MOVE incident: Philadelphia has an image problem | 1985

This story appeared in The Inquirer on July 3, 1985.

In New York City and Dallas and other places, they don’t talk about the 76ers or the Phillies, they talk about MOVE, a group that few people understand, and they talk about a mayor and a police commissioner and a former city managing director who said it was OK to bomb men and women and children in a neighborhood of rowhouses.

Everywhere I went in recent weeks, they were talking about it. In Manhattan, I mentioned I was from Philadelphia and people took a half-step backward. “Wasn’t there another way? I understand that the MOVE group was reprehensible. But bombing civilians in their home?” one woman wondered.

On a street in the mid-50s, before the hotel strike ended, a cop leaned on his car and wondered about it. “We got our problems here,” he said, waving a beefy arm down the street toward a circle of pickets. “We don’t use bombs,” he said.

The pickets walked in this little circle, and despite their problems, there was laughter. But when you said you were from Philadelphia, the laughter went away. “Oh,” one of them ridiculed: “Please don’t bomb us.” Then the group laughed and continued the little picket line prance that they hoped would change their lives.

“What’s this bombing thing?” the question came from one picket who stepped from the line. “We got some bad cops here. We got guys in uniform who like to use their guns. We got Bernhard Goetz who shoots people who come too close. ‘Son of Sam,’ was on the loose until the cops grabbed him. Nobody has forgotten about our ‘mad bomber’, George Metesky, and as bad as Mayor Koch is, he never ordered anybody to drop a bomb on the city.”

“Who’s in control in Philadelphia?” a woman on a takeout line in a delicatessen on the Avenue of the Americas was saying.

In Dallas, it was nearly the same. You said Philadelphia and people started talking about MOVE: “What bothered me most was the children,” a woman in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel, attending a Herbalife convention said. She wore a little button that had batteries behind it and blinking red light that informed you that she had lost “more than 31 pounds.”

“I couldn’t believe Philadelphia would kill its own children,” she said. ’'The funny thing was that Philadelphia seemed to be overcoming its reputation as a second-rate city. People were beginning to say: ‘Philadelphia is moving ahead.’”

But now, Philadelphia has a new reputation, one that will take a long time to live down. The people now critical of Philadelphia have never had to deal with MOVE. But they seem to think there might have been another way to handle the situation on Osage Avenue in May when there was a fierce battle for a short time that ended when the bomb came out of the sky and some 61 houses went up in flames and people looked at the city and saw London during World War II.

At the 76th annual convention of the NAACP, when you said Philadelphia, people looked a little embarrassed. “They murder black folks in your city,” one reporter from the West Coast said, a half-smile on his face. “What kind of mayor do you have there?” he asked.

Then he asked a couple of questions about the mayor’s commission that is investigating the battle between MOVE and the police in which 11 members of the sect died. But he didn’t wait for answers; like many others, his mind was made up. Philadelphia was out of control and he would rather be black anywhere else in America, but not Philadelphia and not now.

The whole thing made you realize that no matter what the commission unearths, whatever we learn about the cops, the firefighters and MOVE, the city is going to be hurt by its new image for a long time.

Wilson Goode has done a lot for Philadelphia. He was a better public relations man that all the public relations people in the city combined. Wilson Goode helped move the city into the big time. He was a breath of fresh air. He was better for Philadelphia than Mayor Rizzo, a man many people around the country enjoyed criticizing.

Mayor Goode had an aggressively positive image that made people forget that Bill Green had ever served. For the first year of his administration when you said “Philadelphia,” instead of laughing, everyone smiled. “Oh, yeah,” they said. “I read about your mayor.” In a real way, Mayor Goode became Philadelphia.

But now when you mention Philadelphia in other places in America, cab drivers start talking about MOVE and the dead children and the police with guns and the firefighters with hoses that they didn’t use while houses burned to the ground. Now, everything Mayor Goode has accomplished went down the drain in people’s minds.

No matter how you tried to defend the ugly events on Osage Avenue last May 13, people disagreed and now Wilson Goode has a lot of work ahead of him. You wonder if this uniquely talented man, who was off to such a great start, can ever get Philadelphia back to where it was before lightning struck.