5
Five Square Miles of Hell
After the civil unrest of 1964 and the early efforts of the GCM to address discrimination and poverty at the neighborhood level, the racial divisions in Chester only worsened, relegating the city’s poor black residents to more concentrated poverty and, as this chapter examines, greater vulnerability to political and economic exploitation at the hands of elites. Ongoing segregation at the metropolitan level clearly furthered the isolation of poor blacks in the inner city. Whites and later, working- and middle-class blacks, left the city, along with industries, employment opportunities, and economic capital. Those who either chose to stay or were simply left behind were faced with few sustainable prospects for the improvement in living conditions.1 Strong social traditions in older black communities were challenged and weakened, as residents faced withering neighborhood ties, declining civic organizations, and the closing of locally owned small businesses. In their place emerged a largely informal subsistence economy in which many residents were compelled to participate as a means of economic survival. By the late 1970s the racial divide between city and suburb was effectively a class divide as well, with the inner city home to an increasing number of jobless and economically deprived people and the suburbs the domain of both the working and the middle classes.
But it would be a mistake to assume that the city of the post–civil rights era was shaped exclusively by ongoing segregation, institutional decline, and the heightened exodus of whites and middle-class blacks. Contrary to the idea of the inner city as abandoned and left to its own devices, where residents themselves develop their own illicit economy and dysfunctional social organizations as a means of survival, Chester was not spared the intentional pilfering and theft of its limited resources by politically connected elites. Alongside the steady disinvestment of economic and social capital grew a sophisticated parasitic economy of vice and criminal activity controlled by white power holders and black political operatives but shouldered by the city’s black population. Indeed, not only were black residents the intended targets of Chester’s parasitic economy that worsened already precarious living conditions, but they were also explicitly portrayed in the media and popular discourse as the cause of urban crime, as both violators and beneficiaries of the rampant lawlessness that overtook the city in the 1980s and 1990s.
The vast public discourse and rhetoric fixated on black individual and cultural deficiencies did not simply coincide with the structural forces that contributed to advanced ghettoization. It stood and arguably still stands as an alternative explanation for inner-city poverty and urban social problems. Racial stigma fixates on particular destructive behaviors that not only comprise an exaggerated depiction of an entire population, but also bleed over as an explanation for a host of inner-city problems from chronic unemployment to abandoned, trash-strewn lots. The prominence accorded to “cultural deficiencies” in majority-black neighborhoods contributes to the pervasive understanding of Chester as a threatening space, a city to be avoided. In turn, the racial stigma of the inner city proves useful to local elites as cover for a host of officially sanctioned, profitable, and illicit activities. Stigmatization facilitates a post–civil rights parasitic economy based on the pilfering of the inner-city built environment and more importantly, the residents who live there.
As this chapter shows, the racial stigmatization of Chester provided reliable cover for various forms of officially sanctioned vice and corruption, as the social problems caused by such activities were effortlessly attributed to the cultural lifestyles of poor minority residents. Already reeling from segregation and a vulnerable class position, Chester residents felt the added sting of racial stereotypes readily deployed as the underlying cause of the city’s woes. Perversely, the much maligned and hyped “ghetto life”—served up as the reason for urban decline—proves to be more the product of public policies and private sector practices. Racial stigma damaged the collective capacity of Chester residents to oppose, let alone formulate an alternative to the parasitic urban underdevelopment that characterized much of the city’s political economy during the 1980s and 1990s.
Plundering Antipoverty Initiatives
The initial architecture underlying federal antipoverty schemes favored community-based organizations and grassroots involvement in program implementation. On the heels of protracted civil rights demonstrations and the state’s ensuing intervention to address racial segregation and poverty, the likelihood of real progress in education, housing, and overall circumstances for Chester’s black community seemed high in the summer of 1964. The early months of Chester’s neighborhood-based demonstration program, the GCM, were a test of 1960s antipoverty efforts, weaving together grassroots participation, social welfare institutions, and state and federal assistance tied to the War on Poverty. In the fall of 1964 the GCM opened its first NAC in the West End, the city’s largest black community. Several others opened in storefronts across the poor neighborhoods by year’s end. GCM workers provided aid and assistance to individuals and families with housing and rent issues, utility bills, emergency food, and referrals to city and county social welfare agencies. In 1965 the state funded child day care centers and a combined federal-state-city grant funded the development of a citywide public library system.
Yet the potential for sustained improvements in poverty relief and racial relations was short-lived. As mentioned in the last chapter, the local political machine quickly swallowed up the GCM, becoming a front for controlling the increasing amount of state and federal funds linked to the War on Poverty. Community organizers, social service workers, and residents leveled charges of political favoritism, patronage, and foot-dragging on implementing anticipated changes at the neighborhood level. In the fall of 1967 the federal Office of Economic Opportunity investigated the GCM’s operations, including the role of Chester’s mayor as a member of the GCM steering committee. In February 1969 the GCM’s steering committee chairman, Kenneth L. Smith (the head of the Department of Christian Ethics at Crozer Theological Seminary), resigned and leveled a number of serious criticisms about the GCM’s operations. These included a lack of adequate internal bookkeeping and record keeping, the manipulation of jobs and money by GCM officials, and directives to community action centers’ employees not to actively assist in organizing poor residents or the GCM would face criticism from local politicians. Field workers were allegedly told to “stay at their desks and out of the ghetto.”2
By the end of the 1960s Delaware County’s white elites had successfully turned the GCM into a modernized version of the city’s early twentieth-century patronage and loyalty machine. By the time the GCM program ended in 1976, its structure and operation mirrored McClure’s system of handpicking and rewarding lieutenants positioned within the city’s black communities for block-level discipline and maintenance of a post–civil rights political and racial status quo. During the height of the War on Poverty, when federal and state agencies were funding programs to better inner-city employment training, housing, welfare, and education, the core function of the GCM was to funnel those dollars as rewards in a network of loyal operatives and maintain (or allow to worsen) the conditions of black poverty to remain eligible for the flow of public subsidies. At every turn, resident petitions for improvements in housing, education, and community services disappeared into a bureaucracy managed by black political operatives beholden to maintaining the status quo. As the public “face” of the GCM was increasingly staffed by black machine operatives, the city could point to the organization as evidence of community self-empowerment and self-governance; thus any shortcomings of the effectiveness of the GCM could not be the result of discriminatory staff hiring.
In 1972 the Delaware County Daily Times published a monthlong exposé that revealed the extent of the GCM’s political favoritism, nepotism, and reward system for the loyalty and patronage of local operatives on the ground. The newspaper’s staff reviewed hundreds of documents and conducted interviews with residents, businesspeople, civic leaders, and past and present GCM employees. The paper concluded that the county’s Republican Party “pulls the strings for the local war on poverty” and found that little of the $12.4 million in federal and state aid the GCM received between 1964 and 1972 was used to assist Chester’s poor residents.3 Nepotism was extensive in the GCM, with top administrators creating positions for spouses and other relatives or hiring them to fill vacancies.4 Representatives of the business community, such as the Chester Small Businessmen’s Association, populated the top GCM committees. Officials favored purchasing goods and services from known business associates or, in some cases, from companies in which they owned an outright interest. The GCM’s day care center was housed in a building rented for $1,500 a month, “three times the going commercial real estate rent,” from a real estate firm owned by a board member’s relative.5 In 1972 the day care center employed twenty-seven workers, many of whom were spouses of GCM committee members, but enrolled only twenty-two students.6 The owner of an insurance firm that received $22,000 in premiums from the GCM between 1968 and 1970 was a member of its steering committee at the same time, and the mayor appointed him to the GCM board in 1971.7 The Opportunity Center, in its origins, was successful. Hundreds attended training programs in vocational skills and General Educational Development (GED) courses. By 1969 most of the professional training staff had departed and by 1972 its advisory board had been disbanded, reducing the number and quality of training programs.8
The political appointment of black operatives in the GCM assured a measure of discipline and control at the organization’s point of contact with the city’s neediest residents. A key black lieutenant in the local Republican political machine oversaw a range of hiring, from custodians to the director of the Opportunity Center. He also served as chairman of the Housing Development Corporation of Chester, an agency partly funded by the GCM and partly by the city, and his wife was employed at the day care center. From its founding, the most progressive component of the GCM were the NACs, the grassroots liaisons between poor people and government agencies. By 1969 the storefronts were understaffed and opened intermittently. As residents’ complaints were rarely addressed, the number of clients and visitors dropped. The politically inclined GCM leadership informally instructed NAC employees to discourage collective action by low-income residents. The Daily Times reporting noted, “Any grassroots protests of poverty conditions are systematically smothered by the political establishment, further hampering the action center’s effectiveness.”9 The Daily Times investigation concluded:
A combination of the Republican organization’s aggressiveness and black apathy has enabled the politically inclined to take control of the GCM. Political domination appears to be a principal cause for the GCM’s failure in the war on poverty. On paper, the GCM is beautifully divided between one-third public sector, one-third private sector, and one-third low-income neighborhood; in practice GCM is at the beck and call of City Hall. The GOP has stacked the deck in its favor by infiltrating people into the private and low-income categories.10
The reaction to the newspaper’s investigation was both predictable and revealing. Most of Chester’s blacks had long considered the GCM an arm of city hall and the Republican organization. Its key players were, after all, familiar faces in the local political machine. Once hopeful, residents, church leaders, and remaining civil rights activists were resigned to the reality that the GCM was ineffective and that it had become another institution that appeared to help people but functioned only to repress them. Black operatives lambasted the Daily Times investigation, pointing to the GCM’s few tangible results and portraying the organization as run by and for the black community. County and city government officials charged that the newspaper’s reporters spoke with a small, disaffected segment of the black community and that the GCM otherwise was delivering services to the city’s neediest. The everyday conditions in black neighborhoods suggested otherwise.
In July and August 1968 the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission held investigatory hearings on the state of poverty and race relations in Chester. Its findings showed that after four years of GCM operations little had changed. Over one-third of the city’s black families received welfare assistance. In 1968 the unemployment rate for blacks was 16 percent, over twice that for whites at 7 percent. The majority of Chester’s black residents continued to live in overcrowded segregated neighborhoods in poorly maintained multifamily housing units owned by absentee landlords, whites who had left the city for the suburbs and continued to own and rent city property.11 The commission labeled the housing in neighborhoods where the majority of blacks resided substandard. Housing units operated by the CHA fared no better. Nearly complete racial segregation of public housing persisted in 1968, with all 350 units in Lamokin Village and 390 units in the Ruth L. Bennett Homes occupied by blacks and 100 percent of McCaffery Village white.12 The commission found that the CHA intentionally actively maintained racial segregation of its projects, creating “established permanent communities of the economically disadvantaged; [that] become permanent hearts for ghettos in microcosm; and have been administered in such an aura of paternalism to have fostered the antipathies of tenants and adjacent residents and business operators alike.”13
The commission found racial discrimination pervasive across all city services and agencies, from its grassroots antipoverty initiatives and housing authority to its police force, urban redevelopment agency, and school district. Its report also concluded that the GCM’s activities in connection with these services and agencies aided official racial segregation and therefore sustained high poverty levels. It cited the testimonies of residents as evidence of vast inequalities in service provision, from fire and ambulance services to trash collection and public safety, between black and white neighborhoods. White neighborhoods and certain small areas within black districts were “politically favored” in the patronage system of the municipal administration. “The failure of the City Administration to take affirmative action to provide redress of complaint under the aegis of law assuring true equality of opportunity,” the commission’s report noted, “has been a major factor in the deepening of thus-far unchecked racial antipathies and the very apparent racial polarization in the City of Chester.”14
Black Poverty Pays
Chester’s post–civil rights urban politics of extraction and disinvestment was not limited to the white-dominated power structure siphoning off state and federal dollars intended to alleviate the city’s racially inflected unemployment, poverty, and poor housing. Indeed, local politicians and affiliated business partners brazenly harnessed networks to profit from their own creation of an insalubrious parallel economy based on embezzlement and extortion at the hands of poor black residents. The prevailing and sustained racialized narrative of Chester as a black, poor, and increasingly dangerous city enabled this system of corruption to operate and flourish. As such, many of the city’s woes directly attributable to official systematic corruption were instead readily and effortlessly blamed on the culture and way of life of its black residents.
Operational changes in Delaware County’s ruling political machine partly enabled the visceral turn to outright corruption, usury, and exploitation in Chester. As pointed out in prior chapters, the longevity of the Republican Party political machine was testament to its organizational discipline and rigid and effective authority structure. For as long as the Republican machine controlled Chester and Delaware County’s political and judicial administrations, the structure of patronage was hierarchical and orderly, from a War Board that managed countywide decisions that affected thousands to the individual traffic officer writing a parking ticket. Half a decade after McClure’s death and with the shift in political focus from the city to the county fully in place, the system of patronage was no longer nearly as organized and rationalized. It devolved into localism and extremism fraught with risky ventures of party captains hell-bent on exploiting as much gain and monetary profit as possible from the declining city.
As the machine decentralized and party discipline evaporated, the organization of Chester’s politics took on a more obvious parasitic and extractive character. Municipal corruption was endemic in the decline of many older industrial cities. But Chester’s formal and institutional embrace of corruption was aided by the remnants of the former machine’s patronage system that incentivized the participation of black party leaders in the everyday operation of white rule and economic exploitation. Through the course of the 1970s and 1980s the associations and networks comprised of local white and black politicians; the administrations of police, courts, social welfare, and housing; and the local branches of organized crime and gambling and narcotics syndicates were laid bare, transforming Chester into a frontier town of crime, vice, and official corruption and its residents into hostages to costly schemes endorsed by parasitic urban politics.
Corruption involved large sums of money and the abuse of power at high levels of municipal administration. But it also involved low-level schemes that targeted Chester’s economically vulnerable black residents. In doing so, official corruption relied on and reproduced prevailing racial discourses that associated black inner cities with criminality, discourses that popularly defined the urban-suburban divide in the post–civil rights era. In 1971 a Pennsylvania Crime Commission investigation found that a system of organized kickbacks targeting black residents prevailed throughout Delaware County’s criminal justice system. Unscrupulous bail bondsmen colluded with district judges to uniformly set unnecessarily high bail for low-level criminal offenses. Under this setup, individuals (young black males) arrested for minor infractions such as loitering were charged with and arraigned for more serious crimes. The trumped-up charges triggered setting bail when it was not needed, requiring defendants (and their families) to secure bail. The inflated bail costs provided a substantial premium for the bondsman, and both district justices and police officers shared the proceeds as a kickback. Charges were later reduced or dropped.
The favored inner circle of bail bondsmen had direct connections to city hall and officials in the Chester Police Department. All were white with the exception of Melvin Wade, a black building supply agent who became a professional bondsman in 1969. During the hearings of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, Wade provided elaborate testimony on the operations of Chester’s corrupt bail system. He explained how white bondsmen accessed arraigned defendants through contacts, arranged through the mayor’s office, with top police officials and magistrates. Wade’s bail scam was more grassroots. He cultivated relationships with individual police lieutenants and captains whom he “tipped” for notification of arrests. Wade gradually cornered a small share of the Chester bail bond business. In the course of the investigation, the commission also learned of improper activities surrounding zoning building permits and municipal contracts and financial kickbacks in municipal purchases.15
The bail kickback operation was systematic. The division of payoffs required routine coordination of the local judiciary, police, and bail bondsmen. The vast majority of its victims were black residents and disproportionately young black males. In its review of the records of Chester district justices, the Crime Commission found high arrest rates for blacks for summary offenses such as disorderly conduct and breach of the peace, which were technically noncriminal and punishable by a fine.16 The entire system operated under the cover of racial rhetoric and images that assigned large parts of the city as crime-ridden and its black residents as criminally culpable or at best, permissive and party to a culture of illegality.
A series of Crime Commission investigations conducted in the 1970s found evidence of a city awash in a number of sanctioned illegal activities, including gambling, prostitution, narcotics, loan sharking, official bribery, kickbacks, and payoffs. All these enterprises siphoned money from federal and state dollars to residents’ pocket change, out of Chester. In each case, city hall’s involvement was extensive. Two black Republican Party committee members, Frank Miller and Herman Fontaine, ran an elaborate illegal numbers racket made possible by their political connections and regular payoffs to high-ranking police and local government officials, including Chester’s mayor. Both had served on the board of the Delaware County Citizen Coalition (CITCO), a GCM venture created to jump-start small manufacturing businesses that would provide employment to black laborers. Funded by federal dollars and administered by several black party officials, CITCO closed after three years and a single failed pilot program, citing “management problems and lack of experience.”17 The GCM funneled thousands of dollars to a nightclub owned by the two for a daytime cultural enrichment program for Chester’s black youth. GCM officials defended the expense and the choice of the nightclub, stating “it was one of the few places with suitable facilities that would accept a party of black children.”18
A three-year Crime Commission investigation outlined the details of the Miller-Fontaine gambling enterprise. The numbers racket employed over one hundred employees and grossed between $8 million and $11 million annually. They used the profits to purchase corner stores, warehouses, restaurants, bars, and other small businesses in Chester to serve as fronts for the expanding numbers racket and for payoffs to police and high-level city officials.19 While running the enterprise, both Miller and Fontaine continued as operatives for the Republican Party.20 The commission noted that the extent of the successful operation and its ability to continue unabated were made possible only by ties with Chester’s government. The police provided immunity from arrest for numbers writers and fended off competition by selectively arresting other nonsanctioned numbers writers.21 Yet despite months of commission hearings during the three-year investigation, no officials were charged. In 1974 a Delaware County special prosecutor issued a report in which he stated, “It would be well to emphasize at this point in this report that at the close of the Crime Commission’s investigation no evidence suitable for prosecution was turned over to any local, state, or national prosecution agency and in its April 1973 Report the Crime Commission stated that it had no evidence to back up any of its charges.”22
In 1975 county Democrats pressured a Philadelphia special prosecutor to look anew at the Crime Commission reports and findings and demand that the county’s special prosecutor turn over crucial documents that could lead to prosecutions.23 In response, the U.S. attorney’s office launched a criminal investigation into official corruption in Chester. Four years later Mayor Nacrelli was convicted of accepting kickbacks from gamblers under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. He was sentenced to six years in prison.24 After his federal conviction and while awaiting imprisonment in a federal facility, Nacrelli continued as chairman of the Republican Party, screening job applicants for the Comprehensive Employment Training Act program to determine their political affiliations and placing nonprofessional patronage employees in the Chester Upland School District.25
The federal case against Nacrelli detailed the extent to which the city government of Chester operated as an institutional means of extortion and systematic extraction of resources and capital from residents and legitimate businesses. Government revenues were largely used to pay for the silence of municipal employees, while top officials skimmed profits from vast illegal enterprises. Any internal inquiries into employee misconduct or questionable governmental expenditures were handled swiftly by immediate dismissal and employment blacklisting. Uniformed police officers were “no more than submissive pawns in the game being played by organized gamblers and corrupt politicians in Chester.”26 Little changed after Nacrelli’s conviction. The former mayor served two years of his federal prison sentence, all the while overseeing operations in Chester. According to a Pennsylvania Crime Commission report, Nacrelli quickly resumed full control of party operations upon his release from prison and return to Chester. He continued to select employees for patronage jobs in municipal offices, the Chester Upland School District, the CHA, and the Chester Redevelopment Authority. He routinely convened backroom meetings with members of the Chester City Council without notifying (or inviting) the mayor.
The city’s downward spiral continued through the late 1970s and the 1980s fueled by newer, high-tech forms of vice and graft directly tied to the municipal administration and in turn, the region’s white political system. Video poker replaced the numbers racket. Rampant narcotics trafficking led to syndicate and gang turf wars and street crime. Chester emerged as a central stopping point in the trafficking of cocaine and heroin between southern Florida and New York City.
The city’s segregated public housing developments functioned as open-air drug markets in the 1980s. This in itself was not unique. Many housing projects across the country had become turf for drug dealers, and several cities sought to limit drug activities through community policing and police cooperation with tenant associations. However, Chester was different. City hall sanctioned a hands-off policy in which the police avoided the drug-plagued housing projects, most notably William Penn Homes. Ignored by law enforcement, William Penn Homes became the one-stop hub for cocaine and heroin distribution, sales, and open consumption. In her testimony to the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, Mayor Willie Mae Leake testified that when she became mayor in 1986, she had to instruct the police to return to public housing developments. Her predecessor advised her otherwise, telling her: “When I was mayor, I told them to stay out of the William Penn project. . . . After all, those people don’t pay taxes and they don’t vote.”27
The Pennsylvania Crime Commission convened once again in 1990 and issued a statement that spelled out the constellation of factors contributing to the city’s decades-long reputation for official corruption and rampant criminal activity: “As Chester’s industry further declined, as federal social services, especially labor training, disappeared and the local municipal and county governments abandoned the idea of salvaging the inner city (and instead embarked on draining it of resources and capital), the drug informal economy and associated social organization flourished.”28 In making an explicit connection between the parasitic political economy and the city’s decline and numerous social problems, the commission recognized Chester’s predicament as the willful consequence of politics and urban policy.
The dynamics of a post–civil rights race strategy enabled and legitimized a cynical politics of parasitism, corruption, and extraction. First, the appearance of Chester’s self-determined governance facilitated ongoing official corruption and criminality. The practice of incorporating black political leaders and black functionaries into white-dominated county-based party rule provided racial cover for corruption and vice. The political machine was smaller and broken up into minifiefdoms (of which Chester was one), but it did not cede the city to black control. Instead, white party officials handpicked dependable black leaders to provide a veneer of black self-governance and political control, enabling what the Crime Commission called an “interracial, criminal alliance.”29 All the while, the white power holders ruled over an organized corrupt system that was picking through the remains of a city largely left behind. Local government oversaw corruption of the petty and the grand sorts, skimming off the top of federal funds for social programs and fleecing the city’s poorest residents of their limited incomes. The parasitic political economy in Chester thrived against a steadily worsening social and economic backdrop that rendered the city particularly vulnerable to criminal exploitation and cynical political manipulation.
Second, the regional racial dynamics of black inner cities and white suburbs sustained the illusion that the desperate situations of cities like Chester were caused by the residents themselves. By the mid-1990s most residents of the Philadelphia region considered Chester a dangerous place, one to avoid. Negative news stories fueled the oversimplified story of an exodus of white residents and the rise of a minority-ruled hotbed for criminals and welfare recipients. In short, Chester was written off and made invisible save for profiteers of corruption and vice. Caught in the midst of declines in public safety, education, and other social services, Chester’s post-Nacrelli leaders turned to private sources to spearhead even the most modest form of urban redevelopment and offer some promise of replenishing bare city coffers. As the following discussion suggests, Chester became receptive, if not vulnerable, to particularly opportunistic forms of private sector investment—environmental waste.
Chasing Smokestacks: One Black, One White
Chester’s local political leaders intentionally housed waste disposal facilities in the city as a form of urban economic development, but this was not unique. Other poor northeastern cities facing the economic burden of deindustrialization did so as well. Most waste-to-energy facilities built in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, were constructed in defunct industrial zones in poor cities. Chester followed suit, opening a trash-to-steam incinerator operated by the Westinghouse Corporation in 1991. What is unique to the Chester case is the clustering of four additional waste facilities in the same privately owned parcel along the Delaware River adjacent to a low-income, primarily black residential neighborhood.
Between 1986 and 1991 the strategic politics of race inundated the contested process of siting an incinerator in the city’s West End. The siting process unfolded as a protracted and highly public conflict between the city’s first black mayor and the county’s white political establishment—or so it would seem. The appearance of political discord over the city’s waste zone actually reveals how key stakeholders wielded discourses of racial subordination to push through extensive plans for toxic economic development. The wielding (or use) of rhetoric of race and racism was an effective political strategy precisely because it tapped into the experiences of discrimination that many residents of Chester’s West End faced. As the following account shows, issues of race and racism were deployed in manifold ways, transparent, obscure, and even bizarre. A rhetoric of race and racism shaped and ultimately concealed the decision on how many incinerators would be built, where they would be sited, who would own and operate them, and who would benefit or lose in the long run. Wielding the rhetoric of race and racism proved highly pragmatic and profitable for Delaware County’s proincinerator faction but not for the minority residents of Chester.
During his imprisonment and after, Nacrelli retained control over most of the city’s business, from securing bids and contracts to approving all political appointments. In 1986 his former secretary, Leake, became the first black mayor of Chester. By the time Leake took office, Delaware County political leaders had partnered with a private firm to incinerate trash from all its forty-nine municipalities. The county raised $300 million to construct a trash-to-steam plant through a bond issue underwritten by the Pittsburgh conglomerate Russell, Rea, and Zappala (RR&Z) and Bear, Stearns, and Company Inc. of New York. In 1985 RR&Z formed Chester Solid Waste Associates to purchase waterfront land and develop a megawaste park where the county’s incinerator, a medical waste incinerator, and other waste facilities could be built. The county plan allowed Westinghouse to build, manage, and own the waste-to-steam plant and to guarantee disposal of 465,000 tons of the county’s trash each year for twenty-five years. The plan approved a facility with a burn capacity twice as large that need to incinerate the county’s trash.30As negotiations moved forward, Westinghouse was permitted to seek waste disposal contracts from municipal governments in Delaware and New Jersey.31 Nacrelli helped broker the county’s deal with RR&Z and Westinghouse.
Within months of taking office, Mayor Leake announced that Chester would build its own waste disposal facility as the cornerstone of the city’s plan for economic revitalization. Leake envisioned Chester as a “waste magnet” profiting from packed landfills and looming trash crises in larger nearby cities such as Philadelphia and New York. When Philadelphia’s proposal to build its own municipal trash incinerator was defeated in the early planning stages, Leake saw the opportunity for Chester to economically benefit from burning trash. In October 1986 Chester officials secured a verbal agreement for a multiyear contract to dispose of Philadelphia’s trash. Leake’s planned incinerator would dispose of trash not only from Philadelphia but also from the towns and suburbs of the tri-state area. The proposed waste-to-energy facility would process forty-eight hundred tons of garbage a day, burning 50 percent, recycling around 30 percent, and shipping the remaining residual material to a landfill. It would generate an estimated sixty-six megawatts of electricity a day or about the amount used by sixty-six thousand households.
The mayor and other Chester officials launched an aggressive public relations campaign to build the incinerator. Leake promoted the incinerator as the best opportunity for the city to secure its own economic development; its $335 million cost should be considered an investment in Chester’s future. The incinerator would generate between $5 million to $10 million a year from tipping fees (the fee per tonnage of trash from municipalities) and the sale of the electricity generated, three hundred new jobs with a minimum of 25 percent of the workforce minority employees, and up to one thousand additional jobs in new firms locating in Chester to buy and sell recyclable materials.32
The mayor’s economic message struck a chord with the residents of a city suffering from high unemployment, fiscal debt, and few development opportunities. The city’s special counsel for the project called the incinerator “the cornerstone of the city’s economic development program.”33 An influential local Baptist minister (and former local NAACP president) equated the plan with salvation and summoned Chester citizens to support it. “We are down on our knees and we need to be picked up. This project could bring us back to the good days. We will be able to stand on our own feet.”34 As the first black mayor with strong ties in the city’s black civic community, Leake appeared to be a fighter with Chester’s best interests at heart. A Philadelphia Inquirer profile on the mayor noted her popularity among residents, many of whom attributed a messianic quality to her conviction to lead Chester to economic recovery. The article quoted Leake as saying: “Somehow God is going to help me or show me the way to change the course of Chester. And I pray, I believe it will happen.”35 Since the mayor’s efforts focused exclusively on job creation and economic redemption, her public relations campaign did not address any potential environmental or health concerns of a waste incinerator located within the city.36
Leake’s promises of Chester’s economic revitalization seemed convincing, but the incinerator plan was troubled from the start. Delaware County’s plan for its waste incinerator already had a site and funding in place. Lacking both, the city started with a clear disadvantage and never recovered. In addition, the county took advantage of its head start and thwarted its competitor’s efforts at every chance. Over the next eighteen months, significant challenges to the plant’s financing and siting emerged and quickly escalated.37 In August 1986 the securities firm handling the city’s tax-exempt bonds dropped out, citing concerns about the project’s feasibility. The firm specifically mentioned the city’s inability to secure a site to build the incinerator and no guaranteed commitment for a steady source of trash. Within a week Matthews and Wright, a Wall Street investment firm, signed on to the deal and hastily purchased the bonds on August 29, two days before federal tax oversight regulations were to change. The regulations in place prior to September 1 allowed the $335,000 tax-exempt bond to be issued before the funds were actually needed for construction expenses. The terms of the bond sale, however, fixed the timing of the Chester project, as it required either full repayment or the plant’s completion by August 1991.38
The city’s last-minute bond sale raised enough suspicions to warrant a federal securities fraud investigation. In 1987 investigators alleged that Matthews and Wright had used a fictitious bank to create a paper transfer of $1.7 billion in bonds for Chester and other distressed cities, issued just before the key tax deadline.39 Mayor Leake dismissed concerns that the charges would jeopardize the incinerator funding, describing the firm as “sympathetic to the plight of poor, black cities like Chester.”40 In 1991 the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) informed the city that its bond issue did not comply with requirements for tax-exempt status. The IRS determined that Chester’s bonds were actually sold two months after the September 1, 1986, deadline for tax-exempt status.41 A Matthews and Wright official and a consultant were indicted on fifty-two federal counts of fraud, bribery, and conspiracy, and a bond lawyer pleaded guilty to a charge of failing to report a felony.42
Chester’s financing problems were matched by its failure to acquire a location to build the incinerator. Shortly after the mayor announced the August bond funding, Delaware County officials thwarted the city’s plant location plan. In September the county council voted to purchase the city’s intended site for $1 from the Delaware County Economic Development Center Inc., a nonprofit county agency that had bought the land from Reynolds Aluminum in 1980. When asked about the reason for the purchase, the Delaware County councilman leading the county’s incinerator plan noted “the questionable status of Chester’s plan.”43 Four days later the Delaware County Council diverted $280,000 in Community Development Block Grant funds originally earmarked for Chester to pay for maintenance costs of the newly purchased industrial park. Determined to move forward, the city condemned and announced plans to take possession of a large waterfront parcel owned by Philadelphia Electric in October. But the utility firm was in negotiations to purchase the electricity that would be generated once the county’s Westinghouse incinerator came online. Philadelphia Electric waged a legal battle over the city’s condemnation and possession that continued past the city’s bond-imposed deadline of 1991.44
As the city-county conflict widened, Chester politicians and local supporters cast the battle over the incinerators as a fight for the city’s independence from imperious county rule and eventually as a racial issue pitting the majority black city against the white suburbs. Race and racism, then, entered the lexicon of the siting process not as an issue of the racially disproportionate impact of environmental hazards but as a means to advance one incinerator plan over another. In the closing weeks of 1986 Delaware County political leaders and some Chester city council members urged the mayor to acknowledge the growing obstacles and the increasing improbability that the waste-to-steam incinerator plan would be built. A former mayor, who had vacated the office to become county sheriff, publicly counseled Leake to strike a compromise deal with the county. Leake’s strategy was to buy time. In order for the county’s incinerator to be built, the city would need to sign a host agreement. The county offered a $2 million signing fee. Westinghouse promised the city $2.4 million once the environmental permits were approved and an additional $2 million in payments in 1988 and in 1989. The company also pledged $2.40 per ton of trash handled, which amounted to $2.35 million a year if the plant were to operate at full capacity.
Leake refused, claiming, “We’re being coerced.” Leveling charges of interference and political foul play, the mayor claimed that the county profited from keeping Chester economically depressed and that her plans for economic autonomy threatened the historical imbalance between the city and the county.45 Leo Bean, the city-appointed special representative for the incinerator project, also cast the dispute with the county as one of local rule and economic autonomy: “Chester is on the brink of economic rebirth and it needs to control its own destiny.” Bean continued: “Chester has been under the absolute control of the county for years. The county says we will take care of you, we will give you what you need, the scraps. . . . It’s time that the county recognizes the city has problems, severe problems, and putting a trash-to-steam plant there is not going to solve the problems. It’s just going to make a private developer rich and get the county’s trash processed for free.”46 The rhetoric of the city-county conflict took a decidedly racial tone as the prospects for moving the incinerator plan forward continued to dwindle in 1987. In a high-stakes effort to find a new site for the incinerator, Leake asked the residents of Chester’s majority black West End neighborhood to “sacrifice” their homes.47 The city proposed taking 248 homes, 50 vacant lots, and 7 businesses on 22 acres along the waterfront. All the homes and businesses would have to be demolished after lengthy negotiations with the individual property owners. On the evening of June 30, 1987 Leake made a public appeal to about 125 residents at Calvary Baptist Church. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Leake first calmed the skeptical crowd, telling them: “As I entered tonight, I saw some very unhappy faces. Remember that I’m here for your benefit, not to hurt you.” To build her case for the residents’ consent, the mayor reminded the audience of the importance of the incinerator as the best and last chance to address the city’s poverty, high crime rate, and declining tax base. The church’s minister (and the mayor’s most ardent supporter) furthered the appeal, telling those gathered, “Finally we get somebody in the mayor’s office who wants to stand up and bring the city back, and if you care about our children and our city, there has to be a sacrifice.”48
Leake made a personal appeal for racial solidarity with the predominantly black crowd, declaring that “as a black woman she had their best interests at heart.” As the Inquirer reported, her words appeared to work. “The crowd stood and joined hands and prayed with the mayor. Then the residents, many of whom were angry at the meeting’s onset, walked over to shake the mayor’s hand, kiss her cheek and wish her good luck with the project.” One of the residents, a retired schoolteacher, spoke to the crowd: “I’m for anything that will help Chester. I’m willing to give up my house that I’ve lived in since I was 9 months old.” As many applauded, she turned to the mayor and said, “Mayor Leake, if you want my house tonight, you can have it.”49 Leake’s success at winning the support of residents is notable, especially given that similar communities across the United States were actively mobilizing against building environmentally hazardous facilities. Towns and municipalities sought to pass ordinances to limit new facilities based on fears of pollution and possible negative health consequences.50 Yet for the next nine months, local environmental concerns over waste incineration in Delaware County remained invisible, giving way to a ramped-up rhetoric of contested interests between a black city and its white suburbs.
As required by law, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) scheduled public meetings before issuing a permit to build and operate the county incinerator. The purpose of the meetings was to hear residents’ concerns over any impact the incinerator might have on their community. The meetings were well attended,51 and all the speakers objected to the county’s incinerator plan, citing the county’s racial and political subordination of the city with no mention of possible environmental impacts or health concerns. Vocal supporters of the mayor’s plan had formed the group Concerned Citizens to Save Chester (CCSC) to mobilize and maintain the support of the city’s black residents for the incinerator plan. In a May 1988 public meeting, state officials heard from a dozen CCSC members who issued complaints over a lack of self-determination, references to past and present housing and employment racial discrimination, and demands for “ownership” of the incinerator project for economic development. All the speakers objected to a PADEP operating permit based strictly on the claim that it would prevent Chester from building its own incinerator. “We are tired of handouts. We are tired of being poor folk; our city is on welfare. . . . We are tired of being walked on, sat on, spat on,” one speaker concluded. PADEP officials responded that they could say nothing about Chester’s incinerator project, because they had not received an application for state review and permits. They reminded the speakers that the meeting’s purpose was public comment on concerns over possible traffic, noise, pollution, odors, and other impacts of the proposed county facility. None were expressed.52
The CCSC also targeted Chester politicians who were either lukewarm or outright opposed to the project, calling on one city councilman to resign, as “he never votes ‘yes’ on any positive aspect of the Chester Resource Recovery Project that would help Chester’s survival.”53 Calvary Baptist Church’s minister publicly leveled charges of racism at council members, claiming that Chester had been “lied to, stepped on and deceived” by county officials and that the “Ku Klux Klan is all around us.” The county was determined to stop the city from building its own incinerator because its leaders did not want Chester to “earn revenues for itself because the city would then rise up out of its poverty.”54
The city’s efforts to racialize the issue mobilized many of Chester’s black residents to support the incinerator, but not all. Few residents disagreed with the city’s right to political self-determination, but a growing number was critical of the incinerator plan and the racial tactics used to promote it. Months after Leake’s appeal to sacrifice their homes, residents had heard nothing regarding the timing, moving allowances, or property valuations from the city. Questions remained unanswered, prompting some residents of the West End to form Concerned Citizens of Flower/Pennell Streets. The group took issue with the lack of updates on the plant’s financing and siting. Its members questioned why the discussion of the incinerator was cast as a city-county issue and not a local West End one, given the short- and long-term consequences for residents. Concerns voiced over the potential environmental impacts either incinerator would produce were drowned out by the representation of the city’s plan as a struggle for political independence and against the white county leadership’s political domination of a black city’s future.55
By the fall of 1988 the Chester–Delaware County incinerator conflict took a decidedly more conciliatory tone. The county won approval from the state to begin construction of the Westinghouse incinerator. All that remained was for the city to sign the host agreement for the plant to be built along its waterfront. Meanwhile, the prospects for the city’s project continued to deteriorate. The investigation into the $335 million bond issue left funding in limbo, and the city lost a commitment from one incinerator construction contractor and was courting another. The siting process stalled as a city council member questioned the use of a realty firm with ties to city leaders to assess the values of the homes and businesses to be cleared for the incinerator site. Most pressingly, a $1.2 million deficit in the city budget threatened to jeopardize municipal services, including police and fire protection. The county restated its standing bailout offer of $2.5 million, provided the city drop its opposition to the county’s plant. In November 1988 Chester officials conceded and signed the agreement, which gave the city immediate cash to cover its deficit and millions more over the coming years. At the announcement, Leake and other officials said Chester would still pursue its own $335 million trash processing plant on the waterfront.56
After the city signed the host agreement, the county’s plan proceeded and the Westinghouse incinerator began operation in 1991. Chester Solid Waste Associates, which owned the parcel and held a financial interest in the incinerator, proceeded to develop additional waste facilities on its site. Discussion of the city incinerator all but ceased. In 1991 the IRS invalidated the city’s bond issue, officially putting an end to a project already effectively impractical. That year Leake lost the mayoral election and a Democrat became mayor of Chester for the first time in more than a century. In 1992 the city-appointed director of the trash incinerator project was convicted and imprisoned for soliciting and receiving kickbacks from contractors hired to plan and site the failed incinerator.57 The total cost for an incinerator that was never built was $7 million.58
The Incinerator War That Wasn’t
From its start, the city’s plan to build an incinerator appeared unlikely. By 1988 both city council members and county leaders conceded that only one of the two plants could be built, as two would create too much competition for the region’s trash to make either project practical. Given that the county had obtained funding and a location for its project by the time the city expressed an interest in building a competing incinerator, there was little doubt the Westinghouse incinerator would be built provided the county received the necessary state permits and the city host agreement.59 While the city incinerator plan may appear in retrospect both a misguided effort and an exercise in incompetence, it also suggests much more about the intentional use of racial divisions in the politics of urban development.
Claims of racial subordination and limited autonomy over the city’s economic development reaped considerable minority community buy in for the idea of a waste-based urban economy, as Chester residents were fixated on the ownership of an incinerator plan, not the consequences of one being built. Between 1986 and 1991 the political discourse was successfully confined to a minority community’s right to build its own incinerator, not whether one should be built at all. At the start of the incinerator battle, the county plan had already secured funding and a location for its incinerator, but the plant’s burn capacity, the fees to be paid to Chester, and permitting assurances for Chester Solid Waste Associates to build a multi-facility waste zone were not. These significant details, with far-reaching consequences for residents, were negotiated during the conflict between the city and the county, while public attention focused on the political drama over which of the two plans would prevail. Although county leaders actively undermined the chances of the city’s incinerator being built, they never publicly dismissed the idea, indicating on repeated occasions that the city could possibly accommodate two incinerators. The terms of the extended city-county contest, the issues at hand (self-determination of a black city) and those that were not (environmental impact on the community), laid the local political groundwork for Westinghouse to build a massive incinerator and for later siting the four other waste facilities in the same waste zone with minimal community opposition.
It is not possible to conclude that the city-county incinerator war was a ruse concocted to facilitate the siting of one of the largest waste incinerator industrial parks in the United States. Yet the evidence suggests that the key terms of the deal that produced the waste zone were finalized as the supposed battle was waging. In December 1988 the Pennsylvania Crime Commission focused on the activities of Nacrelli, the Republican machine leader and former mayor of Chester (and former employer of Mayor Leake). The commission noted that Nacrelli had testified in a 1985 civil suit that he continued to maintain political control over the city’s affairs, both vital and routine. In a written report the Crime Commission concluded that Nacrelli had played a significant role in mediating the incinerator dispute between the city and the county, holding several meetings with key principals, including Mayor Leake, city council members, county politicians, Westinghouse officials, and partners from RR&Z, the owners of Chester Solid Waste Associates. Nacrelli acknowledged his part in settling the dispute, referring to his role as that of a volunteer in service to the city of Chester. The Crime Commission uncovered no wrongdoing regarding Nacrelli’s role in the incinerator negotiations. In its report, however, the commission concluded, “The perception that government must rely upon or call upon convicted racketeers to mediate disputes in an industry historically tainted with organized crime involvement, serves no other end but to suggest to the citizens of Chester that racketeers still decide public policy issues in the City of Chester.”60 Despite extensive testimony from key city, county, and corporate officials involved in the incinerator dispute, the commission could not conclude whether Nacrelli had clearly favored one side or the other. It appears he supported both parties during the course of the conflict as a means to broker a favorable outcome for Chester Solid Waste Associates and Westinghouse.61
The protracted conflict pushed racial subordination to the fore of public discourse, mobilizing salient racial tensions that lurked just below the surface of everyday life for many of Chester’s black residents. Positioning the incinerator as a racial struggle resonated among many Chester residents precisely because racism, racial discrimination, and subordination were readily apparent and experienced so viscerally. The political deployment of race and racism was a cynical ploy for power that ultimately diverted community attention away from the disproportionate siting process itself.
In the Aftermath of a Parasitic Politics
Organized grassroots mobilization against Chester’s waste magnet and legal charges of environmental racism eventually materialized, but only after the county’s incinerator and other waste burning facilities were up and running and their impact on the surrounding communities had become apparent. The waste zone’s anchor industry, the Westinghouse trash incinerator, opened in 1991. Two years later the city and county worked together to fast-track local regulatory approvals and granted exceptions and variances to land-use policies in the sixty-two-acre waste zone. Local government oversight of operations in the zone was minimal. The principal private sector stakeholder, Chester Solid Waste Associates, “retained control over every facility that has been permitted to locate in Chester, exerting direct influence over its waste-processing tenants.”62 Left out of the arrangement were the citizens of Chester, particularly the residents of the adjacent West End. Between 1991 and 1995 the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) approved individual permits for five waste processing facilities in the fenced-off parcel, including a medical waste incinerator, a rubber tire recycling plant, and a contaminated soil recycling facility. Chester Solid Waste Associates held ownership stakes in each of the separate companies.
The border of Chester’s waste zone backed up against the West End, a neighborhood of brick and masonry, flat-roofed, two-story, single-family row houses, abandoned or derelict properties, and a number of overgrown empty lots. The West End neighborhood reflected many of the economic and demographic trends that had enveloped the city proper. By 1990 Chester had lost over a third of the total manufacturing jobs present in 1950. Home values in the West End averaged $22,800, below Chester’s overall average of $37,800 and far below leafy suburban Delaware County’s average of $111,700. The median income in the neighborhood was $17,137, compared to $20,000 for the city and $37,000 for the entire county. In what was once a stable neighborhood housing waterfront factory workers, the number of West End households shrank to 124 home owners and 74 renters. Blacks comprised the vast majority of residents at 95 percent, whereas the proportion for the entire city in 1990 was 69 percent.63
Compared to other residential areas in Chester and especially suburban Delaware County (where most of the incinerator-bound trash originated), West End residents disproportionately suffered the negative impacts from the waste zone.64 As the number of facilities permitted to operate expanded, residents dealt with a steady flow of trash trucks, odors, and noise. In their 1996 study of environmentally distressed neighborhoods, Michael Greenberg and Dona Schneider found people living directly next to mounting piles of trash awaiting incineration. Close to 50 percent of the residents living adjacent to the waste zone wanted to move out of the neighborhood. Over 40 percent of all Chester residents reported the routine nuisances of smoke and odors from adjacent plants, rats, trash on the streets, and incessant vehicle noise and traffic.65 Another study depicted the steady stream of incinerator-bound garbage trucks through residential streets:
Since 1991, when the incinerator opened, trucks with New York, Delaware, and Ohio license plates barreled down Thurlow Street, once a quiet residential road, often fifteen or more hours a day. The noise kept sleepy children awake until late at night, and woke them early the next morning. Their parents swept the dust that invaded their homes, and tried to get rid of the trash that flew off the heavily loaded, uncovered trucks, before it attracted the rats which arrived with the incinerator. Mothers and grandmothers watched their children as carefully as they could, to catch them before they chased a ball into the street where the trucks rattled by. Many noticed that they were coughing more, and that their kids seemed to be missing more days of school because of illness.66
Mounting concerns over the waste cluster’s negative health impacts on West End residents prompted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to conduct a risk assessment study in Chester in 1994. That year President Bill Clinton signed his Executive Order on Environmental Justice that required sixteen federal agencies to address the exposure of poor and minority communities to disproportionate levels of environmental health risks. The EPA’s six-month risk assessment study examined the incidence of health problems in Chester and the West End in particular. The results released in 1995 found unacceptable cancer risks and serious noncancer risks such as kidney disease, liver disease, and respiratory problems, among residents who lived near the waste industries.67 Chester’s infant mortality rate was the highest in the state in the 1990s, and its percentage of low-weight births was nearly double that for Delaware County as a whole. The city’s lung cancer mortality rate was nearly 60 percent higher than that of Delaware County. Of Chester’s children, 60 percent had blood lead levels in excess of the state’s threshold of safety.68
As the number of existing and planned facilities in the waste zone grew, residents and local environmental activists formed the grassroots organization Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL). CRCQL’s leader, the Chester resident Zulene Mayfield, organized petition drives and direct action protests at city hall and along the streets garbage trucks used to access the waste facilities, but to no avail. The city’s and the state’s responses were to permit the siting of Thermal Pure, a medical waste incinerator, and additional waste industries. The state granted Thermal Pure permission to incinerate 288 tons of infectious waste per day from Pennsylvania and surrounding states.69 With the opening of the Thermal Pure facility in 1993, the quality of life in the West End deteriorated further. In an incident much publicized by CRCQL, a plant shutdown due to a malfunction in July 1995 left nineteen unrefrigerated truckloads of infectious medical waste on site for six days emitting a foul odor that permeated the neighborhood. In June 1995 the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) granted another waste processing permit to Soil Remediation Systems that allowed the company to process 250,000 tons per year of petroleum-contaminated soil at the Chester waste industrial park.70
In May 1996 CRCQL filed a class action lawsuit against the PADEP on the basis of equal protection under Section 602 of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.71 The movement alleged discrimination resulting from permits the PADEP granted to five waste treatment facilities in Chester without consideration of the undue burden on nearby minority residents. Although the PADEP issued permits one facility at a time and without explicit or overt discriminatory intent, the plaintiffs claimed that the compounded polluting effects of multiple facilities operating in one place produced a cumulative negative outcome for nearby minority residents. Section 602 of Title VI requires that federal agencies adopt implementing regulations that prohibit not only intentional discrimination but also discriminatory effects. Consequently, CRCQL provided evidence of disparate impact or discriminatory effects of the agency’s actions without the burden of proving intent on the part of either individuals or the agency. The lawsuit argued that when the PADEP granted a permit to the fifth waste treatment facility near the minority neighborhood, the residents suffered clear discrimination. The district court ruled in favor of the PADEP, but the Third Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling in December 1997 and found that the state agency’s decisions had discriminated against Chester residents.72
The environmental justice movement viewed the Third Circuit Court’s ruling as groundbreaking, as it potentially provided environmental advocates, lawyers, and communities a less onerous legal means to fight environmentally hazardous facilities in poor and minority neighborhoods. The ruling opened the possibility of arguing that disparate impacts stemmed from structural forms of racism without demonstrating evidence of clear discriminatory intent. However, a clear victory for environmental advocates was short-lived. The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the case in 1998 after the fifth waste industry, Soil Remediation Services, withdrew its application for a permit to operate.73
In addition to chasing smokestacks, Chester officials turned to another unconventional form of urban development that promised to deliver jobs and community development: housing prisoners. In the early 1990s, when incarceration levels were predicted to rise dramatically, a growing amount of federal and state dollars became available for new prison construction in primarily poorer rural towns. After intense lobbying efforts by local officials, Chester was selected as the site for a new state prison in the mid-1990s. The State Correctional Institution at Chester (or SCI-Chester) opened in 1998 as a medium security prison for male inmates with a documented history of substance abuse. It is one of only two such institutions in the United States designed to treat substance abusers in a therapeutic setting. The treatment program is a joint effort of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and a nonprofit addiction and mental health services corporation. State prisons are not typically built within an older city’s limits. But Chester and Delaware County politicians (particularly members of the Republican Party) lobbied intensely for the Chester site, arguing that the prison would create much-needed jobs and economic spillover effects for Pennsylvania’s poorest city. Chester officials were attracted by the additional revenues from federal substance abuse treatment funds that a drug rehabilitation facility would bring.
The decision to locate the prison on the waterfront adjacent to the few remaining industries (including the newer waste treatment facilities) speaks to the limited options available to Chester on the heels of decades of urban decline and a parasitic politics of extraction from the pockets of its own residents. The prison’s small size blended in with an already fragmented landscape of occasional factories, empty lots, and abandoned warehouses. At the time the prison first opened, the streets across Industrial Highway were known for incidences of petty crime, small-time drug dealing, prostitution, and street gang activity. The anticipated broader, positive economic effects of penal-based development were never realized.
The Strategic Uses of Racial Stigma
Our understanding of racial and class segregation in the post–civil rights era is often depicted as de facto, the unfortunate consequence of lingering racial prejudice, the legacy of past (and now illegal) institutional discrimination, worsening economic inequality, or the lifestyles of the urban poor themselves. These lines of thinking shift our gaze away from the active forces of social exclusion and isolation. We would like to believe that active social, economic, and spatial exclusion originated in a distant past, has since been rendered illegal, and is no longer a compelling explanation for the persistence of urban poverty and exclusion. The stories in this chapter prove otherwise. Ongoing and ultimately destructive government policies and private sector interests actively reproduced and benefited from the social and spatial isolation of Chester’s minority residents. The prevailing racial discourse of the inner city as dependent, threatening, self-damaging, and ultimately unsalvageable enabled this “fire sale” brand of urban politics of community pilfering, beginning with the GCM story in the late 1960s, continuing with the municipal corruption scandals of the 1970s, and ending with the invention of Chester as a waste magnet for environmentally toxic industries. Key to the city’s downward trajectory is the strategic use of the racial divide to place the responsibility and blame for social and economic decline squarely on the backs of the poor black community while masking the suburban-focused white elites’ profitable extraction of as much of the city’s remaining value as possible. As the chapter has shown, urban decline fed on a mix of continued institutional exploitation of Chester’s poor and black residents, the dissemination of discourses of fear about the black ghetto (heightened by earlier urban unrest in the city), and the clever allusion to black political leadership and participation as proof of self-governance and empowerment.