A Prayer for the City (50 page)

Emotionally and spiritually the Morrisons could not afford a repeat of what had happened in Queen Village. They had picked their newest location carefully, and during the seven months or so that they had been living in Chestnut Hill, they could not have been happier or more content. It had taken Linda little time at all to feel at home, to feel she was part of something special.

The train hadn’t arrived yet when Linda walked down the platform to the vending machine and bought the
Inquirer
. As she did, she saw something, and she immediately knew what was happening, but for a split second she rejected the knowledge. This was
Chestnut Hill
, the city’s last refuge. What was happening could not be happening. It just couldn’t.

About twenty-five to thirty feet away, a man in a black jogging suit with the hood of the sweatshirt pulled over his head was quickly coming toward her. Before she knew it, she could feel the tip of something cold and blunt in her side, then at her head.

“Give me your purse, or I’ll blow your head off.”

She screamed, and there was a millisecond struggle as he pulled away the purse, the strap of which she had draped over her arm. Her briefcase, which hung by a strap from her shoulder, fell to the platform. He took off
down the stairs and out of the station. She ran down an exit ramp in the opposite direction because she knew there was a pay phone there, and she called the police.

As far as Linda was concerned, the police were inclined to do little. She had not been able to get a good look at the perpetrator because of the way he had drawn the hood of his sweatshirt so tightly around his face. But the ticket agent had seen him when, shortly before the incident, he had come into the little station booth and asked for a schedule. She suggested that the police might want to show the ticket agent some mug shots, and they did. Nine days later.

Linda walked home. Her husband was still there and gave her some cash since she no longer had any. She managed to get herself to the committee meeting, but she was late and felt obligated to give the other members, who were already deep at work on the city’s future, an explanation for her tardiness. “I’m sorry that I’m late for a meeting of the internal working group on creating a vision for the city for the year 2000,” she told them. “But I was just mugged in one of the city’s nice neighborhoods.”

In the aftermath, a range of emotions ran through her—terror, anger, foolishness for having let herself be so vulnerable and not following the cardinal rules of the city. Because she had been mugged before, many of these feelings were sadly familiar. But one feeling was different: the horrible sense of loss, the realization that even in a community like Chestnut Hill, there was still no immunity from crime and there never would be unless all the residents, instead of fighting the newest restaurant or chain store, decided to pool their money and build a fort.

“I just can’t do this anymore. I just can’t stay here anymore.”

That’s how Linda Morrison now felt.

The Christmas tree lighting ceremony in the City Hall courtyard, another new feature of city life ushered in by the Rendell administration, was spectacular, as always. City Hall itself was ablaze with thousands of tiny lights that had been painstakingly placed on its borders, making the massive structure actually look warm. The long expanse of the parkway, from Logan Circle to the foot of the art museum, had been lit up with twinkling snowflakes, paid for by the Legg Mason investment firm. It was a fact he kept in mind when he later called the city treasurer, Kathryn Engebretson,
and said that such largesse really did deserve a little bit of city business (“Legg Mason did the snowflakes on the parkway, so we thought it would be nice to reward them immediately”).

The ceremony itself, replete with appearances by Eric Lindros of the Philadelphia Flyers and Shawn Bradley of the Philadelphia 76ers, only added to the occasion. Even the church youth choir, singing the carols with a kind of James Brown subtlety, so that each word sounded like a bullet through glass—not “Joy to the world” but “
Joy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! to!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! world!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
”—prevented anyone from dozing off.

Rendell loved these occasions, and he may have particularly loved this one since a significant political scandal, the first real one the Rendell administration had faced, was being uncovered with fanaticism by the
Inquirer
. It had to do with a state senate race that under normal circumstances would have received barely more than obligatory coverage. But this one, between Republican Bruce Marks and Democrat William Stinson, had true statewide implications. Whichever party won it would retain control of the state senate in Harrisburg and the power of the state’s budget purse strings. Given that Democrats outnumbered Republicans by two to one in the district, Stinson should have been the surefire winner. But he was such a bland and unremarkable candidate that panic set in, and several weeks before the election, Rendell sent private letters to his A-list of fund-raisers, telling them that contributions to the Stinson campaign were far more important than contributions to the Democratic National Committee. “This is an urgent, top priority plea for you to give and/or raise as much money as possible for Bill Stinson’s Senate campaign within the next week,” wrote Rendell. “We need a minimum of $100,000 from the Rendell Finance Committee no later than next Monday.… I do not impose upon my friends often, but I need the help now. Please don’t let me down.”

Stinson won by a bare 463 votes out of the 40,000 that were cast, and the Democrats were immediately alleged to have stolen the election. The
Inquirer
, in an effort that ultimately included the efforts of forty-three reporters, turned the allegations into reality. The paper uncovered hundreds of cases in which voters, many of them Latinos, had been outrageously manipulated, talked into signing absentee ballots, which were obliquely described to them as a “new way to vote.”

Ironically, it was Rendell’s off-the-cuff comment that stoked the
Inquirer
’s curiosity and led to the relentless coverage. In its initial story on the troubling outcome of the November election, the paper cited cases of
three dozen voters who apparently had been fraudulently induced to cast absentee votes for the Democratic ticket. Rendell threw down a gauntlet in response, declaring that no investigation of voter fraud would be merited unless the number of questionable ballots reached one hundred.

The mayor would have been better off simply putting a red bull’s-eye on his backside and letting reporters take whacks with their little notebooks. Given such a challenge, it was little wonder the paper ultimately uncovered more than five hundred questionable ballots, as if saying to the mayor, “Is that enough, or should we go out and get some more?”

The stories were long and in some cases remarkably repetitive, feeding the angry belief of the mayor and others in the administration that the true goal of the paper was not public service but the personal aggrandizement of winning a Pulitzer. The story only intensified, to the point where a former public official and well-placed Democratic fund-raiser privately begged Cohen to get the mayor to convene a blue-ribbon panel to study possible reform of the election code, not because it would serve any constructive purpose but because it would help the
Inquirer
win the damn Pulitzer and thereby get the paper off the story.

“This is their Pulitzer application,” said Tom Leonard, a former city controller, in a heated conversation with Cohen. “They’re looking for governmental action.” Leonard was savvy in his assessment on several levels: Pulitzers are often won on the basis of results and reforms, and Pulitzers were also the great sustenance of the
Inquirer
, with seventeen won between 1972 and 1990. His thinking apparently was that a blue-ribbon panel might be enough of a result to “sate” the paper. He even had a name in mind to head it, a former U.S. attorney well-known for righteousness, and he thought such a move would put Rendell, whose every word seemed only to inspire the paper even more, on the side of the angels. But Cohen rejected the idea because he thought it would look utterly transparent and also because he doubted it would in any way diminish the paper’s coverage.

The election story beat on mercilessly, taking up huge chunks of the front page in December. But other than those working for the paper and a handful of those directly involved, there was always some question of how many others in the city truly cared about it to the insatiable degree that the
Inquirer
did—a scandal without a broad constituency. The mayor himself obviously didn’t like the coverage. He found no public motive in what the
Inquirer
was doing; the fact that the paper had uncovered astounding examples of election fraud seemed of no moment to him. But at a certain
point, he seemed resigned to the continued onslaught of it and to the worst of all possible fates: “Who the fuck cares if they win a Pulitzer anyway? The readers don’t care.” And given the condition of the city and the daily question of its ultimate survival, there were more important issues to become distraught over anyway.

The year 1993 was in its final day. The halfway mark of the administration had been reached—and far more than that in a psychological sense because portions of 1994 and 1995 would be occupied by the mayor’s bid for reelection. The line on the graph of the administration had shown an unbroken upward movement since Rendell took office two years earlier. But in those last breaths of 1993 came the kind of news that would render any chart meaningless.

Without being given any clear right of appeal, the city was told that consolidations in the Internal Revenue Service would cost Philadelphia about 3,800 jobs over the next five years. The announcement was crushing, coming on top of the closings of such vintage Philadelphia businesses as Whitman’s Chocolate, Mrs. Paul’s Kitchens, and After Six. All told for the twelve-month period ending September 30, 1993, the city had lost an estimated 21,400 jobs. Under the IRS plan, Philadelphia would suffer enormously while other areas of the country, such as Ogden, Utah, would benefit greatly, a circumstance that once again cemented the view that the federal government’s policy in its treatment of the cities wasn’t simply one of benign neglect but was one of deliberate dismantlement. It wasn’t just the loss of jobs that was crippling; it was the types of jobs—decent ones in the range of $20,000 a year that provided good benefits and didn’t require an abundance of sophisticated skills, jobs that were perfect for thousands of city residents and impossible to replicate.

With an urgency in his voice that at times bordered on desperation, Rendell spoke by phone to the Democratic National Committee chairman David Wilhelm, asking him to arrange thirty minutes of time with the president and the vice president to discuss not only the IRS decision and the continuing crisis of the navy yard but also the crisis of America’s cities: “We have let loose an absolutely ferocious school of piranhas in the name of reinventing government, and this school of piranhas eats indiscriminately, and they don’t give two shits about America’s cities. It’s not just Philadelphia, David; it’s all large urban centers. We are getting unintentionally screwed up the rear by the administration.”

Moments later he spoke with Marcia Hale, in charge of intergovernmental affairs for the White House, and he said something to her that he
never would have said in public because it would have undercut all the bread and circuses, all the confetti throwings and summer pool submergings and roof nailings and mascot fightings and menorah lightings and Mickey Mouse appearances that were, more than anything else, sustaining the city. There were times, many times, when the mayor postured to make a point, exaggerated because he thought exaggeration was the only way to make people understand, but this wasn’t one of those times. Alone in his office he spoke from the place where he always spoke best and most clearly, from an unclouded heart.

“Putting aside my mayor’s hat for a second, we’re dying,” he said over the phone. He was sitting at his conference table, leaning ever so slightly, with one hand pressed against the side of his head. As always, his left leg frantically pumped up and down, as if, by the very rhythmic frenzy of the action, he could just speed everything up, make everything happen that needed to happen. “We’re dying,” he repeated with a little more emphasis this time. “Forget all the good things I’ve done; Philadelphia is dying. It’s happened a lot more slowly since I took office, but we’re dying.”

Several months later, at the end of March 1994, Rendell and Cohen found themselves on a Metroliner headed for Washington for a private meeting on the housing authority with HUD Secretary Cisneros. As they found seats in the dining car, the two men seemed relaxed and happy to be out of the chaos of City Hall. Cohen, who rarely accompanied the mayor on his forays to the nation’s capital, had come armed with a briefcase full of paperwork that he hoped the two of them could get to during the train ride. Rendell didn’t mind doing paperwork but seemed equally interested in the fat-free chocolate muffins he had bought at one of the little vending booths in the station just before the train pulled out. Despite their divergent styles, they had eerily assumed twinlike behavior in certain areas. Both had brought along brown-bag lunches for the ride, and even though they had ordered separately, both had gotten the same thing: Russian-dressing hoagies with a side of turkey.

They were in good moods for a variety of reasons. Despite their protests that the
Inquirer
’s coverage of the state senate race had been sensational and overheated, a federal judge had taken the unprecedented action of voiding the results of the election. But a few days before the train trip to
Washington, they had gotten wind of news that made them feel vindicated, and they could barely conceal their glee. The Pulitzers wouldn’t be announced for another several weeks, but the initial judging, the worst-kept secret in all of America, had already taken place, and the
Inquirer
wasn’t even a finalist. The paper’s editors and reporters said repeatedly that a Pulitzer Prize had never motivated the coverage, but Rendell and Cohen reveled in what they were convinced was the paper’s humiliation, particularly since the paper had built its reputation on winning journalism’s most prestigious award. “I was significantly worried that [the judges] would be seduced by those thousands of column inches all saying the same thing,” said Cohen. “It has restored my faith in the Pulitzer process.”