Book review of Buzz Bissinger's "A Prayer for the City"

Buzz Bissinger chronicles the sometimes sputtering, sometimes spectacular, eight-years of Ed Rendell’s mayoral career in his non-fiction work, “A Prayer for the City.” Bissinger, who also penned the widely acclaimed “Friday Night Lights,” chronicles Rendell’s fight to save a city from budget cuts, housing horrors, union strikes and essentially, itself.

Throughout the book, Bissinger has an inside vantage point of Rendell’s first term as mayor of what others saw as a doomed city. Readers grow to know and love the affable Ed Rendell, with his oversize frame and rumpled clothing, and his stoic chief of staff David Cohen. Together this yin and yang pair fights to right the city’s many wrongs, balance a seemingly doomed budget and clean up the messes of past mayors.

Naively optimistic, painfully ordinary, overweight, Rendell emerged as an unlikely hero for the city of Philadelphia. Bissinger saw the potential to tell a unique story from the inside, to tell the real story of America’s cities through the lens of Philadelphia’s struggles and the personal struggles of the newly elected Rendell.
Bissinger’s was moved to write “A Prayer for the City” after he observed just how bad things had gotten within Philadelphia while working as a newspaper reporter.

I remember the neither the precise route I took nor the particulars I was supposed to be covering, but I do remember what I saw that day in the city of Philadelphia: an assemblage of vacant houses and boarded up windows and collapsed porches that seemed to stretch forever, one block bleeding into another without relief. (Bissinger, xi.)

It was here Bissinger saw a perhaps a block or two of run down homes and empty storefronts. But what he didn’t realize was that these desolate blocks were a metaphor for the city of Philadelphia as a whole – a city on the brink of death, bleeding profusely through gaping wounds of crime, poverty and unemployment. Through the book, Bissinger raises the questions - is the slow, painful death of cities inevitable in today’s world? Are cities doomed to be the dead, ghetto-ridden epicenters of all modern cities? Then Bissinger heard on an old radio that Ed Rendell was elected to mayor.

And he heard a prayer for a dying city.

During the 21 years that preceded Rendell’s first term, the city lost more than 250,000 jobs and 30 percent of its tax base. Crime rates skyrocketed, public housing was a disaster and unions bled the city dry financially with their demands. Enter Ed Rendell.

Enter Ed Rendell.

Bissinger gained permission from Cohen to accompany Rendell throughout his first four years in office as mayor – and from
there, the story of his term begins.
Bissinger didn’t know how the story would turn out. He didn’t know if Rendell would have a successful term, if he would save the dying city, if he would fail miserably or emerge victorious, but he knew it was a story worth telling.
The theme of Bissinger’s work resonates as just what the title implies – a desperate, last-ditch hope of a city in need of help.

A theme of prayer, if not answered by action, is answered only with hope. Hope interweaves itself through nearly every character in the book. It is found in the lovable, blundering, temper-tantrum-prone Rendell, the struggling great-grandmother of four Fifi Mazzccua, the unemployed Navy shipyard worker Jim Mangan, even city employee Linda Morrison, who struggles to maintain her love affair with a city that has betrayed her.
While all Bissinger’s characters are vivid in their own right, it is “crazy lady” Fifi Mazzccua who steals the show. Readers cannot help but feel a sense of half sorrow, half amusement for the way this determined, stout woman deals with the dark realities of a declining city and how she hopes to save a new generation of children from the streets.

Sixty-one years old, short, and sweetly plump, unabashed about wearing a shirt that said in bold letters on the front, WANTED: SUGAR DADDY WITH CONDO ON THE BEACH AND EXOTIC SPORTS CARS, Fifi had a face with the varied expressions of a summer storm (Bissinger, 225.)

Mazzccua comes alive off the page. One can see her lumbering walk, the sadness in her eyes when she thinks of her son, Tony, in jail for the rest of his life. But her vivacity is apparent too. Mazzccua maintains the hope that things will get better - even with a son in jail for life, a dead grandson and a pastor who simply left her behind.

She was living now in a different part of the city, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, for the days of Olive Street were gone forever. The city had changed so much since the – in the way blacks and whites got along; in the way the young were yielded up in casual sacrifice; in the way crime and drugs owned the streets, providing temptations for those who wanted to take part and showing no remorse for those who wanted to stay away. Fifi has been affected by all of it, and sometimes she hardly had the strength to get out of bed in the morning. But she did… (226).

Fifi Mazzccua embodies all that “A Prayer for the City” is – being beaten down, pushed aside, taking hit after hit, much like the city itself. But she somehow finds a way to keep going. Mazzccua sent up prayers to be answered, what she got in return was hope – perhaps all a dying city had to offer.

While Bissinger is a gifted writer, at times the book struggles to maintain momentum. While the legislative process and the interaction between the city and state governments, unions and other elected officials are key to the development of the story, the real-life characters living in Philadelphia tell it better. Fifi Mazzccua, one of the more riveting characters in the book, only claims a single chapter and a smattering of anecdotes. The same goes for Jim Mangan, who, along with thousands of others, will lose his job if the historic Navy shipyard closes. He embodies one of Rendell’s main battles throughout his first term as mayor, but Bissinger doesn’t explore his character in depth.

Linda Morrison, the city worker who has been mugged twice and lived in an upper-middle class neighborhood just steps from the projects, is another riveting character who does not get much face time. Perhaps one of the most memorable scenes in the book comes the night she and her husband’s neighbor in Queen Village was stabbed on her own front porch.

In 1990, Linda Morrison and her husband of two years, Jim Morrison, learned something wholly new about city life: when someone is stabbed near an artery, the blood doesn’t flow evenly but spurts in syncopation to the beats of the heart (Bissinger, 164.)

For Morrison, this incident was equivalent to walking in on a lover cheating; she felt betrayed by a city she had stood by and been loyal to, a fact that lead to her eventual escape to the suburbs.

The immersion journalistic style in which Bissinger writes is similar to that of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s process in writing “Random Family” or Hunter S. Thompson’s in “Hell’s Angels.” But Bissinger reports at arm’s length. While he portrays Rendell thoroughly enough at his office in city hall, the reader is left wondering how Rendell acted when he went home to his wife and son – did he put up his feet on a worn recliner, crack open a Coors Light and watch football? Or did he get down on the floor and play Monopoly with his son, moving a silver top hat around the board, assembling a village of small, colorful houses and quietly plotting his victory?

Instead of diving headfirst into the lives of the five characters that live in Philadelphia, Bissinger only tests the waters. He never learns the real stories of their lives – who they love, what they feel about the disastrous state of the city, and most importantly, why they don’t just move away, leaving the dying, writhing city in the dust. Bissinger fails to explain the enduring love his characters have for Philadelphia. Without it, it becomes unclear as to why they even stay.
After an emotional four-year journey that was Rendell’s first term as mayor, the conclusion of Bissinger’s “A Prayer for the City” can only be described as anticlimactic.

For fifty pages, the reader was kept wondering if the deal with Meyer Werft will go through, thus saving the epic Navy shipyard, thousands of jobs and maybe even the city itself. The anticipation of whether Rendell will win one final victory for the city he loves is palpable. But the resolution of this epic battle is anticlimactic and unsatisfying and only mentioned in passing at the conclusion of Cohen’s time with the mayor.

The book ends focusing on power players Rendell and Cohen and their plans for the next four years. Rendell, elected for a second term in 1994, was in the midst of developing the New Urban Agenda. His honest, heartbreaking words while writing this plan sum up “A Prayer for the City” perfectly.

“The New Urban Agenda is no panacea, nor is it guaranteed to make cities succeed,” Rendell had written. “What is certain, however, is that without it or some other significant help, cities will surely fail.” They were honest words, spoken from the vantage point of someone who had seen the sorrow over and over – the homeless man wrapped in rags on the rim of the perfectly sculpted fountain; the son in the relentless light of the hospital waiting room who wanted to know why, why, his father had been killed in the line of duty, the little girl who had taken his hand on the shabby block of Stella and asked for a swimming pool (Bissinger, 376.)

The angst Rendell feels when trying to save a dying city is palpable, and heartbreakingly real. While it is never stated as to whether Rendell “saved” the city of Philadelphia, after all is said and done, it becomes clear - Rendell may have been that prayer, that last hope for Philadelphia.