A Prayer for the City (14 page)

The
Franklin
. The
North Carolina
. The
Dolphin
. The
Raritan
. The
Pennsylvania
. The
Vandalia
. The
Relief
. The
Dale
. The
Mississippi
. The
Princeton
. The
Germantown
. The
Susquehanna
. The
Wabash
. The
Arctic
. The
Shubrick
. The
Lancaster
. The
Wyoming
. The
Pawnee
. The
Tuscarora
. The
Juniata
. The
Miami
. The
Monongahela
. The
Shenandoah
. The
Tacony
. The
Tonawanda
. The
Yantic
. The
Kansas
. The
Neshaminy
. The
Shackamaxon
. The
Pushmataha
. The
Swatara
. The
Antietam
. The
Omaha
. The
Quinnebaug
. The
Henderson
. The
Relief
. The
Dobbin
. The
Sandpiper
. The
Vireo
. The
Warbler
. The
Willet
. The
Kearsarge
. The
Constitution
. The
United States
. The
Minneapolis
. The
Aylwin
. The
Cassin
. The
Shaw
. The
Campbell
. The
Ingham
. The
Duane
. The
Taney
. The
Philadelphia
. The
Wichita
. The
Rhind
. The
Buck
. The
Washington
. The PT 7. The PT 8. The
Terror
. The
Butler
. The
Gherardi
. The
Andres
. The
Drury
. The
New Jersey
. The
Scott
. The
Burke
. The
Enright
. The
Coolbaugh
. The
Darby
. The
Blackwood
. The
Robinson
. The
Solar
. The
Fowler
. The
Spangenberg
. The
Currituck
. The
Rudderow
. The
Day
. The
Wisconsin
. The
Crosley
. The
Cread
. The
Ruchamkin
. The
Kirwin
. The
Antietam
. The
Los Angeles
. The
Chicago
. The
San Marcos
. The
Princeton
. The
Valley Forge
.
The
Whetstone
. The
Dhalgren
. The
Pratt
. The
Okinawa
. The
Guadalcanal
. The
Guam
. The
New Orleans
. The
Newport
. The
Manitowoc
. The
Sumter
. The
Blue Ridge
.

As you continued over the bridge on Interstate 95, past the jumbled stench and sprawl and spew of oil refineries and the endless fields of row houses where many shipyard workers once lived, as you entered a city that seemed so shiny and steely on one side and so dilapidated and deflated on the other, simultaneously resurrected and obliterated, you thought about the yard as it was now, in 1992. Regardless of nostalgia, its fifty-two miles of streets were nearly deserted, its dry docks virtually empty, its cranes at a standstill.

In a commemorative book that had been prepared for the 150th anniversary of the shipyard in 1951, Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews wrote, “I have every confidence that one hundred and fifty years from today Americans will repeat this salute to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard when it celebrates three hundred years of distinguished service to the fleet and to the nation.” But Matthews was wrong. Forty-one years after he wrote those words, the yard was on its knees, laboring mightily and, some thought, fatally this time to save itself from becoming another relic of the city, a symbol not of the magnificence of work but of the very absence of it.

Rumors had coursed through the workforce over the years that the yard was on its last legs, ready to be shut down by a navy brass in Washington that found it outdated and ill-equipped to handle the needs of the modern nuclear fleet, but after a while those rumors seemed as much a part of the territory as were the whine and heat and claustrophobia of the ships’ crawl spaces. Somehow, in some way, another ship always came trudging down the Delaware needing an overhaul and the Philly finish. The old-timers had been there long enough to know that nothing was more subject to old-fashioned horse-trading in the corridors of Washington than military contracts—who got them and who didn’t get them and who had them taken away after they did get them. But scream and cry and threaten as politicians always did when it came to the need to cut spending and reduce the fatty tissue of pork, the old-timers knew that no politician was dumb enough to touch the yard, not with its legacy and its history. “In 1985, when I was working as a pipefitter, I went to one of the older fellows in the shop about a rumor that the yard was closing,” a shipyard worker told the
Philadelphia Daily News
. “He was puffing on a cigar and he said: ‘Listen,
kid, this place has been shutting down for 240 years. It ain’t never going to close. So shut up and get out of here.’ ”

But it was different now, and the latest volley of rumors about the impending closure of the yard—that it was real this time and not some private game of battleship between Republicans and Democrats in Washington—had never been this intense. In April 1991, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney proposed closing thirty-one major military bases around the country, including the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. The navy yard had been on closure lists before, and this one still needed approval from Congress and the president, but there was something different about this announcement, particularly since it was made by a Republican administration and the leading senator of the state, Arlen Specter, was himself a Republican. “There’s a bad feeling this time,” said a shipyard worker named Gene Smith, echoing the feelings of thousands of military and civilian workers, and newspapers covering the story came up with a chilling statistic: if in fact the yard and base did close, the net effect in the region would be a loss of forty-seven thousand jobs and a hike in the unemployment rate from 6.5 to 8.5 percent.

As soon as Cheney produced his list, politicians from all over the state went on the offensive. One promised a “war bigger than the Persian Gulf” to save the yard, and others quickly added their own versions of outrage and vitriol. The most sincere expression of what the yard meant came at the beginning of June 1991, when six women dressed in red, white, and blue attended a federal hearing on the proposed closure and somewhat mysteriously hauled a large plastic bag to the front of the room. Inside were 100,000 signatures on petitions begging that the yard be saved. Quietly and methodically the women had gone to bowling alleys and supermarkets and Phillies games to collect them.

On the last Sunday in June, when the decision on the fate of the yard was to be announced, Pat D’ Amico, one of the women who had fanned out all over the city collecting signatures, cooked a big family dinner. She had grown up in the southwest section of the city in an Irish Catholic neighborhood, and beyond belief in God and pub the only other automatic assumption in life was that when you got old enough, you could always go to work at the yard. She had fulfilled that prophecy. So had her father, her husband, her brother, her sister, her father-in-law, and her brother-in-law. That previous Friday rumors had floated that the federal Base Closure and Realignment Commission, in charge of deciding on Cheney’s recommendations and overwhelmed by the outpouring of support for the yard, not to
mention crucial data showing its efficiency, might keep it open. The vote was televised live, and Pat D’Amico and her family watched. The decision was stunning: a unanimous seven votes. In favor of closure.

As the impact of the vote set in, Pat D’Amico thought that what had just happened could not have happened—that somebody would listen and grasp the importance of the yard, not just as a place that efficiently and expertly overhauled ships but as a place that was too much a part of the city’s lore, America’s lore, to be rendered silent. “You kind of thought in your heart of hearts that this is America, that this is the United States, and somehow somebody would have to say that this couldn’t happen,” she later told an interviewer. “You really didn’t think that this was really possible, and I had a really naïve belief, I’m sure, that somehow my government wouldn’t do this to me.”

But her government had done it, to her and to her city.

Sponsored by Senator Specter, a suit was filed claiming that the criteria used by the navy to close the yard had been faulty and filled with purposeful omissions. In effect, the suit argued that the fix had been in, that the navy had vowed to shut the yard down regardless of how efficient it was compared with other yards around the country. Other politicians and union leaders fell in line behind Specter, their battle cry once again brimming with confidence. They claimed the suit was on sound enough legal ground to keep the yard open, and many of those who worked there were flooded with a sense of hope or, at the very least, ammunition for their own self-denial.

But one politician who did not join the bandwagon was Ed Rendell. When he took office, he spoke little of the navy yard publicly, and much of the reason for that was purely practical. With the city sinking financially and the union negotiations heating up, to give time to anything else was difficult. But he was aware of what was happening at the yard, and as he heard Arlen Specter and other politicians fire away about the merits of the suit and how it would be the yard’s savior, he saw their pronouncements as political and more than just political, as a form of cruel and unusual punishment of the workers, supplying them with the one emotion they could not afford to have—a misguided sense that their careers and futures were eternally safe.

The navy had previously agreed to send one final aircraft carrier to the navy yard, the
John F. Kennedy
, for overhaul. Because of the amount of work an aircraft carrier overhaul required, such a job would keep the yard
open until the fall of 1995. But no more work was scheduled after that, and Rendell privately believed that it was ludicrous to think the navy was going to supply any. Instead, the yard would close in September 1995 once the work on the
Kennedy
was completed, at just about the same time his term as mayor would end. As a result, the issue for him wasn’t how to keep the yard open but what on earth to do with the massive facility when it closed and, equally problematic, what to do with the nearly ten thousand workers who, outside of some miracle, were destined to lose their jobs, their livelihoods, and their way of life.

Had Mangan’s mind-set been different, he might have been able to convince himself of a different fate. During the spring of 1992, there were even some glimmers of hope, if it was your inclination to be hopeful. Vice President Quayle, at a political stop in Wilmington, said the administration was looking into the possibility of using the yard to service and maintain the navy’s fleet of cargo and support ships. In addition, the lawsuit filed by Senator Specter had made a miraculous recovery from the dead. The previous November, it had been dismissed by a federal judge on the grounds that Congress had clearly worded the base-closure law to preclude any court appeal. But in April 1992, a federal appeals court revived the suit on the grounds that various aspects of the decision to close the yard were appropriate for judicial review. “Their jobs are a lot safer today than they were yesterday,” said Bruce W. Kauffman, a former justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, arguing the case for the plaintiffs.

But Mangan was still reluctant to put much stock in such comments. He knew what these bromides of optimism were largely about, telling workers what they so desperately wanted to hear, giving them a scrap of good news that they might well remember in the voting booth later in the year, when Specter was up for reelection in a nasty dogfight against Democratic challenger Lynn Yeakel. His memory for political semantics was a good one, and he could still recall being at the once thriving Frankford Arsenal in 1975 when Walter Mondale, running on the ticket with Jimmy Carter, vowed that that facility would never close. In its heyday during World War II, the Frankford Arsenal had employed more than twenty-two thousand people and had produced eight million bullets a day. Much like the navy yard, it had not equaled such dizzying heights of production and employment
since then, but still, there was Mangan at the arsenal listening to a political speech in good faith, and there was Mondale, as honest a man as you could ever find in all of government, promising that the arsenal would stay open, which of course is exactly the opposite of what happened after Carter became president. Carter did decide to close the arsenal in 1977, and it was after that that Jim Mangan generally stopped voting for mainstream candidates and listened to what politicians said as if it were some form of exotic theater. “It starts to sound like a rerun after a while,” he said of the battery of politicians and lawyers coming to the defense of the yard. “There’s nothing they can do.”

There was always a certain fatalism to Mangan, measured by the way he sometimes sat on the couch in his living room with a quiet expression on his face, as if fighting off some personal demon inside him, or by the way he consistently acted as though what could go wrong not only would go wrong but already had gone wrong. But the stirrings inside him, of what it meant for a man to be a provider for his family and what it meant to no longer be able to do that, were not imagined.

Unlike some of the old-timers, who had worked there for twenty or twenty-five years and had developed a deep and abiding love for the yard, Mangan could not confess to such feelings. Many of the workers came from neighborhoods so close that they could almost reach out across the bed and touch the steel of the dry docks. Son followed father who had followed grandfather, but Mangan was different. He grew up in the neighborhood of Mayfair in the city’s northeast, some ten miles north of the navy yard, and his father was a computer programmer who liked nothing better than to read quietly and surround himself with books. Mangan himself went to Catholic grade school and then to Central, the area’s most prestigious high school. He considered college but decided against it and instead went to a trade school to learn air-conditioning and refrigeration. He spent six and a half years at a company that made specialized air-conditioning equipment to keep computer rooms dry. When the company moved to the suburbs, Mangan elected not to move with it. Instead, in 1981, when he was twenty-six, he joined the yard, going to work in an apprenticeship program as a welder.