Saving the shipyard

One of the things that distinguished the Philadelphia Inquirer was its frequent use of the reconstruction. Soon after a major news event, reporters would interview the participants to recount behind-the-scenes events and tell the story as a whole, instead of daily increments. The reporting had to be deep, the writing quick.





BEHIND THE SHIPYARD DEAL: A 'HAIL MARY' THAT WORKED
THE NEGOTIATIONS INCLUDED EAGLES GAMES AND CAPITOL HILL INTRIGUE. RISKS WERE TAKEN - BY BOTH SIDES.
BYLINE: Howard Goodman and Russell E. Eshleman Jr., INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS, Inquirer staff writer Craig McCoy contributed to this article.
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. A01

The clock was ticking on the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in the late summer of 1995, and the city's desperate play for resurrection - a deal with the German shipbuilder Meyer Werft - was collapsing, too.

A week before the end, Terry Gillen saw it coming. Freighted by foreboding, with 2,000 jobs on the block, the city official looked upon a sea of faces at a union meeting.

"What are we going to do with all these people?" she thought.

She was still wondering when the yard formally closed, on Sept. 15, 1995, then again a few days later, when the Meyer Werft deal died.

Yet within two weeks of that debacle, Gillen and William Hankowsky, both of the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp., sent letters to every shipbuilder big enough to possibly expand here.

It was a short list, about two dozen companies. They read a simple plea: We have idle dry docks and a pool of public money; are you interested?

It was a long shot, a Hail Mary, a message in a bottle.

But word came back.

Through the industry grapevine, the Philadelphians heard that one company, the Norwegian conglomerate Kvaerner ASA, might bite.

So began a secret, two-year courtship between a region with a sadly abandoned industrial asset and a global high-tech business giant with a niche to fill.

The new new urbanism: Going rural

What do you do with a city with dwindling population, acres of empty lots? Here was a radical idea: Return the land to agriculture.






DOWN ON THE FARM IN PHILA.
SOME PEOPLE ARE BOLDLY RETHINKING WHAT A CITY CAN BE. ON BLIGHTED OR FORGOTTEN BLOCKS, THEY SEE FIELDS OF OPPORTUNITY.
BYLINE: Howard Goodman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. A01

Imagine the abandoned factories of Philadelphia's stranded neighborhoods reawakened, producing and pulsing with people at work.

Imagine new life for those brick industrial hulks, in which a bygone Philadelphia made locomotives, hats, saw blades, elevators - now pickings for vandals and shelters for addicts.

Imagine them as Kate Smith does. The agricultural economist, raised on an Iowa farm, aches for the squandered city.

She's eyeing those huge, dark interiors left over from the Industrial Revolution. And she has an idea for them.

Harvest mushrooms.

Why not? Mushrooms are grown indoors. They require a steady supply of unskilled or semiskilled labor, and the city has plenty of that. There's a growing niche market for specialty foods, gourmet or organic.

The idea might collapse when it collides with financial and technical realities. But Smith is optimistic.

"The one thing I know is that everyone has to eat," she says, "and the one sure market is food."

Mushrooms are just one of the brainstorms of a small, unconventional group of Philadelphians - community leaders, intellectuals, businesspeople - who are thinking about the future of the city, and saying "why not?" instead of "no way."

Idea by idea, they are developing a mind-stretching vision of a future Philadelphia. With a nudge here and a nudge there, they're tilting the very notion of "city" to dizzying angles.