CHAPTER 13
WHEN I was a child, Philadelphia was the third biggest city in America. What I remembered of it was driving through endless miles of ghettos, one battered block after an other, on a hot July Sunday, with black children playing in the spray of fire hydrants and older people lounging around on the street corners or sitting on the front stoops. It was the poorest place I had ever seen. Trash lay in the gutters and doorways, and whole buildings were derelict. It was like a foreign country, like Haiti or Panama. My dad whistled tunelessly through his teeth the whole time, as he always did when he was scared, and told us to keep the windows rolled up even though it was boiling in the car. At stoplights people would stare stonily at us and Dad would whistle in double time and drum the steering wheel with his fingers and smile apologetically at anyone who looked at him, as if to say, 'Sorry, we're from out of state.'
Things have changed now, naturally. Philadelphia is no longer the third biggest city in America. Los Angeles pushed it into fourth place in the 1960s, and now there are freeways to whisk you into the heart of town without soiling your tires in the ghettos. Even so, I managed a brief, inadvertent visit to one of the poorer neighborhoods when I wandered off the freeway in search Of a gas station.
Before I could do anything about it, I found myself sucked into a vortex of one-way streets that carried me into the most squalid and dangerous-looking neighborhood I had ever seen. It may have been, for all I know, the very ghetto we passed through all those years before-the brownstone buildings looked much the same-but it was many times worse than the one I remembered. The ghetto of my childhood, for all its poorness, had the air of a street carnival. People wore colorful clothes and seemed to be having a good time. This place was just bleak and dangerous, like a war zone. Abandoned cars, old refrigerators, burned-out sofas littered every vacant lot. Garbage cans looked as if they had been thrown to the street from the rooftops. There were no gas stations-I wouldn't have stopped anyway, not in a place like this, not for a million dollars-and most of the storefronts were boarded with plywood. Every standing object had been spray-painted with graffiti.
There were still a few young people on the stoops and corners, but they looked listless and cold-it was a chilly day-and they seemed not to notice me. Thank God. This was a neighborhood where clearly you could be murdered for a pack of cigarettes-a fact that was not lost on me as I searched nervously for a way back onto the freeway. By the time I found it, I wasn't whistling through my teeth so much as singing through my sphincter.
It really was the most uncomfortable experience I had had in many years. God, what it must be like to live there and to walk those streets daily. Do you know that if you are a black man in urban America you now stand a one-in-nineteen chance of being murdered? In World War 11, the odds of being killed were one in fifty. In New York City there is one murder every four hours. Murder there has become the most common cause of death for people under thirty-five-and yet New York isn't even the most murderous city in America. At least eight other cities have a higher murder rate. In Los Angeles there are more murders on schoolgrounds alone each year than there are in the whole of London. So perhaps it is little wonder that people in American cities take violence as routine. I don't know how they do it.
On my way to Des Moines to start this trip, I passed through O'Hare Airport in Chicago, where I ran into a friend who worked for a St. Louis newspaper. He told me he had been working extra hard lately because of something that had happened to his boss. The boss had been driving home from work late one Saturday night when he had stopped at some traffic lights. As he waited for the lights to change, the passenger door opened and a man with a gun got in. The gunman made the boss drive down to the riverfront, where he shot him in the head and took his money. The boss had been in a coma for three weeks and they weren't sure whether he was going to live.
My friend was telling me this not because it was such an incredible story, but simply by way of elucidating why he was having to work so damned hard lately. As for his boss, my friend's attitude seemed to be that if you forget to lock your car doors when you're driving through St. Louis late at night, well, you've got to expect to take a bullet in the head from time to time. It was very odd, his deadpan attitude, but it seems to be more and more the way in America now. It made me feel like a stranger.
I drove downtown and parked near City Hall. On top of the building is a statue of William Penn. It's the main landmark downtown, visible from all around the city, but it was covered in scaffolding. In 1985, after decades of neglect, the city fathers decided to refurbish the statue before it fell down. So they covered it in scaffolding. However, this cost so much that there was no money left to do the repairs. Now, two years later, the scaffolding was still there and not a lick of work had been done. A city engineer had recently announced with a straight face that before long the scaffolding itself would need to be refurbished. This is more or less how Philadelphia works, which is to say not very well. No other city in America pursues the twin ideals of corruption and incompetence with quite the same enthusiasm. When it comes to asinine administration, Philadelphia is in a league of its own.
Consider: in 1985, a bizarre sect called MOVE barricaded itself into a tenement house on the west side of town. The police chief and mayor considered the options open to them and decided that the most intelligent use of their resources would be to blow up the house-but of course!-even though they knew there were children inside and it was in the middle of a densely populated district. So they dropped a bomb on the house from a helicopter. This started a fire that quickly grew out of control and burned down most of the neighborhood-sixty-one houses in all- and killed eleven people, including all the children in the barricaded home.
When they aren't being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption. Just as I was driving into town I heard on the radio that a former city councilman had been sen tenced to ten years in jail and his aide to eight years for attempted extortion. The judge called it a gross breach of public trust. He should know. Across town a state review board was calling for the dismissal of nine of the judge's colleagues for taking cash gifts from members of the roofers' union. Two of those judges were already awaiting trial on, extortion charges. This sort of thing is routine in Philadelphia. A few months earlier when a state official named Bud Dwyer was similarly accused of corruption, he called a press conference, pulled out a gun and, as cameras rolled, blew his brains out. This led to an excellent local joke. Q. What is the difference between Bud Dwyer and Bud Lite? A. Bud Lite has a head on it.
Yet for all its incompetence and criminality, Philadelphia is a likable place. For one thing, unlike Washington, it feels like a big city. It had skyscrapers and there was steam rising through vents in the sidewalk and on every corner stood a stainless steel hot-dog stand, with a chilly-looking guy in a stocking cap bobbing around behind it. I wandered over to Independence Square-actually it's now called Independence National Historical Park-and looked respectfully at all the historic buildings.
The main building is Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was drawn up and the Constitution ratified. When I had first been there in 1960, there was a long line stretching out of the building. There still was-in fact, it seemed not to have moved in twenty-seven years. Deep though my respect is for both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, I was disinclined to spend my afternoon in such a long and immobile line. I went instead to the visitors'
center. National park visitors' centers are always the same. They always have some displays in glass cases that manage to be both boring and uninformative, a locked auditorium with a board out front saying that the next showing of the free twelve-minute introductory film will be at 4 P.M. (just before 4 P.M. somebody comes and changes it to 10 A.M.), some racks of books and brochures with titles like Pewter in History and Vegetables of Old Philadelphia, which are too boring even to browse through, much less buy, and a drinking fountain and rest rooms, which everyone makes use of because there's not much else to do. Every visitor to every national park goes into the visitors'
