Mayor. Michael A. Nutter
do actually stop at your desk. That doesn’t necessarily mean, unfortunately, that the actual, financial bucks stop at your desk—but the problems, issues, and challenges all end up there. And, quite honestly, whether or not you have any control over the problems or issues in question, you’re the mayor, so it all becomes your responsibility on some level.
At the same time, the mayor’s office is the position that I believe is closest to the people and to their real lives and experiences. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to chat on the streets with the president, a senator, or even a state legislator, but anyone in Philadelphia might have stopped me to talk at the supermarket or found me at Woody’s barbershop in Wynnefield once every two weeks.
A lot of people depend on you on a daily basis. There is a weightiness to the mayor’s office. The other political offices are certainly weighty, as well—being governor is an incredible responsibility, as is being the president of the United States. But people are sometimes not entirely sure what the governor may be doing at any moment, and I don’t mean that disrespectfully toward the governor in any state. It’s just that the gubernatorial position is usually a little more removed and distant from the people. Most presidents, of course, look at Washington, DC, as the place where they function and operate—although apparently not President Trump. As I write this in 2017, we mostly know where the president is but rarely know what he’s doing. While some people consider both governor and president to be “higher” offices than mayor—and they are indisputably different offices—there is no office as close to the people as being in charge of a city. People understand intuitively the mayor’s position more than other political offices, so while it may at times feel lonely, it is also a much more visible one, and you are rarely alone. People know where you are, and usually want to be near you.
When you as a citizen wake up in the morning and turn on your faucet, you have started your daily relationship with your local government and the mayor. You have an expectation that water—and potable, clean water—will come out of that faucet. When you step outside, you expect that the streetlights and traffic signals will work. Your roads on your drive to work in the morning will be decently paved. When you put your trashcan out on your trash day, you expect that it will magically be emptied by the time you come home. When you call 911, you expect a trained, respectful call taker will help you, and then a first responder will appear. When you take your children to a recreation center, there will be equipment such as basketballs and soccer nets, and in good condition. That is all city government. And that is the work of mayoring—an ongoing exchange between larger government policies, including the budgets that fund them, and a daily engagement with and in the lives of citizens.
As mayor, you can accomplish tangible things. I don’t know the party affiliations of many other mayors in my acquaintance, because the problems and issues that we share are all the same and are often very remote from party dicta or ideologies. When he was mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia famously said that “there is no Democratic or Republican way of cleaning the streets.” Being mayor is where politics hits the road—literally. You remove snow, pick up trash, deal with climate events, and repair potholes. It’s where the action is. But you can also apply your core values, principles, and vision to make a measurable improvement in your city and many communities.
During my eight years in office I learned another paradox in the work of mayoring. The buck stops with you, and it’s a singular experience in that regard, yet it’s a collective experience that you absolutely must do with a team of leaders and that absolutely involves communication across many different constituencies, neighborhoods, and audiences. When I look back on my mayoring years and at video clips from press conferences, I notice one striking thing: I am almost never, ever standing alone. I believe in “team.”
Being mayor is one elected position, but it’s not a singular operation. It is a very personal experience, but you have to do it in concert with a host of other people to communicate a message that will resound across the city, region, and state.
One of the constant themes in the chapters that follow is the relationship among the concepts of leadership, communication, and community. Leadership is about bringing people together in shared values for various common goals. It’s about expanding the tent. You can only conduct the business of mayoring well if you communicate, support transparency, and create as big a tent for your constituents and goals as you can.
Where’d You Go to High School?
Philadelphians take great pride in their community and their neighborhoods. I don’t know if this is true of other places because I’ve never lived anywhere else—I was born, raised, and educated, and created all of my trouble, in Philadelphia. It’s not the only place that I’ve ever been, but it is my hometown. I know that many cities claim this title, but we truly are a “city of neighborhoods.” If you meet a Philadelphian somewhere outside of Philadelphia, there are really only two questions that get asked. First, What’s your name? and second, Where’d you go to high school? That second question gives you an answer key to just about everything else you want or need to know.
I grew up at 5519 Larchwood Avenue. My parents moved into the Larchwood Avenue house—a classic, West Philadelphia row house with four bedrooms—in 1956. A year later, when I was born, Philadelphia’s industrial and manufacturing decline was already underway. The city’s population was highest in 1950, and then began to fall as the suburbs grew. Industries and warehouses were leaving the city and unemployment rose, but the high school graduation rate in West Philadelphia did not. My family was the third African American family on our block in 1956. By the time I was around ten years old, there were probably about three white families left on our block, so the neighborhood experienced a pretty rapid turnover. In a “white flight” fueled in part by much easier availability of mortgages for whites, the demographic changed dramatically as whites began to populate the suburbs around Philadelphia. Between 1950 and 1960, Philadelphia’s African American, Latino, and Asian American population increased by 41 percent while its European American population declined by 13 percent. These changes, as well as the degree of racial isolation, were particularly pronounced in North and West Philadelphia, where I lived.
The neighborhood was a middle middle-class place—people were working, but nobody had much money. There was a black-owned grocery store on one end of the block, a white-owned butcher shop, a drug store, and a barber shop on the other end. There were a few bars, too. Every one of the corner properties had a business in it, and these were really the anchors of the neighborhood. Even after the neighborhood changed demographically, many of the non–African American business people stayed, and the mix helped maintain the liveliness of the neighborhood. Larchwood was what we would now refer to as a “mixed use” community, before its time. Larchwood Avenue was a fairly large, two-lane street with parking on both sides, and we played in the street a lot—football, king block, tops, half-ball (stick ball), and other games. The street furnished access to a hospital, so it would never be completely closed off, but we managed play between the cars coming up and down the street anyway. There were some challenging times with gangs and young people and violence in the 1960s and 1970s, but I never felt unsafe on my street.
I believe that a neighborhood and its values often define who we are. Neighbors on my street performed “community service” before that was a term of art. Saturday was the informal neighborhood cleanup day. Most of us had chores. I’d wash down the porch, the steps, and the sidewalk every Saturday before I could play, and a lot of my neighbors were out doing the same thing. It feels as if we had huge snowstorms when I was a kid, or perhaps it was just because I was little. But when I took over the shoveling duties from my father, it was never enough just to do the small part of the sidewalk in front of our house. My