would surely strike all those who worked there. But the fresh water of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers protected the ironclads from rust, and its inland position, some ninety-five miles from the place where Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic, offered sound protection from attack. Most important of all perhaps, Philadelphia could legitimately boast of itself as the greatest and most diversified manufacturing city in the United States.

The steel and iron needed to build the new ships of the modern navy were close at hand, and so was an inexhaustible supply of skilled labor. So the yard was built there, thriving in times of war, when nearly fifty thousand men and women crammed its gates in traffic jams that ran the length of Broad Street from City Hall to the nexus of the yard entrance, barely hanging on in times of peace and power politics, when slow-drawling politicians from Virginia and Mississippi tried to sweet-talk and strong-arm military brass into closing it down so ship work could go to yards in their own states. In 1970, the yard built its last ship from the keel up, the 18,646-ton USS
Blue Ridge
, a specially designed amphibious command ship. But the yard continued to endure, shifting from the building of ships to the huge task of overhauling and modernizing the navy’s fleet of non-nuclear aircraft carriers.

Even on the grayest of days, when the city seemed too tired and too
beaten down to ever pick itself up, a certain sensation still stirred in the motorist who saw the yard from that grimy green bridge. The yard was quiet then, in the spring of 1992, almost ghostly, but memory and myth and the considerable powers of nostalgia took hold, and if you knew any of the stories, it was impossible not to think about them. You imagined that insufferably hot July day in 1837 when the banks of the Delaware filled with some two hundred thousand people, butchers and bankers and drunkards in the momentary suspension of inebriation, watching in awe as the largest ship ever constructed in America, the 120-gun
Pennsylvania
, 3,234 tons and 283 feet from keel to masthead, was launched from the yard. You imagined the thousands who had overflowed the decks of the
Kansas
and the
Maine
and the
Georgia
for a Sunday-afternoon sailor dance in 1919, at which the piano player drummed “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Ain’t You Coming Home to Old New Hampshire, Mollie” in earnest but soft spirit to not offend those who disapproved of dancing on the Sabbath. You saw Hedy Lamarr taking a bite out of the sandwich of a surprised shipbuilder and Judy Garland singing two whole choruses of “For Me and My Gal” right after the lunchtime whistle. You could still hear the sounds of ships rising out of the dry docks like the Egyptian pyramids, steel and iron shaped and hammered by a cast of thousands—