A Prayer for the City (65 page)

These and all the other ships that had been spawned by strong and steady hands from year to year and decade to decade and century to century in the first American city had become a roll call of the dead.

April 1997

D
avid Cohen’s office was as empty and eerie as it had been five years earlier on that Sunday morning in January 1992 when he had started out in gray jeans and a plaid work shirt with so little to rely on besides faith in himself and the man who was about to become mayor.

The picture of Judge Lord was gone. So were the life-size pictures of his children. So was the little box with the calculator inside and the inscription on the front that read
BILLING KING
. Other mementos that he had amassed during the reign had been removed as well: the letter of thanks from Clinton, the framed reprints of the glowing articles in the
Inquirer
and
Daily News
and
Philadelphia Magazine
that snaked up the length of a wall like mounted trophies.

An opportunity had come, and he figured that if he didn’t seize it now,
he would not get another chance for ten or fifteen years. So it was sometime in the fall of 1996 that he had gone to Rendell to discuss something that didn’t seem possible given how inseparable they had become. But it was time to leave.

The chairman at Cohen’s former law firm, Ballard Spahr, was planning to retire at the end of 1997 and Cohen was being seriously wooed as a successor to the position. Rendell, like everyone else, believed that Cohen would never leave his post as chief of staff. “It’s going to be harder for David to walk away from this than me,” he had said at one point. Of course Cohen ruminated about his job from time to time, and of course he expressed requisite remorse over his children growing up without him, but he still worked with singular fixation. If Cohen did leave, Rendell figured it would be to go off and run a major corporation somewhere, make the millions upon millions that he could no doubt make. But Cohen himself had always said that he would one day return to the practice of law. When he talked about his children now, pointing out that Benjamin would be fifteen and Josh eleven if he stayed until the end of Rendell’s second term in the year 2000, there was a genuine sense that he could not afford to miss any more of their lives. Becoming chairman of the city’s best law firm was a major undertaking, but it was nothing compared to what greeted him each morning as chief of staff.

Rendell did not try to dissuade him from leaving, because he knew he had no standing. Between the mayoral campaign days of 1990 and 1991 and his service to the city once the administration had started, Cohen had dedicated more than seven years of his life to Rendell on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis. If he decided that it was his destiny to return to the practice of law, he would have the mayor’s blessing, regardless of how hard it would be and the void that would be created. In describing their relationship, Rendell said there were times that Cohen felt like his younger brother. There were also times Cohen had emerged as a father figure because of the way he sometimes scolded the mayor for so rarely considering the concept of discretion, much less employing it even when he did consider it. But regardless of the situation, Rendell thought of Cohen in a way that he so rarely felt with anyone else, a connection that went beyond companionship as just another pile of junk food to be eaten and forgotten. “At all times,” said the mayor, “he is my friend.”

Cohen’s last day in the service of the city was April 4, 1997, and by the standards with which he had started one thousand nine hundred and fifteen days earlier, the time went by quietly. There had been a huge good-bye
party the previous night at the Palestra gymnasium on the Penn campus, so the number of well-wishers on this last day was little more than a handful. He stood at his desk cleaning out the last remaining items: bar association cards, the round little buttons that the Secret Service had issued for the various visits of the president and vice president so those who hovered around would be recognized as sanctioned sycophants and wouldn’t be ousted, an old manual for a portable phone that he didn’t own anymore. As he rummaged with his usual meticulousness, he talked aloud about some of the high points that he had been through: the night of the Number when the computer had spit out a budget deficit of $1.246 billion and F. John White had said “holy shit” because there wasn’t anything else to say; the night Rendell had announced his five-year plan for the economic resurrection of the city out of near-bankruptcy; positive fund balances in the city budget for five consecutive years.

His greatest regret, he said, was the contentiousness of the labor negotiations, an indication of the degree to which Cohen loathed confrontation despite the fact that it had been the administration’s finest hour. As for the failed dream of a new shipyard that would have been built by the German company Meyer Werft, he largely waved any memory of it away with his hands, as if the only way to deal with it was just to minimize it. Regardless of his gesture, the tragedy of that failure had been incalculable. And yet the city had gone on with gritty and admirable resilience, and so had those who lived within it.

The boundaries of the suburbs didn’t seem to entice Mike McGovern very much any more and he had undertaken his new profession as defense attorney with the same zeal that had marked his life in the district attorney’s office. After the partnership with the two former prosecutors had dissolved, McGovern had gone to work for the firm of Monteverde, McAlee, Fitzpatrick, Tanker & Hurd. In December 1996, he represented Edward A. Greene, one of four former Philadelphia police officers charged with shaking down patrons at an illegal cockfight and robbing them of nearly $30,000. The case was highly publicized, and when it was over, all four had been acquitted. The feeling afterward was so very different from what McGovern had been used to as an assistant district attorney, but it was every bit as sweet, and in that moment, he knew he had made the moral leap from prosecutor to criminal lawyer.

His wife, Mary Pat, would be getting her teaching degree from Temple University in January 1998, and given her own personal experience with
the Philadelphia school system as a parent, it seemed to be the last place on earth where she would want to work once she got her certification. But on the basis of some classroom work she had done at a local school and the students and teachers she had met there, she was now considering it.

The McGoverns’ oldest daughter, Bridget, had also been imbued with the fever of the city, even if it happened to be a different city. A brilliant student, she had decided to attend New York University in the fall. She wanted to be a writer, and she could think of no better place to pursue the craft than in the realities of Washington Square and Greenwich Village. Her father could think of no worse place for an eighteen-year-old to be than in the realities of Washington Square and Greenwich Village. But he was terribly proud of her, and she had received $25,000 in scholarships.

Jim Mangan’s road after the closing of the navy yard had not been seamless. Around Thanksgiving of 1995, he went to work as a welder for a company called DeVal. He was there only about two months before he was laid off again. He handled it with typical stoicism, the price of working-class life in the city, but the layoff also convinced him that the craft of welding, despite the fifteen years he had put into it, had no future use. Utilizing retraining money made available to workers who had been at the yard, he went to school and got his commercial driver’s license. He was hired in July 1996 by a moving company called Ware’s. The work wasn’t easy, subject to the vagaries of when people wanted to move—holidays, the high heat of the summer. The base pay of twelve dollars an hour was substantially less than the sixteen dollars and fifty cents that he had made at the yard. But with opportunities for overtime during the summer, and a willingness to work sixteen and seventeen hour days, he was able to make what he described as a “livable wage.” Money at times was “tight as hell,” but he was supporting his family. He was providing as he always had.

Fifi Mazzccua continued as always, undaunted, unflappable, somehow able to cope. In March 1996, one of the great-grands, Kalih, was hit by a car when he rushed across Germantown Avenue without looking. He went into a coma and was in St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children for a week. He came out with double vision, and then his behavior at home deteriorated to the point where Fifi, with great sorrow and reluctance, had no choice but to have him placed in a residential school. Fifi called him every day and visited him every week, but they missed each other madly. “I love it, grandma,” Kalih, now seven, told her of the school, “but I want to come home.” He returned on Easter Sunday in 1997, and when he arrived at the house on Huntingdon Street, he walked up the stairway to the second floor
and kissed his door and his dresser as if he had just found Mecca. His hair hadn’t been trimmed for two months so the family got him a haircut. He played with his friends with joyous abandon and ripped his shirt. When the eight hours were up and it was time for him to return to school, Fifi burst into tears and could not bear to make the trip back with him.

Her church, Cookman United, was beset by a series of arson fires in 1996, and there were financial problems that threatened closure. But the congregation fought back and the church righted itself. In her own neighborhood the drug trade had slackened, and hard as it was with Kalih, she knew she was doing the right thing. “Today is Monday,” said Fifi as she puttered about the apartment where she worked, laughing and making mirth as if it were already Christmas. “The sun is shining. God is in her heaven. The kids are all right. I feel good enough to come home and drink a cold beer.”

As Fifi pushed forward, so did the mayor. He did not stumble over the ashes of Meyer Werft in those waning days of the first term, but reached out yet again, in total secret, in the beginning of 1996. Cohen was sent to Miami for a meeting with Bernard Meyer that was never revealed to the media for fear, as one internal document put it, “that if any of this became public everyone could look crazy.” The mayor didn’t want the city to be rebuffed again publicly, so instead it happened in private.

But neither he, nor Governor Ridge, gave up pursuit. Another international shipbuilder, Kvaerner ASA, expressed serious interest in the navy yard. By April of 1997, a deal was being methodically negotiated that would create one thousand jobs at the yard and guarantee the construction of three container ships. The governor clearly recognized the importance of such jobs to the city. But in also trying to overcome memories of his ineptitude with Meyer Werft, he now seemed willing to give everything away. Even though the Kvaerner proposal offered a thousand jobs less than the Meyer Werft proposal, the state was contemplating offering the Norwegian shipbuilder a grant of around $180 million—or four times more than what had been originally offered to Meyer Werft. In effect, Ridge’s bungling of Meyer Werft not only cost him politically; it also potentially could cost taxpayers millions upon millions of dollars. Kvaerner was a quality shipbuilder, and its presence at the yard would be an inspiration for the city. But Meyer Werft would have provided a similar uplift at far less a taxpayer price.

As Rendell crossed his fingers for the revival of shipbuilding, he also seized on the concept of the city as tourist destination and audience pool and suburban diversion with greater tenacity than ever.

A new luxury hotel was slated to be built across the street from City Hall. Several blocks down on Market Street, the old PSFS building, heralded as the country’s first modern-style skyscraper when it was built in 1932, was becoming a 600-room Loews Hotel. Several other hotel deals were in the works, which would give the city an additional 2,300 hotel rooms if they came to closure. A Hard Rock Cafe was coming, and so perhaps was a Planet Hollywood. In addition, a formal agreement for a $130-million entertainment center on the waterfront was about to be entered into as well. The developer, the Simon DeBartolo Group, Inc., the nation’s largest publicly held real estate developer, had as its pièce de résistance the $600-million Mall of America in suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul, and it clearly had seized on the American city as the next frontier for a similarly self-contained and climate-controlled experience. The project in Philadelphia called for an array of features: a 24-to-30-screen “megaplex” movie theater, a virtual reality game world, an entertainment extravaganza called the American Experience (in apparent answer to the boring stasis of Independence Hall, which didn’t offer anything interactive or cyberspaced besides the authenticity of its history). In the economic development business, such projects were becoming the newest rage for cities and had an actual label. They were called Urban Entertainment Centers, and the implication was obvious that cities themselves, solely on the basis of providing the intoxicating and spontaneous clash of different sights and sounds and textures, were clearly not entertaining enough anymore, at least for those with disposable dollars to spend. Instead, if a city wanted to be an Urban Entertainment Center, it would have to find a developer to build one.