Clout: Lost Street papers found
IT'S BEEN 26 years since Geraldo Rivera breathlessly opened mobster Al Capone's "vault" in front of live TV cameras at a Chicago hotel, finding only a few empty liquor bottles.
IT'S BEEN 26 years since Geraldo Rivera breathlessly opened mobster Al Capone's "vault" in front of live TV cameras at a Chicago hotel, finding only a few empty liquor bottles.
We were thinking about the mustachioed journalist this week while sifting and sorting through boxes of records left behind when Mayor John Street left City Hall.
An alert City Council member tipped us off to the previously unknown Street archives, which were relegated to a hard-to-access third-floor room tucked away in the City Hall tower. Our source spotted the forgotten boxes from a fourth-floor window. We had to slip through a secret entrance to get to the files.
Joan Schlotterbeck, the city's Public Property commissioner, was kind enough to show us around and then e-mailed Street to let him know about his stuff.
"I was unaware I had material in City Hall," Street told us via e-mail later.
The piles of boxes, which appeared to be both from Street's time as Council president and as mayor, contained a cross-section of governmental curiosities.
There were union contract negotiation papers, a framed resolution and photo from the start of the City Year program showing Street and a young councilman named Michael Nutter, a laminated Wall Street Journal story about how Street and then-mayor Ed Rendell bailed out the city's finances in the early '90s and binders full of documents from the school district, PGW and Police Advisory Board.
"I don't know how it got up here," Schlotterbeck said of the trove. She plans to shred whatever Street doesn't pick up.
We didn't find anything juicy in the archives, but did pick up some cool history. We were in the apse, the curved back of City Hall's tower that faces onto the courtyard, which was designed as a four-story open-air space with a curving stairway taking people from Conversation Hall on the second floor to Council's fourth-floor chambers.
That changed when the city prepared to top the tower with the 27-ton statue of William Penn. The tower and the statue required bracing beams for support, closing in the open area, creating some hide-away rooms.
Fattah: Michael and me
Back in 2004, when the late Michael Jackson was battling child-molestation charges, the pop star tried to arrange a visit to Washington to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus on AIDS in Africa.
The CBC declined to meet with him, but U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah welcomed Jackson into his office. And this week, in the wake of Jackson's death, Fattah released a photograph of himself from the session and a quote that read: "Michael Jackson was the major inspiration and motivator for my involvement in the issue of safe blood for Africa."
So if MJ motivated Fattah's efforts on safe blood, does that mean Fattah responds best to lobbying from pop stars? Should advocates of national health care send in Mariah Carey? Or gun-control activists lobby through Justin Timberlake?
Philly's diplomat in Palau
Ethnic battles in northwest China don't normally get much attention from the city's Democratic power structure. But one Philadelphia ward leader, Lou Agre of Roxborough, is closely following the bloody conflicts between the Han Chinese and the Muslim Uighurs. All because of a connection to a boyhood friend, Mark Bezner.
Bezner grew up on Hansberry Street in Germantown, attended city public schools and made his way into a career with the U.S. Department of State.
Now he's the charge d'affaires, the ranking U.S. diplomat, in Palau, a tiny island nation in the Pacific, east of the Philippines. Palau has agreed to become a refuge for up to 13 Chinese Uighurs who were swept up in raids in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2001 and taken to the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Council check-In
For details of our weekly summer drive-by of City Council offices, check out our blog www.phillyclout.com
Quotable
"I've heard you talk about world-class government. Well, that's what you've given us. You've given us Third World-class government." - Mark from Philly to Gov. Rendell during live PCN call-in show this week on the state budget. *
Staff writer Bob Warner contributed to this report.
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