A Prayer for the City

Acclaim for

Buzz Bissinger’s

A Prayer for the City

Buzz Bissinger

A Prayer for the City

Buzz Bissinger spent five and half years writing this book, during which time he had exclusive access to Mayor Ed Rendell’s administration. From 1981 to 1988 he was a reporter at
The Philadelphia Inquirer
, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, and later he worked for the
Chicago Tribune
. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1985–86 and is a contributing editor to
Vanity Fair
. He is the author of the acclaimed bestseller
Friday Night Lights
.

Also by
Buzz Bissinger

Friday Night Lights

Author’s Note

This is a work of nonfiction. All the names used are real. There has been no melding of characters, nor has there been any rearrangement of the chronology to heighten drama or suit the convenience of the author. Much of what appears in these pages was personally observed. Scenes I was not present for were reconstructed on the basis of interviews with the actual participants, correspondence, memos, and other documentation. There has been no guesswork.

T
he seeds of this book came from many sources, but the first inspiration was a deep feeling of sorrow I did not know how to shake.

I was on my way to a newspaper assignment. I remember neither the precise route I took nor the particulars of what I was supposed to be covering, but I do remember what I saw that day in the city of Philadelphia: an assemblage of vacant houses and boarded-up windows and collapsed porches that seemed to stretch forever, one block bleeding into another without relief.

I knew little of urban policy and even less about urban planning. What I understood of the mechanics of cities came from books I admired—
Common Ground
by Anthony Lukas,
The Power Broker
by Robert Caro. The condition of what I saw was unimaginable, but I remember feeling overwhelmed by a sense of loss. Even amid the horror, delicate touches had somehow survived—an inscription over a doorway, molding around a window, a row of porches, a set of front steps.

Why had this happened?

This question kept returning, as did some other ones. Were these conditions somehow inevitable due to a process of progress and civilization in which older areas die so that new ones can grow? Or were they the result of something willful, a deliberate sacrifice? The delicate touches told me that whoever had built these blocks had not intended them for doom. Finally, there was the most nagging and difficult question of all:

Could anything be done?

The questions came and went until a May night in 1991. I was living in the Midwest, and fiddling with the radio, when I heard a scratchy report from a station in Philadelphia announcing that Edward G. Rendell had just won the Democratic nomination for mayor. I had known him when he had been the city’s district attorney, and I had covered his failed campaign for
mayor in 1987. When I heard of his victory, the questions that had been set aside percolated again.

I called David Cohen, Rendell’s campaign manager. I told him about my desire to write a book about urban America in a way that was wholly different, not exclusively a book of history or a book of policy, but a book of heart and humor and humanity rooted in the present. Then I dropped the question: Would Rendell, if he won election the following November, consider letting me be at his side not just for a year, but for the political equivalent of a season in sports—a full four-year term in office?

I met with Rendell several months later. I had not seen him in three years, and in literally the same breath as he said “hello,” he also said “yes.” If he did become mayor, he would give me access to anywhere I wanted to go in the administration.

He ultimately won the election in a landslide. I was there in January 1992 on the eve of his inauguration, and there I stayed for the next four years, observing events from this remarkable vantage point. Cohen, who served as the mayor’s chief of staff, opened his office to me. So, as promised, did the mayor. Aware of what happens when people learn that a journalist is in the room, how unvarnished truth turns into calculation, both men not only provided me with virtually unrestricted access but also went out of their way to make sure that my presence did not affect the agenda.

The mayor never once asked me what I was planning to write about, but he understood the major aims of my project—to create a vivid and unique portrait of a politician trying to save a city, and to create an equally vivid and unique portrait of the politics of self-interest that must be negotiated daily, almost hourly, to even attempt to act in the public interest. It didn’t take four years, but closer to four hours, to learn that Ed Rendell was a complicated man of many hues. But it also became clear from the very beginning that he represented the very essence of what a politician should be in this country but almost never is, a man unafraid to be human.

That humanity was made all the more remarkable by what he inherited on that first Monday in January 1992. The literal second he became mayor, he found himself at the helm of a city utterly on the brink, so many hundreds of millions of dollars in debt that it could not pay its own bills. Almost simultaneously, he entered into negotiations with the municipal unions the likes of which had never been seen in the modern history of the American city, and sought givebacks and concessions so enormous it seemed almost lunatic to publicly talk of them.

Intertwined was the crisis of unabated job and population loss, and the
crisis of public housing so nightmarish that even the president himself became aware of it, and the crisis of trying to create new jobs. For each and every day Rendell was mayor, he also had to grapple with the fate of the Navy Yard—the city’s most fabled employer, builder of 119 of America’s greatest ships over a span of nearly two centuries, and a place of spiritual presence in the psyche of the city. What eventually happened to the yard was something that no one, not even the mayor, could have possibly predicted.

As I did my research, I realized that this book, to attempt to be a full portrait of urban America, must extend beyond the walls of City Hall and the offices of the mayor and his chief of staff. As a result the book is interwoven with the lives of four different individuals who live in the city. I chose them because they provided vivid windows into the types of issues that affect city dwellers everywhere in the country—fear of crime, the plague of drugs, prohibitive taxes, loss of faith in the public schools, the disappearance of work through plant closure, the fissures of race. I also chose them because of their love for the place in which they lived.

This book is about one city in the United States. But it isn’t hyperbole to say that it could have been written about virtually any major city in North America. No two cities are alike—each has its own character and identity and spirit—but in all of them, the struggle for survival and finding a place in the changing landscape of the country goes on without relief. During my research, thousands of documents found their way into a black file cabinet, but none was more disturbing than a study showing poverty rates for children in our cities:
69 percent
in New Orleans,
58 percent
in Cleveland,
49 percent
in Washington,
45 percent
in New York,
43 percent
in Houston,
41 percent
in Baltimore,
40 percent
in Los Angeles,
38 percent
in Philadelphia.