A Prayer for the City (16 page)

Had those foreign visitors been standing on the loading dock of Sovereign Oil, watching those little caps float in the rainwater like drowning bugs, what would they have thought of America and the once great city that had embodied it now?

There was a bitter irony about a city’s being forced to pay even a cent for the cleanup of an industrial site that far from providing a decent wage for a single resident had only created havoc. Rendell knew that the fundamental
issue underlying the future of the city, his city now, was jobs—how to hold on to the ones that were still there, how to create new ones. Even in his short span in office, a mere four months, he had become remarkably effective at pumping hope into the veins of the citizenry. And more than just hope, there had been progress, the likes of which had not been seen in nearly forty years.

As it turned out, the five-year plan for the restoration of the city’s financial health that Cohen and White and others had worked so hard over had not been for naught. After an exhaustive review, in which every assertion had been challenged and reviewed and then challenged again, it was approved by the persnickety faces of the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority. Toward the end of May, $475 million in bonds was issued on behalf of the city, and a major rating agency actually increased the city’s credit rating, placing it at a level reserved for speculative investments instead of at one reserved for investments that are in imminent risk of default.
PHILADELPHIA IS NEARING SOLVENCY
said the headline in
The New York Times
, and Randall M. Miller, a professor of history at St. Joseph’s University, called the city’s turnaround “downright startling.” But the need was still voracious.

Sovereign might have been the worst of the city’s abandoned sites, but it wasn’t the only one. There were thousands of vacant sites, and outside the womb of Center City they were as easy to find as crack vials or cigarette butts. Rendell also knew that the effects of vacant lots and vacant factories could be more than simply dispiriting. In certain working-class neighborhoods—the ones that had gained the most from the city’s manufacturing legacy and had lost the most in its decline—a single isolated act in the heat of Rendell’s first summer as mayor could turn into something combustible. And deadly. And irreversible.

I
t was a summer night in July 1992, one of those nights so thick with heat it was hard to breathe, as the mayor made his way to a grimy gymnasium in a neighborhood as far away from the nerve of City Hall as a crumbling fort in the ruins. The route he took, beginning at a boxy hotel on the straight edges of suburbia, was transformed into a painful communion of what was no longer there and what had somehow managed to survive—red zigzags of graffiti on a boarded-up doorway underneath a stone inscription commemorating the St. Joseph’s Home for Orphaned Boys; the bruised red brick of the stillborn Penn Ventilator Company rising to nowhere in the stench of the heat; tidy lines of trash underneath a bridge at Allegheny, as if someone had taken the time to arrange them. And then into the shut-off, shut-out neighborhood known as Kensington, at Allegheny and F, where
women in tank tops stared from the narrow doorways of the brick row houses and kids with hair as slick as seal coats sucked down cigarettes. They briefly looked up when the mayor’s car came down the street. They saw Rendell through the dull sheen of the window, and they gestured to one another almost in a special sign language indigenous to the neighborhood, and they pointed in the direction of his car. They didn’t wave and they didn’t smile, but they looked almost bemused, as if a fat possum had just been sighted sniffing for food.

The mayor’s coming to Kensington because someone got killed. He’s going to preach peace and harmony, tell us how we have to get along with the spics who are taking over goddamn everything, just like they told us we had to get along with the niggers.

Big fucking deal, Mr. Mayor. Big fucking deal.

Robbie Burns worked part-time at a pharmacy in Kensington. He had recently gotten his degree in radiation technology and was now planning to take graduate courses. At six feet five inches, he was taller than the others who hung out at the corner of Rorer and Westmoreland on Saturday nights, and that may have given him an aura of toughness. But to those who knew him, that wasn’t at all a distinguishing characteristic of Robbie Burns. He stood out not because of his size but because, unlike so many others, he was planning a career and saw hanging out on the corner as a way of passing time, not a way of life. As a friend of his put it, “He was the only one who made it out of here.”

Sometimes the whites who hung out at Rorer and Westmoreland just hung out. Other times they drank more than they should have from their open containers. Occasionally they engaged with the Latinos who came upon the corner and were equally ready to rumble. The conflicts between the two groups had to do with the unwritten laws of the playground and the territory of the street corner, who had the right to be there and who did not. But the root of it lay in the joblessness and hopelessness of a city neighborhood that now engaged in the endless no-win contest of who the hell to blame it all on, working-class whites pitted against Hispanics, Hispanics pitted against working-class whites in a game of who had more of a right to nothing.

It was somewhere around 4:00
A.M.
when a brown car, maybe a Chevy,
maybe a Buick, appeared near the corner of Rorer and Westmoreland. Two Hispanics exited from the car and engaged in a fight with various whites who were hanging on the corner. There were also indications that one or both of the Latinos may have been struck in the head with bottles. They got back into their car, but they weren’t finished, and once Robbie Burns realized what was happening, once he saw the outline of the gun in the lowered window, he pushed a younger friend out of the way to avoid the line of fire.

The police radio call about the shooting went out at 4:00
A.M.
, the scratchy syncopation of the words sounding like a thin cover of tin on a boiling cauldron, revealing everything and nothing at the same time.

“Man with a gun, shooting, hospital case.”

The first patrol car arrived at the corner of Rorer and Westmoreland at 4:04
A.M.
, four minutes from radio call to arrival, and it is there the officers found Robbie Burns, his frame sprawled on the sidewalk, a single bullet buried in the right side of his head. Burns was rushed by a rescue squad to Temple Hospital, and doctors well versed in the mortality of blood and bullets worked feverishly on him, but their efforts didn’t matter because Robbie Burns was dying.

Within the neighborhood of Rorer and Westmoreland, pandemonium and hysteria erupted. Shortly after the shooting, officers at a nearby hospital observed two Hispanic males entering the emergency room for treatment of head wounds. Witnesses in the Burns shooting were immediately transported to the hospital, where they identified the men as the ones involved. They also identified a vehicle in the hospital parking lot as the getaway car. But it actually belonged to a nurse on duty at the hospital that night. And the suspects they fingered with such quickness were quickly able to prove to detectives that they had nothing to do with the shooting. It seemed clear they had been fingered merely because they were Latinos, and the police had no choice but to release them.

At 8:25
A.M.
that Sunday, Robbie Burns was pronounced dead.

News of his cold-blooded killing moved quickly across the tight webs of Kensington. So did news of the release of the two Latinos, but without the police justification for their release. A crowd of about fifty people gathered at the corner of Rorer and Westmoreland on Sunday morning in protest. They were peaceful and dispersed after about an hour. At about 2:30
P.M.
, another crowd gathered, this one loud and unruly. The demonstrators started marching, and before police had time to seal off the area effectively,
a blue Mazda moved westbound on Allegheny in their direction. The driver was a twenty-four-year-old Hispanic named Michael Rosato, and with him were his wife and six-year-old son. He could have turned around when he saw the crowd, but he did not, and so set himself on a direct collision course with the demonstrators. His car was engulfed. His windshield was smashed. Shots erupted from inside the car. One man was hit in the left thigh, another in the stomach, another in the buttocks. Rosato sped off with police in pursuit. When he was stopped, the officers found a .38-caliber silver revolver underneath the seat.

In less then twenty-four hours, four whites had now been shot in Kensington, one of them fatally. Wild rumors sped everywhere; building in intensity were the accusations that the police had actually had in custody but let go the two suspects in the Robbie Burns shooting. The demonstrators, unsteady and unpredictable on account of youth and drink, refused to disperse. “If they love Puerto Rico, send them back to Puerto Rico. I’m tired of our boys lying on the street,” someone said. Desperate to get the crowd to go home, a contingent of five police officers went to Robbie Burns’s home and asked relatives to come and speak to the crowd.

“Robbie don’t want this,” said Burns’s stepfather. “Please go home. I beg you, go home.”

His words calmed the crowd to some degree, but they also wanted the mayor. Through an intermediary, Rendell agreed to meet with the community the following night, giving him twenty-four hours to defuse the feelings of anger and alienation and disfranchisement that had been building in Kensington over weeks and months and years, allowing him time to negotiate the narrow racial tightrope strung between working-class white and Hispanic and to appeal to all, to try to convince them that they all live under the roof of one city, despite the almost inevitable result that at least one side would feel betrayal and outrage.

Even without the shootings, this was an area of the city that had been tired and turned off by the endless parade of politicians whose promises were never kept. With the shootings, the odds of reaching any kind of common ground with the white working-class residents seemed impossible. At best, they would not listen. At worst, they would mercilessly heckle him and boo him off the stage while the entire city press corps licked its fingers. And in the meantime, during the twenty-four hour reprieve that he had been given, there might be more killings, more vigilante justice at the point of a gun. He needed a miracle, something that would reduce the heat and divert attention.

Ed Rendell was not a particularly religious man. He was Jewish only in the most nominal sense, and he looked forward to various Jewish holidays not because of their religious significance but because they meant he had a valid excuse to stay home. In his office one spring, he voiced his own version of the Four Questions of the Passover seder by asking, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” and then answering with a refrain of “the NCAA finals.”

But he still knew better than anyone else the powers of divine intervention.

In the city that Lincoln Steffens had also called “the most American of our greater cities,” no area embodied the tradition of industry and the white working class better than Kensington, with row house and church steeple and narrow street and the El and the spew of factory smokestacks all within its boundaries. The first American textile mill opened in Kensington. So did the country’s first building and loan association. Around 1900, close to 100,000 people filled its row-house corridors, an assemblage of Irish, English, Scottish, and German immigrants pocketed in a neighborhood two miles northeast of the grand spire of City Hall, and the estimated worth of its manufactured products was said to be $100 million annually. “A City Within a City,” touted one local booster, “filled to the brim with enterprise, dotted with factories so numerous that the rising smoke obscures the sky.… A happy and contented people, enjoying a land of plenty.”