It’s been full steam ahead for Mayor Cherelle Parker since her inauguration in January. Her biggest accomplishment — or failure — was the Kensington and Allegheny cleanup, a project geared towards restoring a “civilizing veneer” to Kensington Avenue. 

Fixing Kensington could not be done virtually like moving parts of a video game. Parker had to go in surgically, with the help of the police, and begin the excision: removing the cosmetic scourge without giving much thought as to where the misplaced people — who refused to go to shelters and rehab — would go. What happened is they migrated into other parts of the city, including my neighborhood, a mere mile or two from K and A, where many new homeless faces popped up, men and women walking around aimlessly looking for someplace to “break ground.”   

The Kensington cleanup, while well-intentioned, was a site-specific project with geographical boundaries so that after the disbursement you could point to the area and say that some level of progress had been attained. But this is like sanitizing one small neighborhood of litter and then saying that the war on dirt is making progress when in fact the entire city is covered in litter. The K and A cleanup was more of a resume-building operation for Mayor Parker. K and A may be clean — despite the fact that the area now looks like an occupied war zone with police stationed everywhere like military guards — while the entire city is still very much a less concentrated version of K and A.  

One has only to look at the ever-growing — as in massive — tent encampment around the Walmart in South Philadelphia. This rustic metropolis of homeless drug addicts — about the size of a US Army base — expands on a daily basis. I’ve heard that the encampment houses mainly gay and trans homeless, and that there are tents as far as the eye can see.   

By looking the other way and ignoring the growth of the Walmart camp, is the city cultivating another K and A crisis? 

Mayor Parker is not a business-as-usual Democrat despite her endorsement of Kamala Harris for president — a Harris presidency, as all sound Americans realize, would be the end of America as we know it. Parker has not ended the city’s sanctuary city status — a move like that would rile too many progressives — but she won’t opt to defund the police, either. She stood firm in 2020 when City Council debated the idea. 

What she has done that is truly admirable is insisting that all City Hall workers return to in-office work. 

She’s correct in saying that such a move will be a bold first step in revitalizing Center City. The (mostly unnecessary) lockdown related to the pandemic destroyed much of what we’ve come to know as Center City life: the multiplicity of Asian buffet eateries — a favorite among office workers — have nearly all disappeared. Casual luncheonettes have closed their doors. Food vendors are less plentiful. Once common bar/restaurant hideaways with popular happy hours have all dried up, leaving nothing to take their place. As a result, Philadelphia’s legendary funky flare —the city where there used to be so many things to do — became a thing of the past.   

Like voting by mail, working from home was supposed to be a temporary measure, the idea being that once the “crisis” was over things would go back to normal. That didn’t happen with voting, and because it didn’t happen we saw the pandemonium surrounding the 2020 election. Traditionally, working from home was a privilege employees earned over time; one never started a new job by working at home although the trend before the pandemic was for some office workers to work hybrid schedules that involved some home-work activity. 

Mayor Parker spent fifteen years working in City Hall meeting fellow city workers and building relationships, experiencing first hand the mechanics of day to day life in the city’s hallways of power. You can’t get that kind of experience by working virtually or in the comfort of your fifteenth floor condo in Society Hill Towers.     

In May 2024, Parker announced that all city employees were required to return full time to the office, beginning on Monday, July 15, 2024. 

This effectively ended the city’s virtual work policy that was instituted in 2021 because of the pandemic. 

“Employee presence at the workplace allows for more personal and productive interactions,” Parker was quoted as saying. “It facilitates communication. It promotes social connections as well as collaboration, innovation and inclusion. It also delivers on my promise of an accessible workforce that is best situated to serve the people of Philadelphia.”

The squawking from some city employees as a result of this announcement was deafening. You would have thought that Parker was demanding pay cuts or initiating layoffs. The lockdown had spoiled these workers in the way that an only child is easily spoiled. No lattes at home? No getting up at nine or ten in the morning and working in your pajamas. Parker’s directive was taken as a personal assault: “You mean you want me to take the Market-Frankford El and disrupt my peace of mind? You know what parking is like in Center City! This is outrageous.”  

Some even used scattered news reports that Covid might be returning as an excuse to continue working at home.

 “The Covid crisis is here again!” they clamored. Hiding behind masks and pandemics: You still see remnants of this behavior today, perfectly healthy looking twenty and thirty-something people hiding behind face masks while riding bicycles or walking in the city. At this point this is nothing less than a sort of pathology that has enveloped certain personality types. Often they are woke Democrats who, like Tim Walz, support putting tampons in fourth grade boys’ bathrooms — but that’s another story.   

“I’m at war with the status quo,” the mayor said, when she got pushback on this issue. 

The pushback came in the form of a lawsuit filed by District Council 47 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The suit claims the mayor’s mandate not only violates its contract but will harm city workers — because, you know, the pandemic is coming back. It should be noted that this union represents 6,000 administrative and supervisory employees — what one might call, in a SNL rather snide sort of way, “lounge workers” or the “slightly spoiled ones who rarely get their hands dirty.” 

District Council 47 also filed an unfair-practices complaint with the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board. They mean business. These union members don’t want to take the El and they certainly don’t want to deal with parking issues. 

They want to make their coffee at home.  

Judge Sierra Thomas Street nixed the District Council 47 lawsuit slightly ahead of Parker’s July 15 deadline, stating that she didn’t think the union was able to prove reputable harm. 

Union leaders, unhappy with Judge Thomas’s decision, vowed to keep fighting for a “fair resolution” but urged members to report to their away-from-home worksite on July 15. 

Philadelphia Magazine reported on the views of some city workers who went back to work after the July 15 deadline.  

“It’s been pure chaos,” the magazine quoted one city worker as saying. Another worker said she was about to look for another job where she could work remotely.  The article stated that many city employees feel it’s unfair to force them to return to work because “they were doing a perfectly good job from home.”

Of course, Philadelphia Magazine would say that, since all of its employees work from home. 

The one (possible) gripe these work-at-home complainers have going for them is when they say that the transition on July 15 had not been handled correctly. We have to take their word on this one. They say that when they went back to work there was a lack of space and desks “and other basic necessities,” which made it all the more difficult to get themselves in gear.

One city worker complained to WHYY that the conditions of the workplace amounted to “a slap in the face to workers.” 

City Hall in the 1970s was horrendously dirty, especially the graffiti-covered restrooms where the toilets didn’t flush and where the ‘70s version of homeless people camped out there all day. It’s in much better shape today, of course, as are all city offices. But after a too long and unnecessary lockdown — a lockdown that destroyed Center City life — there are probably many offices that need sprucing up.

Then there’s this: coming back to work with a resentful attitude tends to make one hyper-critical and over-reactive.   

The Inquirer noted that even Parker’s attempt to win the affection of returning workers with free Chickie’s & Pete’s crab fries went bust when they ran out of food and some workers had to do without.

Rule 1: Never run out of food when planning an event for disgruntled people. If you must, always over-order. These people, after all, are coming from apartments and homes with stocked refrigerators where eating all day was a pleasant option — and where going without just wasn’t acceptable. 

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia,” ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia,” and “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.