A Prayer for the City (2 page)

I still drive through the streets of Philadelphia and see the vacant homes and the slabs of metal where windows used to be. I see the swirls of trash and the piles of discarded tires. I can’t help but think that here, in the United States, lies our own shameful holocaust. But then I drive through other streets and see beautiful row-house blocks. I see places that are crowded and energized and filled with people who are unique and vibrant. I can’t help but think that here, in the United States, lies the very best definition of us.

This book may have been originally spawned from a feeling of loss, but it has its foundation in the strength of the human spirit. It seems strange that I spent so many years researching and writing about people who never
once sat together in the same room. The mayor and his chief of staff could not have been more different from the four other people whose lives I also followed. Yet all were linked by resilience and hope and a refusal to succumb. In their own powerful way, they all understood why a city is worth saving and why it is worthwhile to live in one. Regardless of background or circumstance, each of them was heroic, each of them offering, in their daily acts of living and survival, a prayer for the city.

S
uccess followed success, and as he persuaded more and more people with the spontaneous symphony of his hands and the infectious rhythm of his voice to see a place that he saw, it became easier to believe that there was something wondrous about him, regardless of the patches of hair sprouting from his head like a failed English garden, not to mention the balled-up blue suits that looked as if they had been burrowed away in gym bags.

National story spawned national story, each one better than the last, stories so gushing that even his own press secretary, Kevin Feeley, seemed a little embarrassed.
The Wall Street Journal
basically started it with a front-page profile that Feeley described as a “blow job,” and then the rest of the
national media eventually followed like coins from a slot machine:
Forbes
,
Reader’s Digest
,
U.S. News and World Report
,
Newsweek
,
The New York Times
,
New York Magazine
,
The Washington Post
. They all proclaimed him the miracle man who at Mach speed had reversed a seemingly irreversible spiral of decline and decay. The war was over, they so strongly implied in what they wrote. The impossible had become possible. A dying American city had been drawn back to life by the man Vice President Al Gore had ordained “America’s mayor.”

Ed Rendell read most of these clips. Sometimes he liked them because the accompanying pictures were big and showed him with an affable smile and more hair than he could take credit for in person, and he knew such a sight would make his eighty-four-year-old mother in New York happy. Sometimes he cringed over the effusion of them because it raised the bar of his success ever higher, and he knew that fellow mayors, while offering congratulations in public, would start sticking little pins into the ears and eyes of their voodoo dolls in private. Sometimes he obsessed over the three or four paragraphs out of two hundred that described him as impulsive, because he hated the idea that he was impulsive, and he hated having it pointed out, even though, of course, he was totally impulsive, and after five minutes with him it was impossible for
anyone
not to point it out, whether the visitor was nine or ninety. But he knew better than to pay a whole lot of attention to the cacophony of what was written.

He knew it that day in Washington when he went before the Senate Finance Committee to testify about the urgent need for urban enterprise zones to stimulate investment in America’s depleted inner cities through the use of business tax credits. The senators sat at the front of the room in an elevated semicircle, a little bit weary, a little bit pleasant. Some actually seemed to care, but others listened to snippets of testimony and then, like the revolving door of a department store, just disappeared behind a back door altogether. If there was any urgency in Washington that day, it wasn’t in the obligatory chill of this solemn room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, with its cavernous ceilings and Wuthering Heights gloom. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York was there, with that long, persnickety face that always seems on the verge of smelling something rotten, expounding on the historical precedents of enterprise zones like a precocious schoolboy. Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey was there, looking sleepy and unfocused. Senator Bob Dole of Kansas was there, with that brow of perpetual brooding as heavy as a ship’s anchor. So was Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, with that silky twang of whiskey and smoke that
sounds almost British. So was Senator John Breaux of Louisiana, who seemed as interested in his own territorial rights as he did in the tired tales of horror from the urban crypt, at one point giving his podium several sharp whacks so a photographer would stop leaning against it.

In his prior life as a district attorney, Rendell himself had been to Washington countless times, and he knew the routine: you came for a two-hour meeting; you were introduced; then everyone else in the room was introduced; then, in the thirty minutes that were left after the introductions, you spoke quickly and told the grizzled lions of the capital in five hundred words what was needed; then they spoke slowly and told you in ten thousand words what they thought was needed, until the two-hour meeting had suddenly become four hours, and then you went back home on the train as if the whole thing had been some vague dream. This event had seemed no different, particularly when Moynihan and another of those testifying, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, got into a spirited argument, as if they were the only ones there, over where enterprise zones had first been used to promote investment, in the Philippines or in Puerto Rico.

“I wasted a half day of work so I could hear about the Philippines and Puerto Rico?”
whispered Rendell to an aide as he waited his turn to testify, his leg pumping up and down so furiously that it looked as if he might become airborne at any second. At another point, as Kemp made reference to talmudic philosophy and talked with fevered gesticulations and finger-pointing about how the great entrepreneurship of the inner city had been pushed underground, Rendell whispered to the aide,
“I like Jack, but he’s crazy.”

After about an hour, Rendell’s turn to speak finally came. Forty-eight years old, he was neither intimidated nor nervous. Much of his life had been spent in the public eye, and while he was a devoted Democrat, his political philosophy reflected that of a man who simply said what he thought and what he felt regardless of how it came out. He sat on a red leather chair, his six-foot-tall body hunched over the table as if he had slightly miscalculated the distance between table and chair so he was leaning a bit more than he really needed to and might tip over altogether at any moment. He wore a gray suit, but because of the way clothing instantly rumpled around the large and rounded frame that he constantly fought to keep at 235 pounds, a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt would have fit him better. He gestured sharply with his hands as if he were trying to catch a fly. He spoke with a passion that reached just a notch below outrage, the exact passion
that he used with nine-year-olds when they trudged into his office and sat there, first glum, then transfixed, as he described the vagaries of what it was he did for a living. His voice had a gravelly edge, phrases coming out of him in rat-a-tat bursts. He never stammered but apparently considered the idea of pausing between sentences a sign of unforgivable weakness.

He told the senators how his city—the city of Philadelphia—had lost $2 billion of its tax base over the past twenty years, after the city had raised various taxes nineteen times. He talked about the violence of the inner city, how simple disputes, disputes that in his teens had been settled with a punch thrown here and a punch thrown there, were now being settled with guns and knives and the inevitable end product of someone dying over nothing at all. He talked urgently, as if the words couldn’t keep up with the fervor of his belief in them. He worked hard to make the members of the Senate Finance Committee believe that he wasn’t looking for a taxpayer handout, a reversion to the wonder days of revenue sharing, when mayors could live out their edifice complexes, but that he was seeking a way, at minimal public expense, of bringing an obliterated portion of the American landscape back to life.

“We in the cities are very confused,” said Rendell as he hunched forward. “We see a great deal of support—and we think it’s meritorious—of aid to the Soviet people. But we are perplexed why you don’t give a similar package to cities that are on the brink. We’re also confused at how readily you found money for S and Ls, how readily you found money for Desert Storm.” His words were sharp and unflinching, and they had an impact.

“We had no choice [on S and Ls],” countered Senator Bentsen, the chairman of the committee, with simmering indignation that made his fine whiskey twang go suddenly sharp and raspy, as if a piece of metal had gotten stuck in his throat.

“I submit we have no choice here,” countered Rendell with equal indignation.

Some in the room, like Senator Donald Riegle of Michigan, actually seemed to be moved by what Rendell had to say. It clearly hit a chord with the senator, which wasn’t surprising perhaps, given the misery of Detroit and the growing sense that at any time now it would become the first major American city to expire and go extinct. Unused sections of the city were so prevalent and considered so hopeless that one local politician would suggest putting a fence around them and mothballing them for good. The idea would result in public ridicule around the country, but the serious point remained
that Detroit and other cities like it, so obsessed throughout their histories with growth and development and expansion, must start thinking about shrinkage and neighborhood consolidation if they were ever going to survive.

“What’s happening here is that cities are being destroyed,” said Riegle. “We have a war going on within our own country. We’re going to end up with a
Clockwork Orange
society.”

They were poignant words, but most of the senators looked on glumly, as if this were a blind date that wasn’t going nearly as well as expected and they were just looking for an excuse to get home early—except when it came their turn to speak. Then the color flew back into their faces, and instead of leaning back in their huge-backed chairs in bored silence, they leaned forward in grand interrogator style and spoke with a kind of incision and eloquence that was admirable and a clear gift of the gods. But when the moment of attention passed, when the cameras pecked and clicked away at another face in the semicircle, they cocked their heads to the side, and they leaned back again in their chairs, and their eyes became glazed, and many just disappeared altogether behind the Bermuda Triangle of that back door, never to be seen or heard from again.