A Prayer for the City Read Free

metal had gotten stuck in his throat.
    “I submit we have no choice here,” countered Rendell with equal indignation.
    Some in the room, like Senator Donald Riegle of Michigan, actually seemed to be moved by what Rendell had to say. It clearly hit a chord with the senator, which wasn’t surprising perhaps, given the misery of Detroit and the growing sense that at any time now it would become the first major American city to expire and go extinct. Unused sections of the city were so prevalent and considered so hopeless that one local politician would suggest putting a fence around them and mothballing them for good. The idea would result in public ridicule around the country, but the serious point remainedthat Detroit and other cities like it, so obsessed throughout their histories with growth and development and expansion, must start thinking about shrinkage and neighborhood consolidation if they were ever going to survive.
    “What’s happening here is that cities are being destroyed,” said Riegle. “We have a war going on within our own country. We’re going to end up with a
Clockwork Orange
society.”
    They were poignant words, but most of the senators looked on glumly, as if this were a blind date that wasn’t going nearly as well as expected and they were just looking for an excuse to get home early—except when it came their turn to speak. Then the color flew back into their faces, and instead of leaning back in their huge-backed chairs in bored silence, they leaned forward in grand interrogator style and spoke with a kind of incision and eloquence that was admirable and a clear gift of the gods. But when the moment of attention passed, when the cameras pecked and clicked away at another face in the semicircle, they cocked their heads to the side, and they leaned back again in their chairs, and their eyes became glazed, and many just disappeared altogether behind the Bermuda Triangle of that back door, never to be seen or heard from again.
    Realizing afterward that his impassioned pleas for help for the city had dissolved into the infinite netherworld of Washington rhetoric, Rendell had said angrily, “Where the fuck are they? Don’t they understand they have no choice?” As he boarded the Metroliner to return to the city, he took his customary seat in the dining car so he could spread out his endless piles of work on the table in front of him. His face wound tightly in a grimace, he dipped into his briefcase and, like some bad magician’s trick, pulled out one piece of paper after another after another—reports, invitations, summary memos of meetings, pleas for help from citizens who had run out of places to plead. But as the train spun by the rotting factories on the fringes of Washington and Baltimore and Wilmington, the work largely stayed untouched. Instead, the flash of panic eased, and Rendell mused aloud on the difference between him and his older brother, a corporate lawyer in Dallas: “He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. My best, or maybe my worst, trait is that I do suffer fools gladly.” He admitted that one of his great frustrations of being mayor was that his wife, Midge, kept dragging him to classical music concerts and operas. While he admitted to liking
Pagliacci
more than he ever could have imagined, he said that what he really dreamed about when he closed his eyes and listened to all that music was having a little earplug in his ear so he could listen to the Phillies withoutanybody knowing why he had such a broad smile on his face. He also talked about his own political aspirations, and with the events of the day still sharp, he said he had absolutely no interest in becoming a U.S. senator, although he could clearly see why some might be attracted to it. “It’s an incredibly easy job,” he said. “They don’t do shit.”
    And then shortly after Wilmington, with eight hours of work under his belt and at least eight hours more to go, he fell asleep. Sitting in that little booth in