A Prayer for the City (62 page)

In Erie, where he had been a congressman for twelve years, a big economic-development project might require a public subsidy of a million dollars, not the hundreds of millions that were being sought here to build a new shipyard. Ridge had little direct experience in putting such deals together. He had basically run on a platform of deregulation and lowering taxes, and to some economists the Meyer Werft deal was a typical example of “smokestack chasing,” in which the public subsidy of heavy industry would never be offset by the return. It was also unrealistic to think that Ridge and his staff, within weeks of moving into the state capital, would embrace such a project without questioning every single aspect of it. “[They] didn’t know where the bathrooms were, and they were being asked to do the biggest deal in the history of the state” was the way one observer put it. And they seemed overwhelmed by the sheer expense of the proposal and by the ratio of public money to private money that was being sought.

Rendell was not discouraged. He saw Ridge as solid and decent. He was
thoroughly convinced that the governor, once he got over the shock of how much money the state needed to invest, would embrace the Meyer Werft proposal as something irresistible and indispensable for the future of the city and the state—the creation of a whole new industry. But Bill Keller, working within the trenches of the state capital in Harrisburg, did not share Rendell’s faith.

Right from the beginning, he didn’t feel right about the state’s attitude. State deadlines for responding to Meyer Werft’s proposal were being missed, and all Keller kept hearing was that the amount being sought from the state was “too much money, too much money, too much money.” Instead of focusing on ways to get the project done and bridge the significant gaps that did exist, Ridge’s staff seemed far more preoccupied with the spin the governor was getting in the media.

“Don’t you understand there are three thousand people losing their jobs?” Keller said in desperation to David Fuscus, the governor’s deputy chief of staff for economic development.

“Well, we’re looking into it,” was the response.

At a meeting at the end of August 1995, Keller said Fuscus accused him of “ginning” up shipyard workers by getting them to send negative faxes to the governor.

“Don’t say we have to gin anyone up,” replied Keller.

But Fuscus apparently refused to leave it alone, as if he were testing Keller, almost goading him.

“I told you not to say that,” said Keller, and he took several steps toward Fuscus before others intervened.

Several days later it was relayed to Keller that the governor and his people were livid with him: a local television news crew had suddenly shown up to ask pointed questions about the status of the Meyer Werft proposal, and they were convinced it was Keller who had put the crew up to it. “If it’s you, and you continue to do this, you will seriously jeopardize this project” was the substance of the message that was relayed to Keller.

“Yeah, it was me,” said Keller, and he too had a message for the governor: “Tell him to kiss my fucking ass.”

Bill Keller knew there was potential harm in being so emotional, but he had grown up in the shadow of the yard, and his whole life had been informed by the availability of work on the waterfront. In the summer of 1968, when he was still in high school, he got up early each morning and stood under the foot of the Walt Whitman Bridge to see whether he could help unload the ships carrying cocoa beans and other imported products.
The boss would hire the union men first, then the kids like him, known as clean heads because they had yet to experience the joy of the dirt that fell from the pallets of cargo. The job paid well, and Keller eventually became a full-fledged member of Local 1291 of the International Longshoremen’s Association. There were roughly two thousand men in the local when he joined. In the fall of 1995, there were about four hundred, and it wasn’t just the sixteen- and seventeen-year-old kids on the corner with nothing to do that got to him but the way they mingled with twenty-two- and twenty-three-year-olds who had nothing to do either. He also knew what it was like to lose a job, to somehow struggle with the horrible doubt that you might not be able to provide for your family anymore.

He thought that if he could somehow convey these feelings and images to the thirty-something members of the governor’s staff, most of whom had spent their adult lives in the rarefied air of the nation’s capital rubbing shoulders with other thirty-somethings, he could make them understand why the Meyer Werft project was so crucial.

“Did you ever lose a job?” Keller at one point said he asked Fuscus. “Do you know what it’s like? There’s a feeling in the pit of your stomach.”

Fuscus barely responded, and the creeping fear that Keller had felt about the project from the very beginning only intensified. “You can’t even say [the governor and his staff] were ignoring these people or casting them away,” he said. “They don’t see them.”

After a long summer of frustration, there were finally some indications of hope.

On September 7, Ridge met with labor leaders and said he would personally get involved in the deal and try to make it happen. It was a positive sign, and many of those who were at the meeting walked out feeling buoyant for the first time.

Four days later the waiting was over. The state issued its written response to Meyer Werft’s proposal, and no one could have possibly predicted the substance of it.

The money the state was offering, $45 million, was roughly half what the company had originally sought. That was disappointing perhaps, but not necessarily surprising, given that this was ostensibly the first round of negotiations in what everyone acknowledged was a large and complicated
economic-development project. What stunned everyone was the structure the state proposed: A basic fifty-fifty split in profits between the private and public partners as well as state representation on the board of directors of the local subsidiary that would run the new shipyard. The state also was asking Meyer Werft to put up an additional $40 million in equity and assume $229 million in debt and lines of credit. Accountants analyzing the state’s proposal determined that Meyer Werft’s internal rate of return would be 4.8 percent. By any business standard, that was unacceptably low.

Up until this moment, Rendell had been little more than a cheerleader for the project. He had sensed that Ridge, although outwardly cordial, considered him a future political threat. Rendell had absolutely no intention of challenging Ridge for reelection three years from then, but the dynamic put Rendell into the kind of absurd situation that only politics can generate: the more he leaned on Ridge to do the Meyer Werft deal because it would be great for the city, the more the governor might be inclined not to do it on the very basis that what would be great for the city would be great for Ed Rendell and therefore antithetical to his own political interests.

Ridge believed the offer made by the state was extremely generous under the circumstances. He felt Meyer Werft’s equity position was totally insufficient given the magnitude of the project. He was also disturbed that the shipbuilder had refused to commit any of its orders for new cruise ships to construction at the yard. But from his vantage point, the state’s proposal was not final. Instead, it was the opening offer in what he assumed would be negotiations between the state and the shipbuilder. He believed he had unequivocally communicated that to the head of Meyer Werft’s Philadelphia subsidiary, Michael Schwarz. But Schwarz, based on his conversations with state officials, had a completely different interpretation of the state’s proposal: there was virtually
no
room for negotiation.

Whatever the interpretation, communications between the state and Meyer Werft had totally broken down. It was also clear that Rendell could no longer sit by and hope that it would all somehow work itself out. Bernard Meyer’s already delicate position in Germany had been made even more precarious because of the state’s proposal—certification that he was foolishly risking millions of the company’s money and its revolutionary technology on something five thousand miles away, across the Atlantic, that wasn’t even wanted. On September 14, Meyer spoke with the mayor by phone, and he called the state’s offer ridiculous and insulting. He seemed poised at that moment to pull out. But Rendell talked him out of it.
He agreed with Meyer that the offer made by the state was an “insult,” and he promised to use his political artistry to rectify it and bring the warring parties back to the table.

The next day, September 15, the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard officially closed after 194 years of service to the country, and an estimated nineteen hundred workers walked out of the yard for the last time, with little fanfare.

The final rites at the yard, far from being nostalgic and tinged by bittersweet emotion, were lugubrious and almost robotic. Yard officials tried to portray the workers as heroic to the bitter end, dedicating themselves selflessly to the overhaul of the final ship, the aircraft carrier
Kennedy
, before it pushed back out to sea. But as far as Jim Mangan could tell, the aura of depression had sunk in to the point where everyone was pretty much going through the motions. The work got done, but it got done joylessly and without any particular sense of pride. An emotional flatness seemed to overarch everything, and Mangan himself did little more than deliver the interoffice mail, drive a forklift with welding equipment over to the ship, and play pinochle over in the 94 Building. If he welded, it was only to make a little overtime. The days got long, and Mangan found himself with plenty of time in which to pity himself, too much time, and he couldn’t wait for it to end, the uncertainty of losing a job in many ways worse than the finality of knowing it was over.

As in previous instances where some breathless pronouncement had been made about the yard’s future, Mangan fought any remote impulse to get excited about the Meyer Werft proposal. His basic rule of thumb hadn’t changed: the more politicians talked about the possibility of something happening, the more he became convinced of the very impossibility of it ever happening. But he also knew that the talk of Meyer Werft had flooded the yard. It raised hope and kept people going a little bit, giving them something to cling to in a time and at a moment that was unimaginably bleak, and Mangan himself hoped that his native pessimism was wrong. He had heard the stories as everyone had heard the stories, men with years of work at the yard, skilled artisans at the peak of their craft, now standing in front of sorting machines over at the post office so they could at least get their twenty-five years in and make their federal pension, doing jobs that, as Mangan ruefully put it, “chimpanzees could do.”

“The American dream got yanked from them,” he said. “They had eighteen to twenty years in a job that no longer exists for them.” If he could help it, and he didn’t think he could, he wouldn’t work at the post office or
drive a tractor trailer into the hellhole of New York or get a real estate license or, God forbid, go into sales. He may not have loved welding, but it was something he had labored over and learned, a craft and not a rote reaction. He had performed it well enough to build ships, and out there on the sheen of the ocean was palpable proof of the work he had done. To acknowledge the obsolescence of that skill may have been the most painful cut of all, the thing that hurt the most. And if by some miracle the Meyer Werft deal came together, if the geopolitical forces of the mayor and two governors and the president of the United States and the labor secretary and the European Union somehow reconciled their differences, he knew what he would do, as any man or woman would do who had spent a lifetime perfecting a certain craft: he would jump at the chance to continue.

Shortly before the yard closed, Mangan and his fellow workers lined up at one of the piers and walked into a building of makeshift corrugated metal to get their exit papers. Mangan got a package about his pension and how to continue his life insurance, and then he got something else. It was a little plaque with a circular emblem engraved with the words
PHILADELPHIA NAVAL SHIPYARD
and the illustration of a ship. Underneath was a smaller engraving that said
MAINSTAY OF THE FLEET
1801–1995.

Given the future that was facing him, it was just one more personal effect to throw into a clear plastic bag and carry out of the yard, not a memento at all, but a tombstone.

On the morning of the final day, Mangan got to work at 7:30
A.M.
He and his fellow workers milled about, trading phone numbers, half heartedly promising to stay in touch. The
Kennedy
had already sailed out, and three hours later, with nothing left to do, he went home to Haworth Street for good.

In the succeeding days, he tried to find relief in the six-month cushion that severance and unemployment provided. As he perused the want ads and began to pay for his health care because he didn’t have a job that took care of it anymore, he began to joke that maybe the best thing to do was get on the interstate near his house and drive in the wrong direction so his family could collect on the $200,000 of life insurance that he still had in force.

“That thought has entered my mind in my more morose moments—‘Jesus Christ, what am I going to do for the six kids?’ At least I could give them that before they take that away from me.” But then he thought better of it.

“With my luck, I’d probably survive. I would survive the collision and
be a cripple the rest of my life and be more of a burden to my family than I already am.”

By the early afternoon of September 15, the rumors were rife that the Meyer Werft deal was dead. Relations between the state and the shipbuilder had totally deteriorated, with both sides privately sniping at each other in letters. But so far at least, there had been no public pronouncement from anyone, and Rendell desperately wanted to keep it that way. He believed that the deal could still be resurrected, but he also knew that any official statement about the obvious differences that did exist would only make it that much harder. Meyer Werft kept quiet. So did the city. An almost providential break came when it was discovered that Henry Holcomb, the reporter for the
Inquirer
who had intensively covered the story, was out of town attending to his ailing mother. Bit by bit, as the afternoon wore on, there was a feeling shared by Rendell and Cohen that if they could get through the day without any public comment that the deal was in tatters, they could then quietly go about the business of patching it up. Two
P.M.
became 3:00
P.M.
became 4:00
P.M.
There were sighs of relief, even amazement that a situation so volatile had been kept quiet.