The World Series Win & Philly's Future: Yo, My Man! Not So Frickin' Fast There

LOVE sculpture at JFK Plaza: What? No homeless people?

Unless you're one of the people whose car got turned over in the irrational urban exuberance following the Phillies' World Series win on Wednesday night or stood helplessly on the platform as train after packed train rattled through your suburban station without stopping on Friday morning because of the immense victory parade downtown, you're probably feeling pretty chuff about the city of Philadelphia right now.

In fact, there is an outpouring of warm-and-fuzzy stories about the City of Disorderly Love and its suddenly bright future in the wake of the first championship by one of its long suffering professional sports team since 1983. This one, written by Alex Schmidt, a transplanted Los Angeles resident, is typical.

Schmidt notes that residents know their letter carriers' names, talk to each other at the drop of a soft pretzel (wid mustard) and that the newish mayor is impressive. He also is correct that Philly never would be mistaken for L.A., which looks big from the outside and is even bigger inside, while his adopted city looks big on the outside but on the inside is a crazy quilt of neighborhoods that are easy to get around.

While Schmidt gets points for charming naivete, I cannot help but offer this rejoinder to he and the rose-colored glasses crowd:

Yo, my man! Not so frickin' fast there.

While the Series win feels like a big shot of civic adrenalin, Schmidt would have no way of knowing that the Phillies last (and only) World Championship did not result in a civic renaissance.

In fact, the election of Ronald Reagan two weeks after the Phillies' 1980 victory lap heralded the beginning of the great Washington pullback from being the major bankroller for the urban agenda.

Worse yet, the election three years later of W. Wilson Goode, the city's first black major, was another big step backwards.

My friend Pete Dexter famously wrote that Goode "had been standing in the shallow end of the pool for so long that nobody realized he couldn't swim." Under Goode, the city sank further into a morass of lousy public schools, crumbling infrastructure and crime, including endemic police corruption. There also were the first stirrings of the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged so many inner cities in the late 1980s.

The World Series win certainly was not on anyone's mind when Goode approved a lunatic police request to drop a bomb on the rowhouse compound of the radical MOVE group in May 1985 which resulted in an explosion that led to a fire that consumed an entire block of West Philadelphia, killing 11 people.

Goode was rewarded for his criminal ineptness by being re-elected in 1987 and even carried the neighborhood he had incinerated by a hefty margin. That might have had something to do with the fact that his opponent was Frank Rizzo, the loathesome former police commissioner.

Ironically (I guess), it was a consummate Philadelphia sports fan, Ed "Fast Eddie" Rendell, who began to inject some life in the old gal after succeeding Goode in 1991.

Rendell inherited a mess so bad that the state legislature had established a fiscal oversight board to monitor the city's finances. But in a stunning turnaround chronicled in Buzz Bissinger's A Prayer for the City, Rendell cut a $250 million deficit, balanced the budget and oversaw five consecutive years of budget surpluses, reduced business and wage taxes, implemented new revenue-generating initiatives, and dramatically improved services to neighborhoods while cheerleading a wide range of projects to make the city more tourist friendly and build on its greatest asset -- an historic district that is literally where the United States began, and a world class array of museums.

These successes led 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore to call him "America's Mayor," but there was a dark underside: While crime abated as the crack epidemic did, Rendell never pushed for police reforms, schools continued to slide and racial tensions were exacerbated.

Enter John Street, the city's second black mayor, who took over from Rendell in 1999.

Street was a community activist outsider who became an insider -- first as a city councilman from a grindingly poor North Philadelphia neighborhood and then as City Council president -- who morphed from being part of the solution to part of the problem in overlooking and possibly being involved in corruption himself.

He also failed to push for police reforms and presided over an out-of-control epidemic of murders, most of them in the black community, as homicide rates fell in other major cities. At the height of the local slaughter in 2006, you were four times as likely to end up in the morgue in Philadelphia than in New York City.

When Michael Nutter ran for mayor and won in 2007, he spoke some uncomfortable truths about the failure of his fellow black politicians to move beyond talking the talk, including modernizing an atrophied police department that is literally and figuratively ill equipped to effectively fight crime. And as Schmidt notes, Nutter has provided a note of optimism that the Phillies' championship burnishes, and the long era of urban neglect in Washington may finally be ending with the election tomorrow of Barack Obama.

But it will take more than an aggressive mayor, a sympathetic president with urban roots and a sports championship to begin to cure what ails Philadelphia.

While there has been integration and gentrification in some neighborhoods and Philadelphia's comparatively cheap housing market has become a magnet for New Yorkers, it has never recovered from the slow collapse of its once huge industrial base after World War II. It also remains deeply divided racially, there has been only a modest down tick in the murder rate and schools still really suck. Palpably positive changes are going to take time -- and money -- and that is going to be even more difficult in the teeth of a recession.

It is pretty much impossible to not mention E. Digby Baltzell when surveying the long arc of Philadelphia history.

Baltzell, who probably looked more like his name than anyone I ever met (think tweedy academic) is primarily remembered for two things. He coined the term WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) and wrote the book Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia the year before the Phillies' first World Series win.

Using the history of the two cities, this University of Pennsylvania sociology prof (and WASP) argued that the "Boston Brahmin" elites formed a strong upper class that positively influenced every aspect of urban life from politics to the arts. In contrast, "Proper Philadelphians," while a tolerant bunch, abandoned the city early on, which became the worst run in America.

That certainly is less the case today, and props to Rendell and Nutter in particular. But Philadelphia has an awfully long way to go and no amount of sports championships are going to matter.