A Prayer for the City (41 page)

C
ohen had gotten there early and, wielding a cellular phone with balletic fluidity, had the situation fully assessed and ready for briefing by the time Rendell arrived.

“Who are the protesters?” asked the mayor as he gazed up the street. He had already seen hundreds of them during his term, but these demonstrators, given the uncharacteristic gentility with which they conducted themselves (one of their signs read,
LET THEM EAT CAKE. MARIE ANTOINETTE
1798.), seemed as if they had just been brought up from the minor leagues. They were certainly not of the same caliber as the group of disabled citizens who, upset by the mayor’s refusal to spend tens of millions of dollars
the city did not have on federally mandated curb cuts, had slithered off their wheelchairs right outside his office and then peed into little bottles they carried with them, thus making their removal by the police not only politically incorrect but rather messy.

“We got FOP [the police union] on the left,” said Cohen. “We got homeless right in front. We got Uhuru on the right.”

“Who’s Uhuru?” asked the mayor.

“No one,” said Cohen. “They just want publicity.”

The mayor seemed satisfied. Even the protesters were in wonderful alignment today, adding a spot of good-spirited democracy in action to the painstakingly orchestrated proceedings, and off Rendell went to make small talk with Vice President Gore in the waning moments before the dedication of the city’s new convention center. To some, like Linda Morrison, it was just a building, and a particularly wasteful building at that, built at a taxpayer cost of $522 million and subsidized by taxpayers in terms of operating costs and bond debt for years to come. But many others were hailing it as a new and wonderful dawn in the life of the city, the cornerstone of economic revival.

“It’s more than just a convention center,” said the vice president to the brimming crowd that had gathered outside. “It’s a building block for the revitalization of Philadelphia. It’s the kind of revitalization President Clinton is trying to bring about for America.”

At 11:28
A.M.
on a sun-drenched Saturday at the end of June in 1993, the vice president tugged on a red ribbon to officially open the building. Fireworks shot into the sky, and like the opening of a jack-in-the-box, a high school marching band burst through a set of doors in hats and uniforms.

The scene bore inevitable comparison with another moment in the life of the city when a high-ranking public official had used the occasion of a grand opening as a symbol of something greater. Like Gore, he too had spoken on a stage filled with politicians and other dignitaries. He too had been surrounded by the swell of jaunty music. But unlike Gore, he had spoken not of hopeful revitalization, because the very suggestion of such vulnerability seemed unimaginable, but of a strength and a might the likes of which had left an entire world envious.

The city was still feeling the might of the consolidation that had made it the largest city in physical size in the entire world, drawing into its boundaries the ring of suburbs desperate for its superior services. Its population had continued to boom and thrive with no end in sight, a growth of 21 percent,
or some 140,000 persons, in the six years alone since the last census was taken. New homes of vintage row-house style were being built at the rate of 6,000 a year to handle the constant influx, and with 9,000 manufactories in the city employing nearly 150,000 people, the work was always plentiful. It was a proud boast of the city that its working class was better housed than that of any other city in the world, and it was a boast that appeared to have merit, since nearly half its 130,000 dwellings had been built specifically for laborers. The waterfront thrived, with twenty-one shipping docks, twenty-three piers, and 2,000 men employed just in the daily shipment of 30,000 tons of coal. About a mile away, near Broad and Spring Garden, another 3,000 were employed at Baldwin Locomotive. The thoroughfare of Market Street was home to John Wanamaker, believed to be the largest and most complete clothing store in the entire world. Eight different railway lines fed into the city. There were twenty-seven daily and weekly newspapers and 34,000 rooms in which to bathe while reading those papers, most of which supplied hot water.

The appointed day started off rainy and cloudy. But the sun broke through by the early morning. Six new hotels with nearly 5,000 rooms had been built expressly for the occasion, and crowds by the tens of thousands arrived at the newly built depots of the Reading and Pennsylvania Railroads. They came from Boston and New York and Baltimore and Washington and Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, but they also came from Germany and France and India and Turkey and Ireland and Japan and China, crowding the grounds with their eclectic attire, and the words of official greeting put them in a mood to celebrate.

One hundred years ago our country was new and but partially settled. Our necessities have compelled us to chiefly expend our means and time in felling forests, subduing prairies, building dwellings, factories, ships, docks, warehouses, roads, canals, and machinery. Most of our schools, churches, libraries, and asylums have been established within an hundred years. Burdened by these great primal works of necessity, which could not be delayed, we yet have done what this Exhibition will show in the direction of rivaling older and more advanced nations in law, medicine, and theology; in science, literature, philosophy, and the fine arts. Whilst proud of what we have done, we regret that we have not done more. Our achievements have been great enough, however, to acknowledge superior merit wherever found.

“I declare the International Exhibition now open,” pronounced President Ulysses Grant from the stage that had been set up in between the Main Building and Memorial Hall. It was now somewhere close to noon on May 10, 1876, and all threat of rain had disappeared for good. The flag of the United States rose up the Main Building, the largest building in the world, with a length of nearly a third of a mile, and the flags of foreign countries rose up on the other buildings. The perfect ovals of glass for the windows had come from the country’s two greatest centers of glass-making, Pittsburgh and Wheeling, West Virginia. Fountains shot cologne-scented water into the air, and a chorus and an orchestra blasted out Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus to the accompaniment of a newly built pipe organ containing 2,704 pipes and made by the great Boston firm of Hook and Hastings. A procession of four thousand, which included the president, the emperor of Brazil, and members of the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and the Cabinet, passed through the Main Building into Machinery Hall. The president and the emperor approached the platform on which was displayed an elaborate engine designed by George H. Corliss of Rhode Island—forty feet high with fourteen hundred units of horsepower, a fifty-six-ton flywheel, and twenty tubular boilers. They touched a designated lever, the flywheel turned and cranked to generate power, and within that hall five miles of machinery came to life.

The Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 had officially begun, and in the buildings spread across 236 acres in Fairmount Park in the city of Philadelphia lay example after example of the magnificence of America and the magnificence of the industrial city, a revolution in the very nature of work and mass production—an automatic shingle maker capable of making twenty-five thousand shingles in a single day; a machine for bending the stout wooden beams of ships; a ditchdigger that could dig eight cubic yards of earth per minute, or as much as a man could dig in a single day; a wallpaper machine capable of printing a roll in fifteen different colors; an envelope maker that could cut, fold, and gum 120 envelopes per minute; a machine for the manufacture of rubber-soled shoes; a cork maker that cut corks of various sizes; a tack maker that churned out four hundred tacks per minute; an automatic nail cutter.

The power loom of the United States Corset Company attracted considerable attention. So did the power looms of John Bromley and Sons of Philadelphia, capable of running off thirty-five yards of carpeting a day. So did the machine of the Pyramid Pin Company of New Haven that could
stick 180,000 pins into paper in a single day. The fully automatic elevator was introduced here. So was the telephone as a tool for commercial use. Another display highlighted perhaps the country’s most valuable social contribution to the rest of the world—the public school system.

“All were at work,” a chronicler of the time wrote of that moment after President Grant and Emperor Pedro II of Brazil had set the great Corliss engine in motion. “The looms weaving their varied fabrics, the printing presses throwing off their sheets like huge snow flakes, and pumps, lathes, drills, hammers, and the wilderness of machinery, which you see around you, were humming, pounding, whirring, and clattering, a grand chorus and tribute to their unsceptered monarch.

“Industry.”

One hundred and seventeen years later, in the summer of 1993, it seemed incongruous for a convention center, even one as beautiful as this, to be the savior of the city. It seemed incongruous for the Workshop of the World to fashion a totally new wardrobe as the Host of the World, for the sound of factory machinery to be replaced by the sound of small talk around an exhibition booth, for the row houses that had gone up to house those factory workers to be replaced by the pink polish of convention hotels to house the American Society of Hematology and the National Solid Waste Management Association, for the spiritual solace of men and women coming home from a hard day’s work knowing that the labor of their hands had made something to be replaced by men and women coming home from a hard day’s work hoping that the flawlessness of their drinks and meals had pleased conventioneers from Peoria and Fargo in sufficient measure for a generous tip.

The Pennsylvania Convention Center in all likelihood was not the ultimate answer, and it might well turn out to be the taxpayer boondoggle that Linda Morrison feared. The service jobs it might generate in hotels and restaurants and stores would be of little use to someone like Jim Mangan, who had spent the bulk of his career as a ship welder, unless he reached the point of utter desperation in his search for a job. There was something painfully ironic about a city that had forged its reputation on producing nearly everything there was to produce now trying to reforge its reputation by serving as a gracious and convivial host.

But Rendell had neither the time nor the inclination to ponder such disparities. He dwelled little on the industrial history of the city, perhaps because it augered so badly for the present. Staring with dewy eyes at empty
factories or dreaming of the day when cargo vessels would once again ply the waterfront was a worthless pursuit. In talking about the city’s budget problems, he said it would be wonderful to give deserving programs all the money that was desired—just as it would be wonderful for him to wear his hair in an Elvis pompadour. But the truth was he didn’t have the money, he didn’t have the hair, and the city no longer had anything remotely resembling an industrial base. In the absence of a miracle, the city had no choice but to focus on what it did have—health care, banking and legal services, tourism—the familiar anchors of the so-called service economy.

He seized on the opening of the convention center with full force, and he transformed it from just an opening into an event of enormous psychic significance, as pivotal in its own way as the era of growth that had been ushered in by the Centennial Exhibition. He believed in tourism not necessarily because it was the best answer but because it was quite literally the only one, and he envisioned a quadrangular nexus—the convention center; a Disneyesque repackaging of the city’s history, with battle reenactments and costumed Franklins, Washingtons, and Jeffersons helpfully giving tourists directions; the Avenue of the Arts along Broad Street, with its orchestra and its concert and theater halls; and riverboat gambling.

He was at his indefatigable best, furiously dishing out bread and circuses better than any emperor. Over the course of the Welcome America! celebration highlighting both the opening of the convention center and a visit by President Clinton on July Fourth to award the city’s Liberty Medal to Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk, he went to no less than fifty-two events. His enthusiasm was like that of a child celebrating a birthday over and over and over and blowing out the candles with more determined gusto each time. He was the mayor, and he was expected to be at events such as these, but his presence had taken on star proportions in the city.