Read A Prayer for the City for Free Online Page A

rumps of other buildings, or the way the air conditioner was held in place with a concoction of plywood, gray duct tape, and old rolled-up newspapers that had turned yellow. The scalded-brown color of the shades, as if someone had once tried to iron them flat, didn’t seem to bother him. Nor did the yap of the beeper at his belt. He just went on.
    Little by little his office began to take shape. On the left was the framed picture of the man who had been perhaps the greatest inspiration in his life, former federal judge Joseph S. Lord III. Cohen had clerked for him after law school, in the early 1980s, and at the bottom of the picture was an inscription that said, “If every judge had colleagues like you, the law would approach perfection, and so would friendship.” On the ledge behind the desk were pictures of his two children, Benjamin and Josh. On the right were framed diplomas from Swarthmore College, from which Cohen graduated in 1977, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he had been among the top three in his class. Since law school, his only professional job had been at Ballard Spahr. He had loved it there, and up until the aberration that had landed him in the Dr. Seussian world of City Hall, where hallways stopped and stairways went nowhere, he had never shown the slightest inclination to leave. “I’d be crazy if I didn’t have a little bit of the feeling, Have I done the right thing here?” he said on this Sunday at the beginning of January in 1992. “There’s no doubt about that.”
    Cohen then fell back to work, so deeply shrouded within the cocoon of the task at hand that he didn’t even seem to hear the questions of others, much less respond to them. He was like that for hours, but then, just as nighttime fell, he grabbed his coat and left the building. He headed west on Market Street until he came to a stunning skyscraper that took up much of the block of Seventeenth Street. He searched his wallet for his security card and inserted it into the neat little slot, whereupon a responsive and gleaming elevator whisked him to the forty-sixth floor. He got off the elevator and opened the doors to the Ballard Spahr law firm. He went to the corner office that was still his, but, with overtones of “Cinderella,” only until the stroke of midnight. After that, he would have no association withBallard Spahr, beyond memories and friendships. After that, he would draw a paycheck from the city of Philadelphia at a pay cut of well over $200,000 a year.
    He began to pack up a few remaining things, but as he did, he was momentarily drawn to the window. It was a brisk and serene night with an unfettered view stretching west to the Schuylkill River and east down Market Street to City Hall. In the quiet splendor of that office, suffused with shades of cream and gray and beige, any decision to leave, even for lunch, seemed unfathomable. For someone like David Cohen, it was hard not to think something quite terrible had happened. Behind the veil of work and compulsion and perfection, he had gone mad.
    By any stretch of logic, this office, so removed from all the trouble that routinely took place so far below, should have been his forever. “I am basically an extremely conservative, steady person,” he had said earlier in the day. “It would not have been shocking to me that I would have spent the rest of my life [at Ballard Spahr] and literally not left. That would not have been an unexpected result for me.” It was true that he had gone on a reduced schedule at Ballard to serve as campaign manager when Rendell had run for mayor the previous year, but even then he had managed to bill close to two thousand hours, and it had been assumed he would return to the firm full-time once the election was over.
    Certainly the senior partners at Ballard Spahr were hoping that, for it wasn’t simply by a stroke of hyperbole that Cohen was known at the firm by the acronym COE—chief of everything. Nor was there