A Prayer for the City (49 page)

Cheryl, who was in the tenth grade at Frankford, reported a similar atmosphere. In ninth-grade biology, she said, everyone shared the homework and the tests, so “you didn’t learn nothing.” In algebra, she did not get a regular teacher until October, a not unusual feature of the chaos that marked the beginning of every school year. She didn’t think the school was particularly dangerous, but most of the bathrooms had been locked after a group of students set fire to a schoolbag that had been left behind and threw it in a toilet.

It just seemed to Mangan that his two oldest children were learning in high school what he had learned in grade school, and it puzzled and concerned him. “I got a chip on my shoulder,” he said. “I pay real estate taxes. That goes to the Philadelphia public schools, so let them educate my children.” He knew from his own experience how competitive the job market was, even if you had a specific skill. But his kids seemed to have no conception of it, and instead of seeing them taught the basics of reading and writing, he saw them filling their days with what he termed Mickey Mouse projects—assignments for Black History Month and assignments to write about your ancestors, and Mangan knew that his children could barely write at all. He thought about Catholic school for his children, but given what was happening at the yard, there was no way he could even dream of paying for it. The
Kennedy
had come in, and that would keep the place going for a while, would give workers who were scared out of their wits the opportunity to deny the inevitable or just put it off. His daughter Michelle might have received a totally inadequate education, but she was smart enough in the fall of 1993 to ask her father the questions that counted most: “What’s going to happen to these people when they close that place down? Where are all the jobs going to come from?”

“That’s the question of the hour” was the only answer he could give.

The politicians were telling him he really had nothing to worry about. Foglietta, Wofford, Andrews, Specter—congressmen and senators alike claimed that good times were ahead for the navy yard now that the
Kennedy
had come in. They were sure of it. They guaranteed it. They promised it with the cameras running and the reporters scribbling. But what was the risk of supplying such mushroom clouds of false hope and delusion anyway? After all, they weren’t the ones losing their jobs.

On the outside, Jim Mangan seemed remarkably calm and stoic, showing a true sense of courage on that humble and hearty red-brick block of Haworth. But on the inside, he felt something different. “I’m in turmoil. It just doesn’t leak out.”

T
he meeting of the committee established by the mayor to develop a new vision for the city and usher Philadelphia into the next century quite naturally began early, so Linda Morrison was at the platform of the train station a little before 7:00
A.M.
It was early in December 1993, and the slight chill of winter had just begun to set in.

She had made it to the station with a good five minutes to spare. The last-minute push of commuters up the narrow hill of Benezet Street hadn’t begun yet, and those who had already reached the station were inside the little waiting room. Linda was outside on the platform listening to her Walkman, and that was a wonderful development. In her days of shell shock after Queen Village, she never would have done that. She would have stayed in the waiting room and caught the train just before it left so as not to linger on the platform any longer than necessary. Like many who
had been victims of crime or witnesses to it, she wasn’t about to take any chances, however improbable the odds. She had been mugged before in the city, and she had heard the scream of the stabbing outside her bedroom window on what was supposed to have been a first night of euphoria in a new home. After several months as refugees in the suburbs, she and her family had come back to the city, and they had picked their spot carefully. They were living now in a neighborhood called Chestnut Hill, in the northwest corner of the city. It was known for its tranquillity and its insulation, a privileged neighborhood where parents could let their kids roam on bikes and not consider themselves negligent or overly permissive. She was more relaxed than she had been in over a year, and when she arrived on the platform before the train chugged its way around the curve from the Gravers Lane Station, she didn’t feel scared or apprehensive at all.

That isn’t to say Linda wasn’t agitated about something. When it came to the bureaucracy that she dealt with every day in her job, there was no inner peace. The initial burst of contracting out and other cost-cutting initiatives by the administration had been bold, but she worried about whether the momentum would be sustained now that the budget was in balance and the union negotiations were over.

In many ways, it seemed surprising, if not slightly comical, that she had ever been allowed to get anywhere near this committee to develop a new vision for the city, particularly when her first suggestion might be to get rid of City Hall altogether, its towering spine smack in the epicenter not only an impediment to the flow of traffic but also an unwanted monument to the almighty colossus of government. Although she commanded respect from various colleagues for her intellect, her dissatisfaction with even an improved status quo—the way she was always dashing off a memo to Cohen on why not try this and why not try that?—had never made her popular. Most managers in government, she had discovered in her job as the city’s competitive contracting coordinator, had little interest in doing what her job title suggested should be done—improve the delivery of city services by contracting out various functions that could be performed better and more cheaply by the private sector. City managers still judged themselves by the size of their budget and the size of their workforce: the bigger the budget and the more people working for them, the better the job they were doing. If they reduced their spending or contracted a particular function out, it was usually because someone above them, most likely Cohen, put the fear of God into them and told them to do it. As a result, the idea of
someone like Linda coming along and jauntily suggesting ways to cut their budget and their workforce did not make her subject to long embraces. Almost incredibly, she couldn’t tell who was more resistant to contracting out, the unions whose functions would be taken away or the city managers who would presumably now be able to offer the public a better level of service.

But Linda persevered, in many ways developing a program from scratch, what she referred to as Linda’s Handy-Dandy Checklist. When reporters came from out of town and pointed to Rendell as the next city messiah, contracting out was one of the miracles they cited. By the mayor’s own estimate, which he presented at the prestigious Wriston Lecture of the Manhattan Institute in New York City in November 1993, fifteen different functions had been privatized, and fifteen more were on the drawing board, for a total savings of close to $35 million a year. “Privatization has not proven nearly as hard to do as everyone expected,” said the mayor. “And it is more than just a money saver: in almost every case, we are delivering a better product to the citizens of Philadelphia.” With an endorsement such as that, it was hard to believe that Linda had anything to be concerned about. But still she worried.

Her presence on the strategic plan committee made her even more ambivalent. She knew her views on government were different from those of the people she worked with, and she wasn’t sure how her input could make even the slightest impact. But the chairman had urged her to take part, and then the mayor officially appointed her to it, writing her a letter in November emphatically stating the importance of the work she and the others would do in the coming months. “The city’s Strategic Plan will establish the City’s vision, develop action plans to make that vision a reality, and position the city for the year 2000,” wrote the mayor.

From the letter at least, it sounded like a heady assignment, and Linda seemed to be a bit intrigued by it. Perhaps she could urge her fellow committee members to come up with a vision for the city that truly was different and far-reaching, not the same warmed-over bromides. Why not inject competition into everything, if it improved the delivery of services? Why not dismantle such bureaucracies as the city’s public schools? Why not privatize them and make every teacher and every principal compete for his or her job—or at least offer vouchers? Why not markedly lower the city’s wage tax and the business privilege tax and the net profits tax? The rote answer to these questions, she knew, was that it couldn’t be done because of money or because the dictates of politics simply wouldn’t allow it or because
the unions were too powerful or because she was naïve and pie-in-the-sky and out of her mind.

It was true that the city depended on its wage and business-related taxes for more than $1 billion in yearly revenue, just as it was true that those same taxes had made the cost of doing business in Philadelphia higher than the cost of doing business in any other city in the country and had driven thousands of jobs away. It was true that privatizing the schools was impossible given the alchemy of unions and politics, and it was true that vouchers were fraught with difficult ramifications, but it was also true that no single factor contributed more to the middle-class exodus and the poor languishing behind than the horrendous Philadelphia public school system. She still loved the city, but she and her husband, like thousands of others, were right on the edge, and many of those thousands, tired of bad schools and demoralizing tax rates and the fear of crime, had already left.

In fact, since 1990, despite the wonders of Rendell and his almost universal acclaim, the city had lost more residents than any other city in the country, and the mayor knew exactly what that meant: the cancer in the pores of the city was still very much there.

Since her house was close to the train station, Linda could leave at 6:45
A.M.
and still get there in plenty of time. She and her husband were renting a house just two blocks down the hill, on Benezet Street, and it hadn’t taken them long to fall in love with their new surroundings. With roots going back to the 1700s, Chestnut Hill was still a gem of a place, a village within the city that many considered the last oasis of civility and—most important of all for Linda and her husband, Jon—the last oasis of safety. With its effortless sprinkling of $750,000 homes along streets that were quiet and fat with trees, with its main thoroughfare of Germantown Avenue, where precious antique stores looked in disdain upon the nouveau riche arrivals of The Gap and Banana Republic, Chestnut Hill had a reputation among many in the city as entitled, spoiled, and irreversibly snotty. Anytime a new store or restaurant tried to open, there was an immediate hue and cry among certain Chestnut Hill residents who were sure that the place was finally going to hell for good, that the end of refinement and the onslaught of riffraff were upon them. But the result of such eternal vigilance was a place unique not only in the city but in all of America, suburban in feel but not too suburban to be rendered androgynous, physically set off not only by the hill but also by a deep gorge that ran along the western boundary, a moat donated by God.

The street the Morrisons lived on was named after Anthony Benezet. Concerned about the pernicious effects of slavery in the middle 1700s, Benezet had spent twenty years conducting classes for Negroes from his home and also started a school for girls in Philadelphia so they could learn Latin and Greek as well as needlework. The street itself was an architectural wonder, admired by planners the world over for all that a city street should be and so often was not. Even in the coziness of Chestnut Hill, there was something uniquely inviting about Benezet Street. The side the Morrisons lived on contained a block-long row of three-story twin houses that had been built in the early 1900s in a style that was part colonial revival and part English Jacobean and had come out looking slightly ginger-bready. On the other side were several long stone houses that had been split up into spacious and airy quadruplets. All the homes on the Morrisons’ side had marvelous wooden porches that gave the street a community feel that was rare and blessed, a throwback to the days when everybody in the city, unafraid of crime and one another, had sat outside after dark and talked. On one porch, there might be a candlelight dinner. On another, the slow tune of a rocker to the reading of a magazine. On another, the frolic of children.