A Prayer for the City (59 page)

Almost at the very second after the empowerment-zone awards were announced, Dwight Evans’s name slithered first into a whisper and then into silence altogether. And without Evans in the race, there would be no race regardless of who decided to run.

As far as Rendell was concerned, the truest measure of his rebound wasn’t in any poll but was in the cornucopia of Christmas gifts on the table in his office—canisters of Baileys liqueur, towering fruit baskets, pistachios in burlap sacks, Godiva chocolates, bottles of wine, custom-designed T-shirts. Rendell knew what these gifts were about. He called them “suck” gifts, and the way they spilled all over one another on the table was a better sign than any scientific poll.

“If I was wounded,” he said as he eyed the bounty, “there wouldn’t be this level.”

Visibly relieved, Rendell could sense the restoration of a political image that had been bruised not only by the possibility of a primary challenge but also by the 911 débâcle. In the difficult days following it, the White House chief of staff, Leon E. Panetta, had called and wondered if he might like to become the head of the Democratic National Committee. Rendell turned the offer down.

He still very much wanted to be mayor. He also knew that if he left in the middle of the term, council president Street would succeed him as mayor under the city charter. Despite his personal fondness and loyalty to Street, he realized this would be untenable. The city council president had changed, but in politics, change had no chance against perception. During focus group sessions with voters that the Rendell campaign had secretly conducted the previous August, the response to Street had been hair-raising.

“John Street is extremely unpopular among white voters,” the Hickman-Brown polling firm concluded. “Of all the personalities we discussed, no person generated so much hostility in the three groups of white voters as John Street.… The participants tried to outdo each other in saying critical things about him.” Street was described as a “pit bull,” “full of rage,” having a “big mouth, a big African rotten mouth,” “always screaming about something,” and those actually were the nicest things said about him. Their comments revealed a toxic combination of racism and the reputation of a man who seemed forever defined by whites for his histrionics and his outbursts, regardless of the fact that he had tempered such public conduct in recent years. Many of those in the focus groups acknowledged that Street and Rendell did have a good working relationship, and that Street
had done a good job of presiding over the city council. But they still loathed him, a political reality that wasn’t lost on the mayor.

“Can you imagine if I had resigned and appointed John Street as mayor?” he said the day after the empowerment zones were announced. “Can you imagine how unpopular I would be?”

As good a courtroom verbalist as he was, Mike McGovern could produce no argument to counter that of his wife, who was ready to leave for the suburbs as soon as he gave the go-ahead. When reasons to stay and reasons to go were put on paper, the result was like trying to represent a client who had videotaped a murder he committed and then sent the tape to the police with his name and address on a return envelope. The location of the McGoverns’ home in the city, in the farthest reaches of the northeast, a block away from the Bucks County line, made them a little bit like potential refugees, dissidents who knew that if things got really, really grim, they could walk to freedom. “Do I run for it?” he had asked once.

But there was something about the city that stirred in the blood of Mike McGovern, a lingering chemical. Much of it was based on his memory of Port Richmond when he was a child and a teenager and a young man—the kinetic energy and texture of it, the way everyone was forced to interact with everyone else, the way everyone learned when it was time to cheer together and when it was time to fight, the little things and the nuances you could learn nowhere else and stood by you as you got older. He could not say that Rendell had made it any easier for a middle-class family such as his to stay in the city, but he did think that the mayor had produced an enormous spiritual change. In 1992, six months after Rendell had taken office, McGovern thought the city was dying. He kept thinking about a song by Randy Newman about the death of a city, and he also thought about the movie
Avalon
, in which an immigrant family bit by bit loses its roots and its sense of place in a city that has changed and splintered.

But now he felt differently. He felt something about the city that he hadn’t felt in years. He felt pride. He did have loyalty to the city, and what drew him to the place were emotional values—the city’s heart, the city’s unique soul and character, the city’s humor and passion—values that could not be easily measured against lousy schools and spotty snow removal. He knew that his wife would leave tomorrow if given the chance, but he
couldn’t bring himself to do that. He didn’t want to be a commuter from Yardley or New Hope or Warrington. He didn’t want to run for cover in Bucks County. He had aspirations of becoming a judge someday, and because of that he needed to maintain a residence in the city. But this was not the only thing that compelled him to stay.

He wanted to be a Philadelphian, a city dweller, because it meant something special to him and gave him a certain identity that the suburbs could never supply regardless of all the presumed advantages. “I have always defined myself as a Port Richmond guy first and primarily a Philadelphian,” said McGovern one night as he was driving into Center City. “I don’t want to lose that, because I like being a Philadelphian. Once you leave Philadelphia, you lose your standing to care and complain about it.”

The elevated road curved into the sinew of the city. The sun was trickling down beneath the horizon, and the light fell on the buildings in such a way that they seemed both enormous and vulnerable, strong and delicate, not a place of alienation and remoteness but a place of power and possibility.

“Look at it!” said McGovern, still captured by something he had seen a thousand times before. “It’s just super!” The look on his face was a mixture of pride and wonderment. His soul could be found in the dappled light of those buildings, and it became clear that whatever reasons there were to leave, they would not matter. He was born a city dweller, and he would remain one.

The mugging at the train station in Chestnut Hill in broad daylight had been a breaking point, but in December 1994, at just about the same time the city was being awarded an empowerment zone, there was one final slap in the face for Linda and Jon Morrison. As Jon left the house to go to work, he found the Volvo station wagon parked outside on the street, right where it had been parked the night before, but with one variation: the car was up on bricks, and all four tires were gone. If nothing else, the thieves had been maniacally courteous, piling all the nuts in a neat pile, in case the Morrisons wanted to use them again.

In January of 1995, at about the time Rendell made his official announcement of his candidacy for reelection, the Morrisons bought a home in Newtown in Bucks County. It had aluminum siding and a two-car
garage and vinyl flooring. It had none of the amenities Linda had wanted in a home, none of the charm of the Queen Village colonial or the Chestnut Hill gingerbread. “This looks like a
Father Knows Best
kind of home,” she said as she sheepishly pulled out a real estate brochure about it. The day she looked at it, she breezed through in about ten minutes and felt no emotional attachment whatsoever. But Linda did not want emotional attachment anymore. She wanted only the freedom to feel safe and walk the dog at night and not look over her shoulder, the freedom not to shut her windows tight in ninety-degree heat, and the house in Newtown, regardless of its appearance, provided that assurance.

Originally she had felt angry about moving out of the city, convinced that she and her family were being driven away by a series of factors that could have been controlled. “I don’t think they believe in anything, really,” she had finally come to conclude of the Rendell administration. “They believe in efficiency, whatever that is.” She thought that the mayor, as well intended as he might have been, had never been a visionary, and she also thought that Cohen, suffering from the insulation of an office that had become his cage, had no idea of what it truly meant to live in the city and grapple with the problems that she and tens of thousands of others grappled with every day.

“David Cohen needs to be mugged,” said Linda.

But the closer the time came to move, the more the feelings of anger gave way to other emotions. At the beginning of June 1995, two weeks before the movers were to come, Linda took the commuter train from Chestnut Hill and returned to the old neighborhood of Queen Village to wander around one final time before leaving the city altogether.

In a horrible space of two years, between 1990 and 1992, Linda’s mother and two of her brothers had died of cancer. And staring out the window of the train now as it lurched its way through the desert of North Philadelphia on its way downtown, she experienced a similar sense of helpless loss. “It reminds me of that cancer eating away,” she said quietly, continuing to stare out the window into the deadness of the desert where nothing moved. “I feel sad in the same way.”

The train passed by Wister Station and entered an area of weeds and tree limbs as wild as uncut hair, and it reminded Linda of an ancient city she had once read about that had become extinct after a period of thriving. “The jungle overgrows it, both vegetative and living,” she said as she stared out the window. The train pulled into Wayne Junction, with its rub
of graffiti on the station walls, and then continued on past a tableau of boarded-up stone houses and empty factories.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” said Linda wistfully of the houses. And she was right. At a certain time and in a certain place, they had been beautiful, not symbols of despair at the end of the century but symbols of sturdiness at the beginning of it. “And these factories,” she said as she continued to stare out the window. “That’s what I think are the very saddest. They represented progress and productivity and the production of wealth. They were an asset instead of a liability.”

The train stopped again, and Linda got off and walked back to those streets and crevices where she and her husband and tiny baby had lived before they fled in the summer of 1992. She went back to the playground where she had taken her son, Ian, to play. She went back to the colonial on Queen Street where they had lived, and she pointed to the bedroom that had been her son’s. She pointed to the white marble steps that had been splattered with blood after the young woman had been stabbed. She went back to the sliver of Kauffman Street, where the Section 8 apartment complex was, and the sight of it again filled her with rage. “I hate them. I hate everyone who lives there,” she said.

All the horror came back, the constant din of chaos, but all the wonderful moments came back as well. She remembered how she and Jon, after work, would sit on the marble steps sipping from glasses of wine. She remembered how much she liked her neighbors and the sense of community she felt, a feeling of togetherness and of being a part of something. Her thirst for the city was unquenchable this day, every crevice taken in as if she had never laid eyes on any of it before, not a stagnant or a hopeless place at all but a place, even within the small circumference of where she walked, filled with variation. It seemed impossible that anyone with an affinity for cities such as Linda had could actually be leaving, just as it seemed impossible that anyone who had been through what she and her family had been through could stay. The ambivalence in her was abundant, and the more she wandered and remembered, the quieter she became.

“I am really grieving,” she said. “I feel like when my family died. I feel the same way.”

Eventually she got back on the commuter train. She went through the desert of North Philadelphia and back into Chestnut Hill, the oasis of city life that had turned out to be no oasis at all.

She and her husband closed on the
Father Knows
Best house in Newtown
in Bucks County in the middle of June 1995. Seven days later the movers came, and the Morrisons were gone.

Six months and seven days from that moment, on the very first day of 1996, Ed Rendell would finish the incredible journey of his four-year term as mayor. In the absence of some catastrophe, he would begin another term. He would stand with both hands placed firmly on the edges of the podium and give an inauguration speech, just as he had before. He would make promises and offer challenges, just as he had before. He would state his best of intentions, just as he had before.

Linda Morrison might listen to what he said on that day, or she might not, because other than as a matter of curiosity, it would have no bearing on her at all.

She wept when she left the perfect house on Benezet Street in Chestnut Hill, just as she had mourned three years earlier when she had said good-bye to Queen Village. But the feelings were different. When she left Queen Village and moved to the suburbs, she also knew that she would return to the city, give it one more chance.

In saying good-bye now, she knew that the chance had come and gone, and there would not, could not, be another one.