Free A Prayer for the City by Buzz Bissinger

of Music on Broad Street, about to give his inaugural speech as the newest mayor of the city. Pacing back and forth in the Academy’s reception room backstage, he shaved and then gargled with mouthwash. He went over a few last-minute details with Cohen, then left the reception room a few minutes before 10:00 A.M.
    “Here we go,” he said in a voice that was nervous and almost bemused, like a parent suddenly finding himself in the lead car of the newest roller-coaster ride at Six Flags with no time to take it all back. It was a crowning moment, taking place in this splendid hall where for ninety-two years the Philadelphia Orchestra had spun symphonies and concerti as magical as any on earth. In a box to the left sat Rendell’s family, Midge beaming and vindicated after those dark election losses of 1986 and 1987, when her husband had lost those two elections back-to-back. Next to her was theireleven-year-old son, Jesse, at that age of perpetual gawkishness, when the blue blazer and the button-down shirt and the penny loafers all seem slightly out of kilter.
    In the fourth row sat some of Rendell’s closest friends and advisers: Cohen, Oxman, Makadon. The three had spent endless hours together during the campaign, acting more like fraternity brothers than grown professionals, needling, cajoling, screaming, cynical and suspicious of any need or suggestion that didn’t come from the sanctity of their own lips, but as Rendell moved to the podium, they were clearly overcome with emotion, and their eyes seemed moist.
    Behind Rendell on the Academy stage was a short row of state power brokers—Governor Casey and U.S. Senators Harris Wofford and Arlen Specter. Certainly they could do a great deal to make or break Rendell’s term in office with their power of the purse strings. But they didn’t wield nearly as much clout as the group that sat behind them on the stage, a mélange of city council members and city commissioners and city judges with necks too big for their shirt collars and dresses more suitable for a high school prom than an inauguration. Over the past decade, more than a dozen of their former brethren had been sent to jail for selling their offices to a variety of bidders. But this group still had power, the kind of power that if dispensed vindictively and capriciously, as it usually was, could make Rendell’s life as mayor miserable.
    Mixed in with this group was someone who wasn’t a council member or a commissioner or a judge. Relegated to the back of the stage, he seemed virtually anonymous, an afterthought. But eight years earlier in this same hall, with many of the same people watching and wondering, he had ignited the city with his own best intentions.
    We are a diverse people and we share a deep optimism about our future. Today, we begin to shape that future. Let the word go out loud and clear: Philadelphia is on the move again.
    The man who said those words was the son of a North Carolina sharecropper. He was also the city’s first black mayor, W. Wilson Goode. During his first hundred days in office, he promised to attack the problems of the city with a swiftness and a savagery never witnessed before. He did not produce as much as promised, but his best intentions continued to generate enormous goodwill, until one of the strangest and most horrifying days in American urban history, May 13, 1985, when police dropped a bomb ona West Philadelphia row house containing members of the radical group MOVE. Paralyzed by fear, torn by a set of choices that offered no easy answer, Wilson Goode sat in front of a television set in silence hour after hour after hour, watching a fire burn out of control until sixty-one homes had been reduced to rubble and eleven people had died.
    From that moment on, the best of intentions were not enough to save the mayor. The city, like a living creature, began to devour him. The problems of the homeless, crack, a sinking economy, race, and his own tragic indecisiveness did him