A Prayer for the City (32 page)

The Morrisons knew about Southwark Plaza when they settled together in Queen Village. But the essential character of the neighborhood overrode any concerns they had, particularly since Linda had already lived there for three years and felt familiar with it. The house they decided on, at 327 Queen Street, was irresistible anyway, a three-story row house with a red brick façade. The shutters and front door had been painted a mustardy yellow, but that was easy enough to fix with a coat of new paint. In back was an ample yard, and that was a major attraction as well. The view from there wasn’t much: a narrow alleyway called Kauffman Street and across Kauffman a low-slung interconnecting series of drab and slightly grayish apartments. But in the excitement of purchasing their first house together and thinking about all the time they would spend together in that wonderful backyard, they paid little attention to what lay beyond the sliver of the alley.

Tired and exhilarated that first night in their new home, with boxes spread everywhere, they managed to find some clean sheets and throw them onto a mattress. They fell asleep—until they were awakened at 2:00
A.M.
by the sound of screams coming through the sliding glass of the bedroom window. They rushed to see what was happening, and they saw a man stumbling down the alleyway of Kauffman Street. They heard his screams—
“Dad, you killed me, Dad, you killed me
”— and as they watched him step and stumble, they saw how the blood did not flow evenly from the stab wound, as one perhaps might have thought it would, but gushed out in syncopation to the beats of his heart.

The Morrisons tried to tell themselves that what had happened was the kind of isolated and horrific crime that just happens sometimes—and what good were the bragging rights of living in the city if you didn’t have at least one tale of horror from the urban war zone to tell your suburban friends? But the wave of incidents emanating from the area of that drab, grayish-looking
apartment complex across the sliver of Kauffman Street did not cease. Every week, it seemed, as Jon Morrison played in the backyard with the dog or did some planting, a police car would whiz down the alley responding to some call or other. Every night, it seemed, kids were playing and screaming and yelling, unsupervised, until 1:00 or 2:00
A.M.
Linda herself began to call the police on a regular basis, asking them to do something about the noise. In response, she received an unannounced visit from a member of the city’s Commission on Human Relations, who suggested that the problem was not with the parents, many of them single mothers, but with Linda and her own intolerance.

Feeling both desperate and angry, Linda Morrison made a determined effort to find out who owned the complex, and she was told that it was a so-called Section 8 apartment complex. Under the Section 8 program, administered by the federal government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, tenants contributed a portion of their monthly income in rent to a private landlord. What gap existed between the payment by the tenant and the actual market value of the rent was subsidized by HUD. Linda discovered the name of the agent for the Kauffman Street complex. She called several times trying to find out the name of the owner, but the agent refused to divulge the information and finally just told her to “fuck off.” The forces of Kauffman Street overwhelmed Linda and her husband. They tried asking the parents to supervise their children, to keep them from screaming and yelling at all hours of the night, but more often than not they were met by amused half stares, as if such a request were not only impossible to comply with but also comical. The screams and yells continued, the only respite coming when it rained.

Linda and Jon Morrison began to feel surrounded, the glower of the Southwark high-rises on one side, the chaos of the Kauffman Street complex on the other. They literally went underground, particularly in the summer, burrowing into the basement to escape the noise, outfitting it with rugs and a television set and a couch. The yard, the very reason for buying the home, became unusable. They didn’t want to be outside, not if it meant staring into Kauffman Street, not if it meant hearing the wail of another police siren. Through her contacts in the city, Linda had a friend in the upper echelons of the police department. Analytical by nature, she asked him to do a computer search of all the calls that the police had made in the area of the Kauffman Street complex. She found out that there had been more than ninety calls to the complex in one year, for such offenses as drug overdoses,
fights, domestic disturbances, noise, gunfire, and several shootings. The police actually asked whether they could use the Morrisons’ third-floor deck off the master bedroom to conduct surveillance of the complex because of its perfect vantage point. But not wanting to turn their house into a precinct, they said no. In the meantime, their car, an old Toyota, was stolen.

They went to community-association meetings in an attempt to change the situation somehow, and they were outspoken in their views. Political correctness was not part of their style, particularly when it came not only to the Kauffman Street complex but to an issue of far greater controversy within the Queen Village neighborhood: what to do about the high-rises of Southwark.

In a way, the saga of Southwark was so predictable that mustering outrage about it was almost hard. Like similar high-rises in every city in America, Southwark wasn’t some towering symbol or metaphor for public housing but was the typical embodiment of it. If Southwark stood out at all, if there was anything that distinguished the complex, it was in the color of those three twenty-five-story towers—a clammy, sickly yellow the human skin gets from chronic fever and stale air.

Public housing hadn’t always been the festering sore that it was in 1992. When the first public-housing act was passed, in 1937, in the throes of the Depression, it was never intended to establish a form of permanent housing at all but was meant to provide temporary shelter for those requiring assistance until their income stabilized. While promoting many of the New Deal entitlements and other social programs, President Franklin Roosevelt himself recognized the danger of creating a permanent class of persons dependent on government. “Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber,” said Roosevelt in his State of the Union Address to Congress in 1935. “To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.… We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance and courage and determination.”

Public housing ultimately did evolve into a form of permanent shelter
for many of those who lived in it. But into the late 1950s, it had neither the physical dilapidation nor the overwhelming preponderance of single mothers on welfare that it has had in the 1990s. According to a study of nineteen public-housing developments in Philadelphia in 1959, 63 percent of their residents were married, 58 percent were employed, and only 18 percent were receiving public assistance. The specter of so-called manless families was a problem then, but it was thought to be a solvable one. In fact, the local agency that administered public housing in the city, the Philadelphia Housing Authority, was the first in the nation to establish a social service division to deal with the issue.

Southwark itself opened in 1963 and for a short period of time was actually sought out as a desirable place to live. But by the 1970s, the quality of life in public-housing towers was beginning to fissure, and not just because of the inherent flaw of a structure designed to pack the greatest number of the poorest people into the least space possible. The second great migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North, in the post–World War II era, put housing, any type of housing, at a premium. Various standards for rental properties that had existed in the past, such as prompt evictions and careful screening of tenants, were discarded. More and more, public housing became the very thing it was never supposed to be, the housing of “last resort” for those too poor to afford anything else.

By the early 1990s, Southwark had become a dilapidated horror. Two of the three high-rises were closed, and $48.5 million was earmarked for renovation, although many housing experts thought the whole concept of high-rise housing projects was fatally flawed regardless of how much money was spent on it. The questionable folly of rebuilding Southwark then turned into possible fraud in the winter of 1992, when it was discovered that the Philadelphia Housing Authority, after spending at least $6 million of the $48.5 million in renovation money, still did not have any usable architectural drawings. As for actual refurbishments, new windows had been installed in the three high-rise buildings. But the practical effect of that was blunted somewhat by the subsequent discovery that the windows did not meet specifications and had been improperly installed.

One didn’t have to be a social scientist or an expert in public housing to understand a place like Southwark. Any adult, regardless of education—or any child, for that matter—could look at those towers and their utterly incongruous setting and see the malarial color that had infected them and know that they had been doomed to failure from the very beginning, casting
a potentially fatal effect not only on those who were sentenced to live there but also on those who lived anywhere close to them. Anyone walking through the corridors of the one high-rise that was still open, 90 percent of whose residents were single mothers and their children, didn’t need a PhD to realize that unless the social conditions inside such a place changed, no amount of money spent to rebuild and refurbish it would ever make a lasting difference. There were poor people in the city who desperately needed housing, but not like this.

Linda Morrison began to hate Southwark as much as she hated the Kauffman Street complex. She wasn’t surprised in the least by the revelations of wasteful spending since her suspicion all along was that the rebuilding had more to do with feeding the ravenous appetites of the “poverty industry”—the architects and contractors and social service agencies, all of whom would be the greatest direct beneficiaries of whatever sums of millions were poured back in. Meanwhile, taxpayers and the urban poor, regardless of what they thought of each other, ended up as the ones who invariably benefited the least.

The planned rebuilding did strike her as financially nonsensical, given that the average cost of rehabilitating each of the seven-hundred-odd units in Southwark, roughly $65,000, was significantly more than the average cost of a home in the city. Beyond the cost, Linda saw Southwark as a monument of social-policy failure, the very thing that predictably happens when government assumes the role of provider.

She adored Queen Village, but more and more she began to relate to it like a widow going through the stages of grief—denial, heartbreak, anger, acceptance that what she loved had been irrevocably lost. She could still walk through its narrow blocks and alleyways and feel the city in her heart, but more and more she began to feel a certain coldness.

The Morrisons now had a son, named Ian. He was born in August of 1991, and that only added to their feelings of fear and insecurity in the neighborhood. To protect themselves, they bought a gun, and they went out to a firing range to practice shooting. The target could be set from far away but Linda had no interest in the delicacy of sharpshooting. She knew what the gun was for—self-protection and self-defense. She asked that the target be brought into close range, between six and eight feet away.

Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!

She fired off the six rounds from the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model
10 without the slightest flinch, decimating the target, the smoke and the smell of gunpowder soaking the air.

“That’s all I want to know how to do,” she said.

By the spring of 1992, around the time Linda had decided to become involved in the war of the unions, she and her husband had run out of solutions. They were tired of living in a state of siege, tired of holing up in the basement, tired of walking out of a restaurant and scanning the street in all directions, tired of that horrible sense of being on guard all the time. “We felt there was no civilized way to solve the problem,” said Jon Morrison as he later looked back on it. “If it were some sort of business or industry that was a nuisance, you could imagine legal ways to solve it. This was a problem without a handle on it.”

They put their house up for sale, and on a Saturday night in the spring of 1992 they received further lessons on the rhythms of the human heart.

It was the night before an open house for prospective home buyers, and they had spent part of that day getting everything clean and shiny. They were asleep, just as they had been that very first night in 1990 when the exhilaration and giddiness of moving—sheets thrown happily over a mattress—had given way to terror. They heard screams, just as they had that very first night. But the victim was a woman this time, not a man. She had been shot, not stabbed, and she was staggering down Queen Street, the imprints of blood on the smooth stone of the sidewalk forming an orderly trail as delicate as a cat’s paws, down a marble cornerstone and a black metal railing and an oval flower pot. The woman was a neighbor of the Morrisons, and she had been shot and mugged on her way home. She made it to her house, her blood splashing on the bottom two steps. Then she was carried to Linda and Jon’s house, the blood splashing onto their steps as well. A pillow and a comforter were fetched for her to use until the ambulance came.

That Sunday morning, Linda worked diligently to cleanse her front steps of blood. At a certain point, the steps, like everything else—the shutters, the slight angle of the roof, the small symmetrical windows, the brick facade—embodied exactly what Linda had wanted in a house in the city. But now the splash of blood on those steps, seeping into the indentations and cracks, seemed only appropriate, as did Linda’s efforts to clean it. Part of her efforts was an act of purification, but part was something far more practical: with an open house scheduled for that afternoon, it would be difficult to explain to prospective home buyers how part of the hidden charm
of the neighborhood was those unexpected moments when a neighbor started bleeding on your front steps after getting shot. That was Linda’s personal “tidbit of urban wisdom.” Others who moved in would have to discover it on their own.