Darrell L. Clarke, a most purposeful accidental politician
Darrell L. Clarke never intended to run for public office, never thought he would have to. Over 20 years, he had worked his way up from answering phones in his councilman's office to serving as the Council president's chief of staff.
Darrell L. Clarke never intended to run for public office, never thought he would have to.
Over 20 years, he had worked his way up from answering phones in his councilman's office to serving as the Council president's chief of staff.
He was comfortable behind the scenes as the man to see in John F. Street's office if you wanted to get something done in the Fifth District.
But then his boss set his sights on becoming mayor - a decision that surprised Clarke - and "it was pretty much decided by everybody that I was the guy," Clarke said in an interview last week. "I'm telling you, I had no desire to be a Council person."
Clarke embraced the role that was once thrust upon him, and 12 years later, he has followed in Street's footsteps again to become Council president, the second-most-powerful man in city government.
Clarke might have been an accidental politician, but his ambition and skill have been quite purposeful.
He is low-key, with a self-effacing smile and an athlete's stride that belie his political prowess and age - he'll be 60 in September. Colleagues say he has quietly risen because of his competence, his mastering of the minutiae of governing, and his ability to build coalitions.
"This is what he does. He works, and he works very hard," said Leigh Whitaker, his former chief legislative aide. "He's not a guy who hangs out. He keeps a very low profile because that's just who he is."
No doubt, Clarke won't be found drinking and cavorting at the Palm after work. And he admits to being reluctant to talk about his personal life.
He never married. He is ultra-proud of his one child, Nicole Bright, whom he helped raise to become a doctor.
Though he's not the type to feature his daughter on his campaign literature, he bristles at the "ridiculous" suggestion that he's excessively private or inscrutable. Catch him in his district, he said, and you'll see that "I can be live and in living color, trust me."
"But," he added, "my position is, people who get stuff done tend not to be the people who do a lot of talking."
And Clarke has a lot of stuff he wants to get done.
Last week, at his first Council meeting as president, Clarke began rolling out his agenda, based on the idea that the city must raise money without raising taxes. Among other measures, he's advocating the sale of public assets and advertising space on public property.
He has other notions that would part with long-standing Council tradition.
He's not ready to talk about specifics, but Clarke said he was committed to "a 12-month process" that would break up Council's three-month summer recess - a frequent subject of brickbats from critics - and he's creating one technical staff, eliminating the partisan and patronage-based system that divided the staffs by party.
"People are going to get hired and they're going to be expected to do work," he said.
He also said he wants to take Council out into the neighborhoods for budget hearings and public forums. Last year, Council was bashed for being slow - and appearing reluctant - to schedule neighborhood hearings on redistricting.
"I don't know if we'll call them listening posts or whatever," Clarke said. "I would like to see us do things beyond our traditional legislative responsibilities."
'A lot of mouth'
He may not be a classically brash Philadelphia politician, but Clarke "had a lot of mouth" as he described it, growing up in Strawberry Mansion - and that led to his life in politics.
Clarke was raised at 30th and Norris Streets. His family moved there when he was a baby and the neighborhood was still predominantly white.
By the time he graduated from Edison High School in 1970, North Philadelphia was a predominantly black area embroiled in gangs, radical politics, and the turmoil of the civil rights and antiwar movements. Sports kept him out of trouble.
"I had a group of guys, we were all athletic. . . . We played ball all the time," he said.
By the early '70s, Clarke was running the Strawberry Mansion Community Association.
"It wasn't the Black Panthers, but we adopted a philosophy that things weren't right nationally and locally," he said. "We wanted to make sure there was justice."
He remembers fighting to keep a salvage yard out of the neighborhood. Two busloads of residents went down to City Hall for a court hearing, where they met their new lawyer for the first time.
"We're standing there like, 'Where's our lawyer, where's our lawyer?' " Clarke said. "We see this guy walking down the hall with these books and stuff, this big Afro. His name just happened to be John Street."
Street helped them win the case and keep out the junkyard.
In 1978, Clarke was goaded into running for committeeman by an elderly neighbor, Andrew Rhoades.
"He said, 'You're always running off at the mouth, you always got something to say. . . . Why don't you get in the real game?' " Clarke said. "I ran for committeeman and, voila, I came in number one."
A short time later, the area's new councilman - Street - showed up on Clarke's turf to hold a community meeting without checking in with Clarke.
"So we had this little confrontation on the block," Clarke said. "He said, 'Well, I'm the Council person, I represent these people, too. I didn't have to check in with you.' "
Street became a councilman in 1980, and Clarke was hired to work in the district office.
"I was given a desk, a phone, and a pencil and a pad. I was told, answer the phone, ask who it is, put them on hold, and give them to somebody," Clarke said. "That was all I was allowed to do."
His first Council meeting featured the infamous fistfight between Street and Councilman Francis Rafferty. The 6-foot-3 Clarke was photographed trying to separate the parties.
"My mom called me the next morning, wanting to know what in the world I'm doing," he said. "I'm going to lose my job because . . . I'm standing right in the middle of the crowd on the front page. She's freaking."
Through the years in Street's office, Clarke learned to flourish while working punishing hours. Three nights a week, they would host four community meetings one after another.
Clarke, an avid runner, and Street, also a noted exercise nut, would jog the 8.5-mile Schuylkill river loop after their workday, late at night.
"I got that serious work ethic and that pretty much consumes all your time," Clarke said. "It's still that way."
'The vision thing'
Clarke held his inauguration party a few weeks ago at Avenue North, the $100 million retail and housing development at Broad Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue. The project included the first movie theater to open in North Philadelphia in 30 years.
"I wanted to show this is the transformation that's happened up in the neighborhood," he said.
Economic development has been Clarke's signature issue as a councilman, and he cites the transformation of North Philadelphia as his proudest achievement.
Avenue North developer Bart Blatstein said he thought Clarke would be "the best Council president the city has seen in recent memory."
"He gets the vision thing," Blatstein said. "I wouldn't be spending all this money in his district if he didn't get economic development. . . . I plan on spending a lot more."
Not everyone has been pleased with the development. Residents in Yorktown, a planned community built for black owners in the 1960s, have struggled with the impact on their stable area east of Broad Street.
They have complained bitterly at times about the expansion of off-campus Temple student housing, saying it brings loud parties and gobbles up valuable parking space.
Asked to comment about Clarke, Pam Pendleton-Smith of the Resolute Alliance in Yorktown, demurred - "I would have to say Yorktown would have no comment."
Clarke describes himself as a fiscal conservative, and although he has at times sponsored bills that reflect his days of fighting for social justice - like the failed paid-sick-leave effort - he's no social liberal.
"I believe genuinely that the best social program is a good job," he said. "I would hope that, at a certain point in time, we don't have to have a sustained, broad-based social-service network."
Perhaps the biggest question is whether Clarke and Mayor Nutter - who frequently battled with Street and lobbied to keep Clarke from becoming president - can get along.
"People say, 'What are you going to fight with the mayor about?' Well, we hope we don't have to fight about anything," said Councilman Bill Greenlee, a close Clarke ally. "It doesn't do us any good to get into a big brouhaha."
Clarke is expected to run a tighter ship than previous president Anna C. Verna, who fostered a much more free-flowing environment, unwilling to use her powers to check individual Council members from pursuing agendas that might conflict with hers or the administration's.
That could be good for the mayor, should he and Clarke come to an agreement on an agenda.
Asked whether he would, in fact, rein in Council members and set the agenda, Clarke gave a typically humble answer left to interpretation.
"If asked, I will give my opinion," he said. "Some tell me that when you're Council president, that tends to go a long way."