Worthy Of This Great City Read online

“I don’t know.” I didn’t. The casino slightly higher up the river was doing fine despite it’s inconvenient, downscale location. Although she had a point about the violence, down in those dim subterranean walkway tunnels to nowhere. (As of this writing, the Market East train station has been renamed Jefferson Station; Septa sold the naming rights to the Jefferson hospital system. I think this hilarious but no one else seems to appreciate the joke. Meanwhile the Gallery is reportedly being transformed into more of those upscale outlets, but the last time I had to walk through there the food court and most of the stores were abandoned or shuttered, the kiosks vanished, the subterranean space dim and just plain spooky.)

  My doubt turned Margery garrulous. “The Columbus people know full well Center City already has a glut of unoccupied office space. Surely you realize that if this mayor had some better way to push fiscal revitalization anywhere in this city he wouldn’t be talking about casinos?”

  “Except you don’t have the votes.”

  “Council will make the decision that best benefits city residents.” All those devotees who faithfully expected her to defend their interests against the whole hostile encircling Delaware Valley, who needed to admire her and depend on her and just plain believe in an idol. We were walking back towards the elevators, past closed office doors: a doctrinaire, entrenched populist commander in the battle against urban disintegration, and a short, scruffy question mark, all hair and nose, toting a battered canvas messenger bag. At that moment imagining a Council meeting room, members sitting deaf and certain over their notepads, impatiently glancing at their phones.

  “So you’re expecting a miracle? Is that what you’re saying?” When she was so educated, such a stern realist: it made no sense.

  “I realize you think I’m somewhat dense, Con, because I don’t adopt your limited version of reality. But things happen as they’re meant to, the right solution tends to manifest.”

  It was fucking inexcusable. Ruth couldn’t have said it better.

  “God wants a casino? Seriously?”

  She picked up a plain yellow pencil and started turning it round her fingers. “I have a strong idea that this story is just unfolding. The future is determined in part through continuing to move forward with faith. In that sense belief certainly creates reality, in case you didn’t know. But then, I know better than to argue matters of faith with you.” The implication being that, unlike such callow ignoramuses as me, she herself knew God personally, was familiar with his methods and intentions, and found them acceptable, even laudatory. And yet I wouldn’t call her religious. It’s more that she has complete faith in her own beliefs.

  So she nourishes them, and sometimes her certainty loses battles before they’ve even properly begun because there’s so much she simply refuses to hear. That’s how she recognizes evil: it’s whatever stymies her success. Of course she supported this mayor, what choice did she have, but she supported him without denying his myriad flaws, eliciting more than one cowering confession before her magisterial throne and brushing away his promises with experienced disdain. To resolutely promote his agenda in countless conference rooms and school auditoriums, square and firm, her eyes fixed on social justice, her mind expertly determining what was really possible and what could and should be done next.

  Once, not really all that long ago, East Market was a genteel avenue lined with legendary department stores one right after another: Strawbridge’s, Lit Brothers, Gimbels, Wanamaker’s: relicts of that even earlier era when Philadelphia was unarguably the greatest of all the many great manufacturing cities, a veritable mercantile paradise. Today only the facades of those lovely, ornate merchant palaces remain, extraordinary city blocks of them carefully restored and officially protected, magnificent and improbable, their interiors divided into downscale commercial space or offices and apartments. You walk this way on a cool, empty dusk and hear coarse laughter coming down the street from nowhere specific, mocking and somehow personal.

  Today Macy’s was the sole real downtown holdout although technically a carpetbagger, occupying the old Wanamaker building, cleverly maintaining the old traditions: the eagle statue and the humungous organ and the Christmas light show, childhood traditions to lure in today’s nostalgic adults. Most of the better retail trade has wisely fled across Broad Street to reestablish itself west of City Hall, in with the sleek new towers, the Penn Center and Liberty Place and Comcast buildings, all that contemporary city that erupted once skyscrapers were finally permitted to look down on Billy Penn’s hat. If only west of Broad Street so as not to obstruct the view from the river, so as not to allow Colonial or Federal or even Gilded Age history to vanish into the future.

  No, I’m being really unfair here; downtown’s so much better than it was even twenty years ago. Ask anyone. People have tried, that’s the truth, and even somewhat succeeded. But that isn’t to say it’s what it once was. Much of East Market below Broad is safely avoided until around 7th Street, where you start to pick up the vibes from the historic district, and then it’s all sunlit expanses thronged with tourists, horse-drawn carriages decked out with plastic flowers, newer museums and visitor centers, early Greek Revival banks, and chipper guides speaking from touring trolleys. Wander off Market Street and you’re strolling by the brick rowhouses of Old City with its secret gardens behind wrought iron gates, sheltering trees, and doorstep urns overflowing with ivy and bright impatiens. There’s a preserved complacence about those marble stoops, a nourishing goodwill that emanates from satisfied visitors and the general beneficence of people with money, an energy that supports a host of tiny galleries and better restaurants. Naturally the Independence Hall area dominates the district, that serene Georgian edifice constantly choked with gaping visitors all marveling at how terribly small and simple it is considering what it gave birth to, the rollicking, unimaginable size of that.

  Continue on towards the Delaware and you’re passing smaller offices and retail and the newer hotels and condos nudging I-95 near the riverfront, or instead head south and you’re swallowed up by the reticent brass-and-brick luxury of Society Hill, secluded streets quiet to your foot. At Front and Market Streets shuttered enterprises mingle with small functioning businesses; it’s an intriguing enclave, the air deliciously infused with a bohemian twang, experimental yet exclusive. It’s where you encounter stoic Tamanend, Billy Penn’s Lenni-Lenape partner in peace and patron saint of America, right there at the foot of the highway overpass at the Landing, standing on a turtle.

  Go south a block to one of my favorite stretches of Chestnut Street because it features pretty much every possible variety of international cuisine. Continue down the block towards the river where right between a family Mexican restaurant and an upscale Brazilian eatery stood the storefront housing Donny Mealy’s reelection headquarters, its window signage shouting in your face, its very existence either blighting or completing the ambience, I’m not quite sure which.

  I found Mealy in his inner sanctum, on the phone, looking as usual like the owner of a shady but flourishing used-car dealership, the kind who does his own deliberately cheesy commercials. In actual fact he’d been a successful insurance executive before taking to politics. He’s shrewd, competent, has a juvenile ego and remarkably bad taste - you have to wonder who raised him – and he’s a complete pile of shit who loves to advertise that fact because he really doesn’t know better. He’s that kind of asshole.

  “Con,” he said. “Con.” And indicated a chair, so I sat and listened to one side of a confidential conversation regarding the legal problems of the son of a worthy constituent. Speaking a name I recognized, giving me a wink.

  Finally ending the call, turning to me with a big smile that showed molars, soft cheeks dimpling, dark eyes gleaming from that pampered complexion. “Con! What are you up to today and should I worry about it?”

  Although I’d superficially explained my mission, setting up this interview. “What I really want you to tell me is how you envision the waterfront a decade into th
e future. All of it, not just the Landing, but of course that area, too.”

  Laughing, smoothing that vanity hair as if deep down he knew he was only a caricature. Do these people simply not get what we think about them? Or is the charade only for the gullible and the hell with your perception, I’m in it for the win and you don’t matter? “Oh, let’s see, what do I picture there? That’s an interesting question.” I nodded in acknowledgement, doing my foreign and modest bit; I generally don’t notice myself doing it anymore but that time I did.

  “Well! I’ll tell you then. I see a new financial center with landmark buildings designed to compete with the best contemporary architecture in any major city in this country, all of it fully occupied and integrated into the heart of the city but still easily accessible to the suburbs and New Jersey.” He’d certainly collected all his words, and handed them to me with a totally unconcerned face, not even bothering to act interested.

  “And you really see this happening?”

  And in that instant, the words just past my teeth, I knew Columbus was doomed. Knew it as surely as I knew my own address, knew it well enough to bet the rent money, even though my conviction was utterly irrational.

  “Dude,” I said to myself. A word I picked up during my brief legal career and can’t exorcise, although I only use it to myself.

  Mealy sent a quick suspicious glance at me, probably catching something odd in my expression. “What could stop it?” With spread hands.

  And I could only shrug in return.

  Maybe a week later the mayor’s office scheduled an announcement on this very topic. I stopped in at Thom’s office, pleased to discover him ensconced behind his cluttered desk, his jacket over the back of his chair and his sleeves rolled up. He had an 18th Century map of the city directly behind his chair, symbolic or pretentious or both, and a photograph of Ruth on his desk, looking windblown and laughing out of a silver frame. I sank down on his official leather sofa and leaned forward to clasp my hands between my knees. “What’s all this about?”

  “A casino at the Landing, ultimately. That much I can absolutely guarantee.” Delivered with the practiced satiric, rueful face. “Another move in the same tedious game. Do keep me informed.”

  Down in the mayor’s reception room His Honor’s press secretary came forth to address the city, posing before a magnificent, flag-flanked fireplace in an equally glorious room brimming with gilt and crystal and marble, with a gold-patterned carpet and a coffered ceiling and its every inch of wall space papered with portraits of our former mayors, all these worthies glaring out at we few repugnant journalists sitting uneasily on our plain wooden chairs.

  The press secretary, a middle-aged and unremarkable female in a dowdy gray pantsuit, informed us in that quiet but invariably rude voice common to municipal officials that the mayor was filing a complaint against Philadelphia City Council to force action on a zoning ordinance designed to facilitate the establishment of a slots parlor on Penn’s Landing, as Council’s refusal to act on the matter constituted, either fortuitously or by design, a deterrent to those seeking to invest in the proposed project to the benefit of opposing financial interests.

  Fine.

  Additionally, the mayor declared himself greatly impressed with the guidelines established by PennDesign, which the mayor agreed clearly represented the best interests of the communities most affected by any improvements along the waterfront. Therefore, and despite the decision of the PCPC in favor of what was termed the Columbus project and the accompanying recommendation that the mayor send on to Council legislation designed to support that plan, the mayor would defer any further action regarding development at the Landing until revisions to all plans could be made incorporating the PennDesign guidelines.

  So that was a clever piece of virtue confiscation, today’s most popular game, the mayor utilizing PennDesign’s ethical leverage to provide his own project some breathing room while not incidentally granting his true believers a tiny measure of confirmation, something to keep them coming to church.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ruth liked to remark offhand how she was raised in a bar, that boast first an admission tentatively ventured late one night in an Oberlin dorm room, signifying a momentous breakthrough: such a disclosure would have been unthinkable not five years earlier. Right through high school she existed in a continual state of suppressed panic, desperate to conceal the shameful circumstances of her upbringing, guarding her fragile psyche against any accidental glimpse of the truth. Think about that, think about desperately lying to those school friends a bus ride outside the immediate neighborhood, a stratagem certain to fail and earn you a double helping of the very humiliation you dreaded, never mind the deadly humor of your relatives. Also garnering the notice of various officious, meddling idiots: teachers and counselors, all those dangerously inept assholes.

  The bar in question occupied the corner of a side street off Snyder Avenue, commanding the intersection, forthrightly ugly with its bright red, rounded cement belly jutting out over the sidewalk, all in all a pugnacious, unrepentant imposition on the sensibilities of the whole neighborhood. This minor landmark formed the terminus of two residential blocks, most still brick, some with siding or gray stucco, but long before the era of artisan chocolates and pho an area immaculately maintained, with clean friendly stoops, hopscotch games in bright chalk on the sidewalks, halved pimple balls hiding behind car tires, and cats peeping amiably from between lacy front window curtains. Windows that were worth the seeing all decorated for the holidays, with baskets of plush pastel bunnies, stenciled spider webs, or motorized Santas, and always those big old-fashioned, multi-colored light strings. People spent time and thought on those displays; those streets were about everyone’s hard-won victory over the whole mean world, about being at home in a protective enclave of similar generous souls.

  Dougherty’s signified the major triumph of Ruth’s grandfather Ted, a photo on the mantel with the kind of frank smile no one’s had since World War II, a man whose ambitions were confined to his unassuming family tavern, his squat building with its wood-paneled upper façade and the family name etched in gold on the single glass door. When Ruth’s dad took charge he had the two long windowless walls partially rebuilt in murky glass blocks; later again, during an unusually lucid interval, he had them restored to the original paneling.

  Inside it was nothing out of the ordinary, with no taint of professional décor but just the usual dim interior and that hard aromatic smack of beer and cigarette smoke and steam, with the expected shelves of jewel-toned bottles fronting a mirror with gold-etched Victorian curlicues like a real Western saloon: a mirror that reflected everything back at you in a friendly fashion, flattering to an adolescent girl. The booths had maroon leatherette seats, the bar was of battered, polished oak, and there were half a dozen small round tables towards the rear. For a declared tavern Dougherty’s offered little in the way of food, mainly burgers and steak sandwiches on Italian rolls from a big plastic bag left hanging from the front door every morning. But during prime business hours it provided a pleasant refuge for mere acquaintances, people remote enough to present no real danger but welcome for purposes of mental and emotional realignment. So Dougherty’s was convenient and did its job, effectively serving the immediate vicinity.

  From the start half-hearted, though, and here’s the reason: it was an inheritance that made Dougherty’s possible, the proceeds from the sale of Ted’s mother’s house and not Ted’s own sweat and determination. That rankled, and he held a grudge, and then he decided not to try too hard in order to demean the legacy.

  Francis Dougherty, once he inherited, expended most of his attention on his vintage jukebox, his precious baby. God knows where he got it from. It held the place of honor in the very center of the long, narrow room, dominating the wall directly opposite the mirror so all its flashing and winking and gleaming chrome was gloriously magnified. Frank kept it stocked with all his favorite pop classics, the melodic essence of a sentiment
al era - Elvis and Sam Cooke, Sinatra and Nat King Cole, songs with lyrics that were deeply romantic or cleanly sad or mid-century cool but essentially based on promises, lost or fulfilled but promises, those eternal foundations of all civilized life. Because Frank himself was all about promises.

  If Dougherty’s wasn’t remarkable in any way, once Frank took command it was definitely going to be, someday. Frank was certain of that, and he could delineate grandiose schemes with the best of them. It was always just about to get underway, that transformation into a destination South Philly restaurant with class and renown. Not right now, but when the time was right. “Money, Ruth.” Except Frank could never quite grasp that action on his own part was required, not even when it came to minor improvements or repairs like a loose bolt on the men’s room door or a faulty freezer. Instead he simply waited for something better to happen, apparently feeling he should wait for some cosmic go-ahead, meanwhile expending immeasurable nervous energy treading water, dealing adequately enough with disasters but otherwise just managing to pay the taxes and keep the whole slapdash enterprise square with Licenses and Inspections.

  The relatives tended to descend a bit too often for Frank’s taste, people who just couldn’t take a hint yet expected infinite courtesy and mysteriously received it, too, even while they made clear their avid distaste for the family business. Or at least that’s how the daughter of the enterprise saw it. But more often they eschewed the bar itself for the house a few streets over. Pat, Frank’s fraternal twin, proved the most frequent unwelcome visitor, forever infuriating despite his falsely affectionate smirk, his deceptively meek wife Kate trailing obediently in his wake. Pat who consistently addressed his niece with a full formal Ruth Marie, virtually pushing her an unbending arm’s length away in order to forestall any repugnant familiarity. But to Kate she was always Ruthie, because Kate could never remember how much her niece despised that particular diminutive.