A Prayer for the City (60 page)

T
he mayor sat in his customary spot at the table in the Cabinet Room, surrounded by a clump of executives judiciously dressed in innocuous shades of blue and gray and beige. The executives seemed as mousy and non-threatening as their wardrobes, but the mayor knew exactly what was going on, how this was little more than a setup and how, once you cut through the obsequious slick of legalese and corporate-speak, he was basically being asked to lie.

The more he listened on this August day in 1995, the more his face turned ashen, and it wasn’t just the disingenuousness of what he was hearing that was troubling him. It was the realization that his city, and all cities like it that had once been the definition of American industrial might and strength, were on the verge of a certain kind of extinction.

A Prayer for the City The subject at hand in the Cabinet Room was a plant closure, and the number of jobs at stake was so small as to seem irrelevant: 240. But in the realm of the mayor and the city, where every job counted and was fought over, the loss was significant. Beyond the actual number, there were the deeper reverberations of the psychic loss. The jobs were at the Breyers Ice Cream factory. They were the jobs that had helped lay the foundation of the city, and Breyers, beyond being the maker of the country’s top-selling ice cream, was a hallowed name in the industrial arc of Philadelphia. It was here that Breyers was founded in 1866, when William A. Breyer used a hand-operated freezer to produce his ice cream and then sold the delicacy from a wagon. His “pledge of purity” caught on quickly, and in 1924 a then massive plant was built in West Philadelphia, adorned by a huge neon sign in distinctive script that could be seen from miles away on one of the city’s expressways, a stable beacon keeping an eye over the quilt of working-class row houses that spread beneath it. But Breyers, like so many other companies in the 1990s, was undergoing corporate restructuring. And although the explanation for such restructuring could be debated by economists from now until the end of the century—how to some degree corporate shedding is the natural reaction of capitalism when new jobs requiring new skills inevitably take the place of old ones—the set of victims seemed forever constant: the city and those who lived and worked within it.

In a six-minute meeting at the end of August, the company that now owned Breyers, Unilever, a multinational conglomerate, had told its workers that the plant was closing. Several days later Rendell met with representatives of Unilever and Breyers to see if anything could be done to keep the plant open. Given his innate optimism, he refused to believe that any situation was hopeless. But his hands were clasped together instead of conducting their concerto, and this wasn’t a gesture of prayer but more a gesture of weary acceptance. He offered to modernize the existing plant or help Unilever, with its more than $2 billion in assets, build a new one. “We think we can compete,” he said softly, sounding like a parent begging a school to give his problem child one more chance. “We think we can do a better bottom line. I don’t want to waste our time, but we think we can compete.” Loans, cheap land, tax benefits—they were all available just as long as Unilever did not close the Breyers plant. “It’s got a strong identification with the city of Philadelphia,” Rendell said, hoping that might count for something.

And then he sat there quietly as Jerry Phelan, a senior vice president for manufacturing, explained the rationale of Unilever in maintaining its competitive edge in the ice-cream business. “I hate to use the word, but we did computer modeling studies,” said Phelan somewhat sheepishly. Those models, which took every need into account except the human ones, made it clear that the only way to keep pace with the competition was through purchase and consolidation and plant closures. First it was at Good Humor, where the studies said that four plants, all of them in industrial cities, needed to be closed. Then it was at Gold Bond Ice Cream, where, as Phelan put it, they “took out” three of six plants, as if they were enemy machine-gun nests. Then it was through an investment at Klondike, where the computer studies said that two of the three existing plants had to go. Then Unilever purchased Breyers from Kraft, and the computer modeling studies said there were nine manufacturing plants, and that was too many, and there was an overcapacity problem, and some of these plants had to be taken out as well.

“We have a great workforce here,” said Phelan, trying to be complimentary but not realizing the tragedy of what he was saying. “It has nothing to do with labor. It has nothing to do with gas rates. It’s a question of capacity, where do we take it? It is really that simple.… We have a capacity issue that we have to address if we want to be competitive, and we want to be competitive.”

The computer modeling study gave Unilever a choice of plants to close—the one in Philadelphia or the one in the Boston suburb of Framingham. The Framingham plant was built in 1964, when the suburbanization of industry was exploding. It was all on one level, and its former owners had poured a significant amount of money into it in 1991. The Philadelphia plant was sixty-eight years old and awkwardly laid out in terms of the modern requirements of mass production—too many levels, too much useless square footage. Millions could be spent to modernize it, but other than pleasing the mayor and the workers who earned their livelihood there, what was the point? “If you do that,” said Phelan, sitting close to the mayor, on his left, “you still end up with a seventy-year plant.”

In the 1930s, the Breyers plant in Philadelphia was the largest and the most modern ice-cream manufacturing plant in the world, capable of producing seventy thousand gallons of ice cream a day and replete with its own laboratory and a staff of chemists to ensure the “pledge of purity.” Public tours were proudly conducted. But in the ceaseless wave of technology that made things bigger and better and faster than anyone had ever
dreamed was possible, with less labor than anyone had ever dreamed was possible, it was now obsolete. Even if its workers churned out oceans of ice cream twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, it could not compete. The plant, built in the density of a once-bustling city because that is where the workers were, was now an unwanted orphan. And the closing of the plant wasn’t some startling new trend but further evidence of an unrelenting one in which the number of workers employed in manufacturing nationwide had dropped from 33 percent of the workforce in the 1950s to 17 percent. In the 1960s alone, the number of blue-collar jobs lost in the country’s four largest cities—New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia—had been more than one million.

Rendell listened to Phelan’s recitation of plant closures and consolidations and computer modeling studies, his hand now pressed against his jaw. The more Phelan spoke in his tone of sheepish apology, as if the mayor should somehow feel sorry for the company and understand its predicament, the more the expression on the mayor’s face showed traces of exasperation. On countless occasions over the past four years, he had sat at his place at that table in the Cabinet Room and with charm and guile had convinced people not to make the decision they were about to make. Dozens of times he had turned what he didn’t want to hear into something that he did want to hear. In virtually every situation, he had found the filament of hope and seized upon it to the exclusion of everything else, as if pulling a family heirloom from a fire.

He listened to Phelan lay out the competitive rigors of the ice-cream business,
the ice-cream business
, and explain how the only way to respond to those rigors was to close one plant after another. He asked what it would cost for the city to build a brand-new state-of-the-art plant, and he didn’t blanch at the figure that was given, $60 million, until he heard what such an investment would yield: fifty jobs.

When it was his turn to speak, he initially looked as if he might burst. He grimaced slightly, as if neither Phelan nor the other nervous and pursed-lipped executives around him grasped the true impact of what had just been articulated. What he said wasn’t angry; it was mournful.

“Everything you laid out—it would make a textbook study in business school, but it is a horror story to hear for the future of our country. What is going to happen to our people between technology and competition and everything else? The older a city is—it’s harder for us to compete. What are we going to do for cities? I’ll be a two-term mayor, and I’ll get out before
the carnage really starts, but what’s going to happen to our country? What are cities going to do? Our cities are going to be horrible places.”

“I agree with you,” said Phelan. “The cities are in big trouble.” As a show of commiseration with the mayor, he noted that he was from New York, although, of course, he didn’t live in New York anymore but in that urban metropolis of Green Bay, Wisconsin. “We don’t like closing plants,” he continued, even though, by his own recital, Unilever had closed nine of them and was about to close a tenth. “We don’t like taking people from their jobs.”

But Rendell wasn’t particularly interested in Phelan’s expressions of guilt. As the meeting progressed, it became clear to him that the company’s major preoccupation was spin: it was hoping to convince the reporters waiting outside that what was occurring behind the closed doors with the mayor was a valiant, last-gasp effort to save the plant. Company representatives were clearly hoping to cast the meeting as some noble attempt to see whether anything could be done to avoid the closing.

But the mayor himself knew that was ridiculous. “We were dead in the water before you came down here,” he said. “There’s no way we can compete. Why are we talking in ifs?”

“You might have put an if on the table,” said a company lawyer whose beige suit fit much too snugly.

“How?” Rendell asked incredulously, noting that the plant would not have been saved even if the workers had worked for free.

“What do I say [to the reporters],” asked Rendell. “Do I go out there and lie? I don’t know what to say. If I was inclined to lie, I don’t know what to say.”

“Our willingness to meet with you was to see if there was a glimmer—” said the lawyer.

“There was never a glimmer,” answered the mayor.

“I think it would be fair to characterize it as an effort of the city and the company to do something about this,” said the company lawyer.

“That would not be fair,” answered the mayor. “I think you should not comment because everything you say would be a lie.”

So Rendell went outside to meet with the reporters. Refusing to lie, he characterized the meeting as fruitless because a decision to close the plant had been made before the meeting. And the four corporate representatives, like prison escapees, quietly snuck out a side entrance. They went back to their jobs, while the 240 workers at the Breyers plant learned for certain
that they were losing theirs. The mayor gave his impromptu press conference, then trudged the hundred feet back to his office. In the cocoon of privacy, his mood was still somber. He moved to the round table and peered at his schedule to see what was next, because there was always something next. But then he looked up, and the dispassion with which he suddenly spoke seemed far more frightening in its own way than any of his eruptions of the past four years.

“We have clearly stopped and delayed the death of the city of Philadelphia through relatively heroic measures. Will the disease kill this patient? Meetings like this make me feel if I was the most competent public official in the history of the United States and was here for the rest of my life, I don’t think I could save it.”

But like all the mayor’s moods, this feeling was momentary. In the wake of the closing of Breyers, with barely four months left before his term as mayor ended, came the opportunity of something magnificent not just for the city but for the entire country, something beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.

It all depended on what happened down at the yard.

Bernard Meyer was from a small seaport town in northern Germany, and initially at least he knew little about the machinations that had taken place in regard to the yard during the past four years. He wasn’t familiar with any of the workers who had earned a living there. But he did know that the navy was shutting the yard down in the middle of September of 1995, and he also knew that he had an idea for it that not only made sense but also reflected a faith in and a respect for the industrial heritage of the city that virtually no one in the city shared.