A Prayer for the City (56 page)

She had dressed beautifully on this particular day when she went to see her son, as if to conceal from him the worries and the responsibilities that weighed her down. “You look great!” he said, and she acknowledged that she had not only done up her hair but she had also put her teeth in. They hugged each other, and he called her Mommy. The severity of the rules of prison visiting had increased and decreased over the years and had recently become quite spartan. There was a time when you could pull chairs around to play pinochle, but that wasn’t allowed anymore, so Tony and Fifi sat
side by side in a long row of sagging chairs with greasy arms. She bought him the food he liked from the vending machine, and they talked idly and comfortably for two hours, and it was hard to believe that this was the way they had been forced to talk for all those years, under the glare of guards and over the noise of other inmates and against the green grime of those walls. Their love truly did flow like a river, unyielding and undying, mother to son and son to mother. He privately worried about how tired she looked, and she privately worried about how some gray was beginning to show around his temples. She dreamed of cooking him a meal. He dreamed of taking her on a cruise. He worried that she would die while he was still in prison, and she worried that she would die before God answered her and he was set free.

“Keep the faith,” he said when it was time for her to leave, and he bent to give her a hug, one of the two he was allowed during visitation, a brief one at the beginning, another brief one right at the very end.

“I’ll try,” she said as tears formed in her eyes.

Then he stayed where he was, and she lumbered out through the visitor’s room and back up the stairs.

The stairs were steep, and there was a little elevator attached to the railing for those who were handicapped. Fifi sighed and laughed and looked at those stairs as if she were scaling Everest and told a guard that the next time she came, she was going to go the proper way, in that little elevator. Then she looked at the stairs, and she did what she always did. She took hold of the railing and climbed them.

Fifi ran around the corner on that August day in 1994 after she dropped the phone. She saw the crumpled fence and the car that had smashed into it and all the blood. There had been a terrible crash that made for front-page news even in the desert of North Philadelphia, where there seemed no room for new horrors. A man apparently under the influence of cocaine had been driving his car like a madman five minutes before noon. He sped through a stop sign at Eleventh Street, went over the curb, struck the steps of an empty corner store, and swerved back into the street for half a block. Then he mounted the sidewalk again, ran over a signpost and crushed a woman who was six months pregnant and her three-year-old son against a fence.

The three-year-old would survive, and so miraculously would the baby. But the woman, named Kim Armstrong, would not. She was twenty-four years old, and Fifi knew her well. Sometime earlier Kim had given birth to
a son. His name was Taheem, and his father was Tony’s son Keith. Now both his parents were dead, his father killed in a shoot-out over drugs, his mother killed by a driver out of his mind because of them.

A few weeks earlier Fifi had asked aloud whether the cycle would ever stop.

“Sometimes I wonder, What more, what more, what more?” she said. Now she knew the answer.

On the last Friday in August of 1994, people in the neighborhood gathered at the Cookman Church in the aftermath of Kim Armstrong’s death. The issues they discussed were much the same as the ones that had been raised at the community meeting that had taken place at the end of June in the aftermath of the death of six-year-old Michelle Cutner. Black men talked about the need to regain control of the neighborhood. A police sergeant said drug activity in the neighborhood was so intense that there was at least one arrest a day. He urged people to call the police, and when people in the audience said there was little point in calling the police because the police never came, he meekly responded that for every call that did go out over the police radio, someone “eventually” responded.

Fifi was there. Her daughter was there because she had been the meeting’s organizer. So were about fifty other people who just wanted some semblance of law to be brought back to their community. The mayor sent along an aide who, within the privacy of Rendell’s office, existed largely to serve as a willing target at those moments when the mayor felt like ridiculing someone. His presence at meetings was virtually a sign of their unimportance.

“I just left the mayor,” said the aide, who arrived an hour and a half late. “He very, very much wanted to be here.”

E
verywhere Rendell and Cohen went, he seemed to be behind them, out there in the shadows. Just when they figured they had shaken him, outwitted him for good and put him off the trail, there he was, the glint of his badge just barely visible in the summer sun.

They had given him the mayor’s contributors’ list when he had run for governor, which was like going to the wine cellar and handing over the rarest bottle of Mouton Rothschild coveted during the war. They figured he would accept it in the spirit in which it was intended, part gift, part buyout, but there he was. They called their best fund-raising lieutenants to the long table in the Cabinet Room, held the political equivalent of a Mafia war summit, then sent these grim and powerful soldiers on a do-or-die mission
to raise so much money from every law firm, bank, investment house, and business that no one, no one, would dare risk a challenge.

By the middle of the summer of 1994, the Rendell campaign had $1.7 million sitting in various bank accounts. And yet there he was, inscrutable, impossible to read, refusing to go away, the sweet speculation of rumor only making him stronger.

There had been a time during the spring when Cohen had become utterly convinced that State Representative Dwight Evans would run for mayor. He had seen him in Harrisburg during negotiations for the state budget. Evans was angry in a way that shocked Cohen, and had suggested that there was no true commitment to minorities in the city. The process of budget negotiations in Harrisburg, the endless horse-trading and behind-the-back deals that the petty men who called themselves legislators mistook for power, was always exhausting, and Cohen thought Evans’s private outburst was partially a reaction to that atmosphere. But Cohen thought something else was driving Evans, something he couldn’t blame him for at all. The state capital of Harrisburg was a miserable place, not only because the town was an ugly and crummy backwater but also because of the absolutely corrosive attitude that most legislators bore toward the city. Cohen himself saw it when a legislator whom he had never met before expressed his admiration for the mayor this way: “He’s done a helluva better job than the nigger you had in there before.”

By the middle of the summer, Cohen wasn’t so sure what Evans would do, but he did know this, just as the mayor’s political strategist, Neil Oxman, had known it the night his client the mayor shared a giant hoagie instead of the pain over the death of a six-year-old: given the racial breakdown of the Democratic party in the city, Evans would be a credible and formidable challenger to the mayor if he decided to run. They had known it from the very first day of the administration, and they knew it now.

As a state representative, Evans had served his district in the city loyally and well for thirteen years. Without shrillness and without the immediate instinct to hold a press conference or play racial politics publicly, he had become a leading advocate of the city’s minority community and was particularly masterly at strong-arming the mayor in a way that was quietly effective. He wasn’t flashy, and he might not have had the stamina for a citywide campaign against Rendell in a Democratic primary. The mayor’s popularity was formidable, and his ability to raise money daunting. But Evans had something the mayor would never have: immediate access to the base of the city’s minority vote. If Evans could get to those neighborhoods,
if he could take the community that had humbly gathered in a church to mourn the death of six-year-old Michelle Cutner and a dozen other communities and seize upon their alienation, then the possibility of an upset wasn’t some fantasy.

Like a hard-to-get date, Evans refused to clarify his intentions one way or another, and there was always something mercurial about him. But Rendell and Cohen were acutely aware of his presence and of the need to head him off. The Rendell administration came up with a plan, the Philadelphia Plan it was called, a way of showing that the mayor, beyond his own private feelings, did care about the neighborhoods and the minority residents of the city. The plan, to rehabilitate housing, had good intentions and was modeled after the public-private partnership that Jimmy Carter had devised in Atlanta. But since one of the motivations behind it was politics, the polish and the presentation of it bore little resemblance to the reality. In private, the mayor readily agreed with the assessment of the plan as a drop in the bucket that would do little unless the city was able to increase its jobs base, with casino gambling or a second convention hotel or maybe even some miracle at the navy yard that no one had even considered. But perception was paramount, and one of the debates over the plan had to do with choosing the maximally effective visual backdrop for the press conference—should it be bombed-out buildings or rehabilitated ones?

Rehabilitated homes won out, and the Philadelphia Plan was announced amid great fanfare on a picture-perfect day of clear blue skies. The governor was there. So was the mayor. So was Dwight Evans, and so were so many other politicians that someone must have spread the word that there were free umbrellas and tote bags for those who got there on time. So were representatives of the nine corporations that, under the terms of the plan, had made a commitment to contribute $250,000 a year for ten years to community-development corporations to develop and build new housing. Standing next to the mayor and the governor, they were preening and proud. Given the federal and state tax credits that existed for such neighborhood investment, the real out-of-pocket expense for these corporations, with aggregate assets running well into the tens of billions, was about $50,000 each per year, but that information wasn’t highlighted.

The largesse of one of the participants, PNC Bank, was particularly notable. In its press release congratulating itself for its participation, the bank noted that “all companies should view community investment as an integral, not supplemental, part of their business.” PNC was a good corporate citizen, but less than a year later it would inform the city that it was thinking
of consolidating its back-office operations. The bulk of the jobs, about eight hundred of them, were already in Philadelphia, and the total number of jobs at stake was somewhere around twelve hundred. PNC would then sit back as the cities of Philadelphia and Camden fought for those jobs like rats fighting for the last piece of cheese. Camden, desperately trying to revive itself, wanted the jobs. Philadelphia, trying not to lose any more jobs than it already had, desperately wanted to keep them. Camden, buoyed by the pro-business policies of Governor Christine Todd Whitman, at one point offered an incentives package worth millions in low-interest loans and tax reductions. Philadelphia countered with its own multimillion-dollar package. Camden sweetened its offer. Philadelphia sweetened its offer, particularly after PNC wrote letters to state officials noting that the New Jersey proposal was $5 million better than the Philadelphia proposal and how nice it would be for the city or the state to rent two city office buildings that the bank was planning to vacate, thereby securing an income stream.

The mayor himself knew what was happening, how he was being forced into a horrible bidding war by a corporation that knew it had the city cornered. No big-city mayor anywhere could afford to let go of this many jobs, and during one phone call with PNC Bank Corporation chairman Thomas O’Brien, Rendell became livid. He wrote a letter of apology afterward, explaining, “It has been a tough week for the city and sometimes it seems that no matter how effective our administration is, it simply doesn’t matter and we are nothing more than a very good doctor to a patient who is dying slowly but surely.”