A Prayer for the City (44 page)

Robin’s final service on the last Sunday in June began with the singing of “Sweet, Sweet Spirit.” He stood in a white frock with his hands on either side of the pulpit, as if slightly steadying himself, but he looked comfortable and serene. The church itself was not crowded. Many of the pews were empty, but that only gave the moment a greater sense of intimacy, a true gathering of friends. The sound of a crying toddler echoed from the dimly lit wood, but no one seemed to mind, and through the opened slats in the stained-glass windows came the sound of the city—sirens, car alarms, honking horns. Muggy chunks of heat pushed through the windows, and the congregants gently cooled themselves with little off-white fans courtesy of Baker’s Funeral Home.

The children’s choir got up to sing, dedicating their songs to Robin. There were only four members, but they sang with such off-key gusto that their spirit was utterly infectious, their voices loud and shrill and easily carrying to the height of the massive vaulted ceiling.

Robin spoke next, his voice slightly quavering. There had been a celebration at the church in his honor the day before, and although the emotional aspects of it had been wrenching, it was nothing compared with this.

“I knew that today would be harder than yesterday, to stand here for the last time,” he said, and he spoke about the tone of the previous celebration, how “not a word was mentioned about race, because race has no place. We built a bond of trust early on, and that bond of trust carried us through fifteen years together.

“I love you all from the bottom of my heart and will always remember this time as a time of great strength, of great creativity. I’ll remember where I first learned about those things, at Cookman Church, Twelfth and Lehigh, in your arms.”

Through the church came cries of “amen,” and then the adult choir went to the pulpit to sing. There were six in this group, and in the middle, like a
tamped-down version of the Statue of Liberty, was Fifi, singing with gusto, joyfully undaunted by her occasional off-key notes. Though she had risen at 6:00
A.M.
, between getting the great-grands ready for Sunday school and making sure everyone got fed in the chaos of the kitchen, she had been late for the service. But it didn’t matter now. She had dreaded this moment when she would have to say good-bye, but she fought back her emotions and lost herself in the rousing song, swaying, smiling that smile that could cut through the thickest wall, dressed gloriously in a white top and black skirt.

Robin spoke again, this time to give his sermon. He hadn’t written it out because he knew that this was a moment when the spirit had to take over. Whatever he said—whatever words floated into his mind as he stood on the pulpit now would be the right ones.

I grew up here. I learned some things here I never would have learned anywhere else. I don’t know how many furnaces I learned to fix. I don’t know how many cars I learned to hot-wire—when someone stole ’em, we stole ’em back. I don’t know in how many households I was able to receive nourishment. I don’t know how many lives touched my life.

You have taught me to believe in miracles.

Despite the emotion of the occasion, he told those gathered that this was not the end of anything at all.

Today is not a day God has brought us to say “It’s over, it’s finished.” Today is a day God has brought us to say “It’s new, it’s a beginning.” Are you ready?

His refrain of hope was appropriate, but in that simple church built for another time and another era, it was hard to know just what would happen. For nearly thirty years, the church had been on uncertain ground, recently nursed back to life a slow step at a time. Now in this moment of good-bye, it seemed more fragile than ever. A successor was in place, but the post would be part-time.

Inside there was still peace and serenity, but outside life went on as always. If you were born here in the 1960s and lived here still, you were a
witness, every single day of your life until you died, to an environment that had only deteriorated. Under such conditions, as if watching the creep of cancer through every pore and every tissue, why wouldn’t you turn to crack? Why wouldn’t you become pregnant? Why wouldn’t you father as many children as you could? Why wouldn’t you pick up a gun? Why wouldn’t you want to die?

Robin ended his sermon with the parable of the eagle who thought he was a chicken, lost and confused, unaware of his strength, until he found his proper path.

My friends, you are now all eagles. You will soar with God. You will keep your eyes on the sun. You are wonderful.

God loves you. So do I.

After the sermon, Robin invited the congregants to the altar to reaffirm their devotion to God. They came and knelt, and Robin slowly went down the row with tears in his eyes, hugging each of them, clasping their hands.

A mile away, in the heart of Center City, lay a glistening convention center that had been dedicated the day before, a shiny and no-expense-spared Mecca for the out-of-towners who would start flocking there from all over the world with their disposable dollars to spend. But here there was no convention center. There was only the faith of those somehow strong enough to have it still.

The choir sang one final time, the words lingering there.

One by one the congregants filed out of the pews in the dim light and said their good-byes, first to Robin’s wife, Weslia, and then to Robin himself. Fifi lightheartedly promised Weslia that she was going to send her a tape of her singing. Then she reached up to hug Robin, and he reached down to hug her. “God bless you,” he whispered, and she closed her eyes, and her hug became a little bit tighter. Then she and her daughter made their way back home along Twelfth Street, walking slowly and side by side in their Sunday finest, past the litter-strewn gutter, past the sealed-up homes that had long ago been left for dead, past the clump of teenage boys rumbling with a pair of dice in the early-afternoon light, farther into the desert of North Philadelphia.

I
t started with a clatter of noises on the City Hall apron, not the familiar garble of protest through a bullhorn with bad sound but something different and more curious. Even Cohen couldn’t resist, so he turned and peered through the grime of his office window. Down below he saw someone he most definitely recognized lightly wrestling with a six-foot mascot known as Smiley, and then he heard a voice as familiar to him as his own loudly saying something, the very same voice that in the very same week had helped structure the successful sale of more than $500 million in bonds on behalf of the city.

“
I, Edward G. Rendell, mayor of the city of Philadelphia, do hereby proclaim July 23, 1993, as Hot Dog Day.
”

Cohen was rattled, his legendary focus momentarily broken by the sight of a man, the mayor actually, wrestling with a mascot in the shape of a very pink pig, and when he fielded his next phone call, he couldn’t help but dwell on what had just taken place, as if he had just had a vision:
“I hear Ed’s voice, and there he is, reading a proclamation with a six-foot pig next to him. The mayor of the fifth largest city in the country is reading a proclamation about a hot dog with a six-foot pig jostling him. Yesterday he sold five hundred million dollars of bonds. Today he’s being jostled by a six-foot pig. When he takes off the jacket, I say, ‘What is he going to do now?’ And then he puts on a hat and apron, and he’s suddenly surrounded by all these kids in little yellow caps. I am stunned. That’s all I can say.
”

In return for the appearance, a company called Hatfield Quality Meats had agreed to contribute $5,000 to the city’s Recreation Department, so there was a cause and an effect of such behavior, but even Rendell wondered whether he had gone past the threshold.

“The things that I will do for five thousand dollars,” he later lamented.

In the afterglow of the success of the Welcome America! celebration and the convention-center opening during the summer of 1993, such actions increasingly defined the mayor. He hated the tag of supersalesman, this notion of him as some amalgam of Deepak Chopra and Lou Costello, the big-city mayor who never saw a pool opening or a groundbreaking he could resist. He liked to think of himself as sober and serious, a statesman with maybe a few strange moments here and there. But he never stopped pumping on behalf of the city.

In recent months, he had worked mightily to raise the nearly $80 million that was needed to build a new orchestra hall in the city. When he heard that fashion magnate Sidney Kimmel was good for $10 million, he figured he could extract another $7 million or $8 million out of him if there was an agreement to name the hall after him. Some, particularly those in the sainted community of the orchestra, might balk at the notion of something called the Kimmel Concert Hall. What kind of artistic ring did that have? But not Rendell, not if it meant getting the damn thing built. “Short of a Nazi, I don’t care if it’s named after Garfield the Cat.”

Obsessed with making the city as appealing as possible to first-time visitors, he worked on a plan whereby taxi and limousine drivers would automatically take visitors downtown from the airport on Interstate 95 instead of the Schuylkill Expressway, thereby avoiding the smelly jangle of oil refineries and the junkyards that were bound to terrify. When he wasn’t appearing somewhere or trying to sell someone on something, he was
attending to the egos of fragile politicians—like a scene in
E-R
, there in rumpled suit and tie attending to an always full waiting room of easily bruised and insecure egos. A state senator was pushing a candidate for the state supreme court. Could Ed maybe make a few calls for a fund-raiser? A congressman was running for reelection. Could Ed maybe make a few calls for a fund-raiser?

“When it comes to kissing political rear ends, I’m pretty good at it. I didn’t know that I would have to be a major fund-raiser for people.”

In the midst of the daily cacophony, he made the calls.

“
Has anybody hit you for Vince Fumo’s guy, Russ Nigro? If you can send me a thousand dollars for him
 …”

“
You may hate him, and I don’t think you do, but I need a thousand dollars for Lu Blackwell for Congress.
”

He considered the calls demeaning and a waste of valuable time, not because people wouldn’t cough up what he asked of them (“It’s scary how no one says no,” Rendell himself remarked) but because there was so much else to do. But if he didn’t make the calls, he knew what might happen—projects and votes that he needed backing on suddenly disappearing into a stew of funk and hurt feelings, particularly since local politicians never, ever forgot. With each day crucial, he could not take the risk. But he also knew he was lucky enough not to have to worry about the day-to-day management of the city.

“My advice, if anybody wants to be the mayor of a big city, is to get yourself a David Cohen. Because another David Cohen doesn’t exist, get yourself three people you can depend on to run the day-to-day affairs.… I love analyzing memos. That’s why I read and analyze them from midnight to two-thirty in the morning. Where do I have the time during the working day to turn off the phone and really think? It’s very hard. I really do envy David.”

“He envies me?” asked Cohen several days later, peering up momentarily from the pages of some dense and turgid memo that only David Cohen could love. “Good God.”

It was a typically self-effacing response, but it was deceptive. Cohen was affable to everyone, and he returned all phone calls personally and promptly whether it was a United States senator or to use the mayor’s own term of art, a “smack-ass.” But behind the exterior lay the soul of a bounty hunter. He reveled in his role as the clearinghouse of all information at City Hall. Nothing went on without him knowing about it first. And if someone tried to circumvent that, Cohen would discover the source. He or she could
run to the deepest crevice of the Grand Canyon, and there a hundred yards behind, in drab blue suit on a mule, would be Cohen with that cheerful smile on his face.