A Prayer for the City (31 page)

There were some in the city who saw her as savvy and visionary and admired the freshness and the provocative zeal of her ideas. Why was government in the business of building and subsidizing convention centers? Why was government in the business of giving money to people through welfare when all it seemed to do in so many cases was strip them of their incentive to work and encourage them to have children who they could not care for regardless of the honorableness of their intentions? Why was government in the transportation business or the public housing business or the health business or the school business when its track record in all these spheres had been one of abysmal failure? There were others who ultimately began to see Linda Morrison as a nut, a loose cannon who didn’t understand anything about the true role of government as provider and protector and employer and edifice builder and economic developer and necessary regulator. But Linda really didn’t care what others thought. Everywhere she looked when it came to government, she saw not simply the typical twin engines of bloat and waste but the perpetuation of a culture of dependence similar to a protection racket in which taxpayers are constantly being asked to subsidize an elite group of monopolistic institutions that are incompetent, above accountability, and have as their only successes employment and patronage mills for politicians. The open letter to Gorbachev in
The Wall Street Journal
referred to sanitation, the schools, and mass transit as Philadelphia’s “urban collective farms.” The letter argued
for the privatization of these three services, but far more important, it spoke about what these functions, and others like it, represented:

When Ed Rendell ran for mayor in 1991, despite his get-tough talk, she saw him as a typical liberal Democrat, which meant that she really didn’t see him at all. She spit out the term “liberal Democrat” so that it came out sounding vaguely like “liverwurst,” and as far as she was concerned, the contribution of liberal Democrats to the country was a legacy of more welfare, more public housing, more taxes, more economic-development boondoggles, more subsidized transportation, and more unworkable schools. Instead, she worked for a Republican candidate named Sam Katz in the mayoral race. A successful businessman, Katz did not win the nomination of his party, but he had innovative ideas about how to get the city on its feet again, and the position papers that Linda produced were a source of admiration in the Rendell campaign.

In the spring of 1992, just as the war of the unions was heating up, Linda wrote a letter to a member of the Rendell administration suggesting that the city use the privatization of union work as a tool for achieving significant savings in the budget and as leverage in negotiations with the unions. The contents of the letter found their way to David Cohen, who was impressed.

She started out in a volunteer capacity. Then she ultimately became the director of the city’s competitive contracting program, which put her in the maelstrom of the city’s efforts to begin the delicate and controversial process of contracting out work that had been the domain of the city’s unions. There was something refreshingly exuberant about her that contrasted with the hangdog caution that could be seen in the people she worked with. With her straw-colored hair and her vintage Midwestern
face, oval and ruddy as if it were still feeling the effects of a winter cold snap, she was utterly lacking in the dead-eyed look that most lifelong bureaucrats invariably acquire after a while. She spoke English, not bureaucratese. She laughed sometimes. She approached the whole issue of privatization with exuberance, even
excitement
. She also seemed to have been seized by something else, a sense of personal urgency that went beyond politics and personal philosophy. As she and the others sat around the table in David Cohen’s office, taking careful notes on what to privatize and what not to privatize, insulated by the loud scream of an air conditioner that shut out most other sounds, they were running out of time. Out there was the city, and while there were thousands who were trapped and had no choice, there were also thousands who did have a choice and weren’t feeling like citizens of the city at all, but like endangered species.

Linda did what she did out of love, love of the city.

Born in Peoria, where her father had worked for Caterpillar, she spent her growing-up years in a series of suburbs and towns and ended up going to high school in Clintonville, Wisconsin. Linda went through a diet of piano lessons and ballet lessons, but when she looked for places to actually enjoy such culture, there were none. Life in Clintonville, a town of five thousand so far north that it was even north of Green Bay, was particularly insufferable to her. She longed for the city, any city. She won a National Merit Letter of Commendation and could have had her pick of colleges around the country. But her parents wanted her close by, so as a compromise she chose the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee because it was situated in the state’s largest city. She left after a year and headed east to school, to study dance. A year later, in 1969, she headed for her version of the promised land—a crotchety apartment in the East Village five blocks east of the Fillmore East. She loved New York. The stimulation was greater than even she could have imagined—the Feast of San Gennaro, the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island at 2:00
A.M.
, the clubs that stayed open till dawn. She later moved to Forest Hills, Queens, and became an executive for a division of International Telephone and Telegraph involved in the export business.

After eight years, she returned to Milwaukee and went back to the University of Wisconsin to get a degree in business. She also opened a restaurant
near the campus. Her father had been a political curmudgeon to begin with, but it was through the running of the restaurant that Linda began to evolve a political philosophy of less being more. The regulations heaped on her by various government agencies, not to mention the taxes, made the difficult job of running a business almost impossible. She couldn’t help but think that government, instead of nurturing the notion of personal responsibility, had become an impediment to it. Instead of being praised for her initiative, she was being treated as a pariah, she thought. But if Milwaukee was the incubator for new ideas, she also hated every single minute of being back there, particularly since she had no sustaining interest in what she described as the troika of “beer, brats, and bowling.” In 1981, she received her degree, and two years later she headed back to New York and what she thought would this time be a place in the promised land for good.

Linda came to Philadelphia the way nearly everybody came to Philadelphia, because it was on the way to someplace else. She knew about the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, in large part because she had seen them once on some geeky trip with her class at Clintonville High. But as she and a friend who was settling there drove through the city on a summer day in 1983, making a meandering loop from Rittenhouse Square to South Philadelphia, feasting on cheese steaks and Italian ices, she was smitten by what she saw. People were sitting on steps, kids were playing in the street, neighborhoods were still intact and had not been savaged by the permanent scars of expressways providing easy access for the diaspora to the suburbs.

Hanging out the window of the car, Linda Morrison took in a city that still had scale and rhythms, a place that was charming not because it was trying to be cute and charming, like some mugging child actor, but because of its very lack of artifice and contrivance. New York was New York, electric, wonderful, intoxicating. But so much of New York was like living in the grouts of a water well, where one became thankful for the thinnest thread of space and fresh air. It had also become outrageously expensive. Philadelphia was a city with a sense of proportion and humanity and humility that New York would never have.

There were three books that Linda had largely depended on to figure out the mysteries of life. One was
Free to Choose
by Milton and Rose Friedman, another was
Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand, and the third was Jacobs’s
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
. Linda had always wondered whether there was some way of describing the unique draw and pulse of
the city, but she had never seen it successfully articulated until she read Jacobs’s book:

To Linda, who settled in a neighborhood of the city called Fairmount, about a dozen blocks north of City Hall, that was it, exactly it—a sidewalk ballet with new impromptu performances every hour, reawakening the senses with an unpredictability that became its very guarantee. In her own way, she became a one-person convention and visitors’ bureau for city life, extolling its virtues to anyone who would listen. She found a
New Yorker
cartoon showing a highway with a stream of cars passing under a sign marked
LEAVING THE CITY
and only one car passing under a sign marked
STAYING IN THE CITY
. Linda took the cartoon and jiggered it so the one lonely car was driving under a sign marked
LEAVING PHILADELPHIA
and the steady stream was passing under a sign marked
NO INTENTION OF LEAVING PHILADELPHIA
. It wasn’t accurate of course. The city, like most cities, had been steadily losing chunks of population by the hundreds of thousands since 1960. But she hung the cartoon right inside her front door, framing it with a mat as red as a fire engine so people couldn’t help but see it. “I had a thing about living in cities,” she later said. “I wasn’t born and bred here. I actively chose it because I actively liked it. It was a kind of defiant statement to have it hanging in my house.” She felt a similar surge of pride and commitment in 1987, when she left Fairmount after roughly four years and moved to a neighborhood south of City Hall called Queen Village.

“Great cities are not like towns, only larger,” Jacobs had written. “They
are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.”

Linda clung to that description, to that idea of the city being celebrated, and not endlessly condemned, for the very qualities that make it different from other physical places in American life. She later bracketed that section in a copy of the book that she gave to someone, to make sure that if he read nothing else, he would at least read that. She did not bracket the following paragraph, but it had just as much meaning:

In 1990, Linda and her husband of two years, Jon Morrison, learned something wholly new about city life: when someone is stabbed near an artery, the blood doesn’t flow evenly but spurts in syncopation to the beats of the heart.

They were in Queen Village when they discovered this fact, a “tidbit of urban wisdom” as Linda later called it. In 1990, the neighborhood was still going through a healthy period of growth. It was gentrified enough to appeal to a professional, two-income couple like the Morrisons but not gentrified enough to be just another “yuppie barracks,” in the words of Jon Morrison. There were dozens of restaurants within walking distance, from the sensory overload of the Italian Market to the eclecticism of South Street, the wonders of South Street Souvlaki, and a particularly good Italian restaurant at Ninth and Catharine called Longano, where under a glitter-pasted ceiling the owners addressed you by your last name and the waiters called you “hon” or “sweetheart.” If you liked to walk, and the Morrisons liked to walk, Queen Village was a wonderful, ever-changing maze with delicious surprises no matter how well you thought you knew it—street next to alcove next to alleyway without some conscious attempt to turn it into the Main Street of Disneyland, factory next to row house next
to candy store because that’s what made sense at the time. As far as they could tell, there was only one troubling aspect to it—three decrepit high-rise buildings that loomed in the sky like diseased redwoods, so completely out of scale and out of character in the neighborhood that it was hard to believe they had been put there as anything but some form of punishment and condemnation. They were part of a massive public housing project known as Southwark Plaza, and as far the Morrisons were concerned, they symbolized everything that was wrong not only with public housing but with government policy as it applied to the American city.