First of three parts

These things, too, were part of Street's firm rule: loathing among his foes, an atmosphere of enforced conformity in Council, and proposals that stalled because Street did not like them or believed their sponsors had slighted him in some way.

During nearly 19 years in Council, including seven as president, there were two John Streets. One displayed a calm, intellectual approach to tackling problems that could have paralyzed the city without his efforts. The other displayed an obsession with power, control and respect - how to get it, keep it, and use it to his and his constituents' advantage.

In his December 1998 farewell speech to Council, Street said that giving and getting respect made him a better leader. "It is not enough to be smart," he said. " . . . Respect is a necessary prerequisite for credibility, without which leadership is impossible."

This is the complex, sometimes edgy personality and leadership style that Street will bring to the Mayor's Office if elected Nov. 2.

Street's attitude about respect is not surprising, given his background. He has been underestimated his whole life.

He grew up poor on a Montgomery County farm with no indoor plumbing. A high school teacher told him he would never go to college. Even with a degree in hand, Street had to fight to get into law school, just as he later had to fight to keep his Council seat.

"When I came, City Council got no respect. The world treated City Council like mushrooms: We were kept in the dark," Street, 55, a father of four, said. "I thought that was terrible."

After joining Council in 1980, Street, a Democrat, quickly realized that its greatest power lay in its ability to approve, or disapprove, city budgets. So he mastered the minutiae, becoming an expert at city finances and a force to be reckoned with by every mayor since.

A decade later, Street's self-discipline and work ethic are legendary around City Hall. He rises before dawn to exercise, does not drink, does not smoke, and is a churchgoing Seventh-Day Adventist. He has a stern public demeanor, and has never been notably popular in his own district. Twice in the '90s, as his power within Council was rising, he had to struggle to win primary elections.

All of it fuels talk that he is too serious and unapproachable to be effective as mayor, suggestions that Street dismisses.

"In matters that are serious to the city, I have a serious demeanor," he said, citing his first year as Council president, when the city faced financial collapse. "This is no joke here. The whole future of the city was at stake. We had to do some very difficult things. It's a part of what's required of a leader."

As Council president from 1992 until he resigned in December to run for mayor, Street concentrated power in his hands rather than sharing it with colleagues as his courtly predecessor, Joseph E. Coleman, had done. Street ran major bills through the all-powerful Committee of the Whole, which he chaired, and banished foes to meaningless committee chairmanships.

He lured legal and financial whizzes from the city bureaucracy, amassing a skilled technical staff he then lent to allies. Opponents had to fend for themselves.

Projects that met Street's approval - such as the DisneyQuest entertainment center planned for Eighth and Market Streets, and endorsed by Mayor Rendell - moved swiftly through the bureaucratic maze.

Projects Street had doubts about - including Temple University's Apollo arena - could be stymied for months until he got what he wanted. What he wanted, usually, were concessions to help his constituents, including money to build low-income housing and promises to hire neighborhood people.

Street also used the power of his office to help friends and campaign contributors get lucrative city contracts. A tight circle of longtime friends benefited particularly.

As Council president, Street even wielded some power over Mayor Rendell: The pair held their famous weekly meetings to discuss city business on Street's time (7:30 a.m.) and on Street's turf (his fourth-floor City Hall office).

The significance was not lost on Street, who used the same wee-hour-meeting tactic with union heads and community leaders.

"If it's important to you, you will get up early and meet me," he said. "If it's not important, you probably won't."

When constituents cried out over projects they felt would disturb the neighborhood, such as Project Home's Fairmount Avenue homeless shelter, Street cried louder. He fought Project Home relentlessly, in City Hall and in the courts, backing down only when federal officials threatened to strip the city of $15 million in funds for the homeless.

When Bell of Pennsylvania announced plans to build a $25 million computing center near Temple University, Street withheld Council's support until Bell agreed to help neighborhood people get jobs, training and housing.

Street's aura is such that many people both in and out of City Hall say they are afraid to speak out against him publicly.

"If you're not on John Street's side, you are his enemy, and he will punish you," said one housing developer, who asked not to be named. "Is that how you rule a city?"

Street does not see it that way.

"There are people who think they know these things, and they have no idea. There are people who are saying: 'John Street travels in a small circle and he's vindictive,' " Street said.

"All you have to do is look and see what I have done. . . . What I have done is build bridges, serious bridges, to all kinds of factions and all kinds of communities. And I have been very careful about it."

The city's 'last frontier'

for new development

"It says to people: 'We care about your neighborhood; we care about what's going on. You shouldn't give up, because we haven't given up,' " Street said during a recent tour of his former Council district, the Fifth, which stretches from Rittenhouse Square to the tattered heart of North Philadelphia.

Street has spent nearly two decades trying to solve housing problems and stimulate economic development in his district. With his encouragement, the city began directing much of its federal antipoverty grants to North Philadelphia.

"The policy under the Rendell administration was to make it the priority," City Housing Director John Kromer said of North Philadelphia. "Other council districts and other neighborhoods did not get funded as heavily."

During Street's tenure as Council president, more than $100 million in federal money was pumped into his district for low- and moderate-income housing.

It paid for 879 new homes (half the citywide total) and 866 new rentals (34 percent). In addition, 64 percent of all home ownership subsidies citywide and half of all rental subsidies were allotted to the Fifth.

By some reckonings, that massive investment has barely made a dent in the blighted North Philadelphia landscape.

"John had control of all that money, and what did he get accomplished?" asked one community developer, who requested anonymity. "I look at North Philadelphia, and I see Beirut."

Street eyes a different vista. On a recent tour, he proudly pointed out neighborhoods bolstered by new construction.

They are communities such as Taino Gardens, an almost-completed spacious, 42-unit rental complex on Sixth and Dauphin Streets. And Ludlow Village Phase II, a home-ownership project at 1600 N. Eighth St. that will offer suburban features such as front yards and backyards, driveways, and a grassy median in the street.

As mayor, Street wants to float a $250 million "blight removal" bond to pay for bulldozing thousands of long-abandoned homes and commercial buildings.

His goal: Ready the land for development, be it big-box stores, houses, or even parks and gardens.

"There is a movement now for these big marketers, retailers like Wal-Marts, Kmarts, Home Depots, and some of the big supermarkets to come into urban areas," Street said. "But they're never going to come unless the area is first prepared for them. You've got to do some housing. You've got to clean these neighborhoods up to make them look halfway decent, or else nobody is ever going to come."

Much of the ground-level work in North Philadelphia is being done by community development corporations that finance projects with a mix of federal grants, city loans and tax breaks. They, too, have witnessed the way Street can make things happen.

Roger Kern runs the Poplar Enterprise Development Corp., which is building the $8 million, 204-home West Poplar Nehemiah community near 12th Street and Girard Avenue.

He remembered calling Street's office when thieves were looting the construction site overnight.

"Just getting the police involved was tough enough, until we went to Street," Kern said. "Then we had regular patrols."

Bill Salas of the Hispanic Association of Contractors and Entrepreneurs in Kensington said Street has been "extremely, extremely helpful" in supporting the group's projects.

Even so, Street was not the easiest guy to get to, Salas recalled. Consider the time Street set for one meeting with Latino leaders: 6:30 a.m., in City Hall. On a Sunday.

"I thought it was strange on a Sunday, before church," Salas recalled. "It was early, but I said: 'Sure, why not? We work on weekends, too.' "

Understanding Street's work ethic and feelings about respect has helped community development organizations get on his good side.

APM, the Association of Puerto Ricans on the March, a 27-year-old social services organization in North Philadelphia, became a player under Street.

In 1990, director Rose Gray met with Street to present an exhaustive, 10-year outline of APM's plans to revive a neglected stretch of lower North Philadelphia, showing how each project linked to the next.

Gray said she brought the plan to Street as a sign of respect, because "he's the protector of the community, the seer, the eyes."

Thereafter, Street cleared a path to other key political leaders, and wrote letters of support when the group sought public funding.

People who crossed Street, whether in the neighborhoods or in City Hall, saw a different side of him.

In 1985, he held up $803,000 in funds requested by the Department of Human Services and the District Attorney's Office to help delinquent youths and fight welfare fraud. Street said bureaucrats had ignored his phone calls, and failed to answer his questions about the funding.

At a hearing on the issue, he shouted at officials from the Goode administration and the District Attorney's Office: "You all have to understand that we're the ones that have the ultimate responsibility . . . and we expect our phone calls to be returned, and we expect people to come here with information as requested!"

When he voted against a 1989 resolution to make June "Lesbian and Gay Pride Month," Street explained that gays had "disrespected" him a year earlier with strong public criticism of his support for cuts to AIDS programs.

"I was outraged, and I'm still outraged," Street said at the time. "I won't take it."

The budget cuts in question illustrate how Street's priorities shifted as he grew more powerful.

Initially, Street was a social liberal, willing to increase taxes to fund services for the needy. By the late 1980s, with Philadelphia's financial crisis looming, a new John Street emerged.

The new Street, chairman of Council's Appropriations Committee, was a fiscal conservative who surprised liberal colleagues. The new Street forged a coalition with conservative Democrats and Republicans, and effectively controlled Council, even if Coleman held the title of president. Street pushed through a 1989 city budget with no new taxes and cuts in social services.

The same man who had twice filed for personal bankruptcy, defaulted on student loans, and let unpaid utility and tax bills pile up was leading the fight to tame an out-of-control city budget.

As president, Street controlled the legislative process, deciding when - and if - bills saw the light of day. He did not hesitate to use that power in his own political interest.

In 1996, Councilman James Kenney introduced a bill to ban aggressive panhandling, and give police power to remove people sleeping on city sidewalks. Street killed the bill.

A year later, Street introduced his own version. It passed Council, and was signed into law by Rendell in 1998 - just in time for Street to use it in his mayoral campaign.

Street displayed his power

over major development projects

In 1985, officials at Bell of Pennsylvania had a radical idea. The company wanted to build a $25 million computing center - not on a suburban corporate campus, but in the heart of the depressed neighborhood near Temple's campus.

Bell executives nearly doomed the project with one giant misstep: failure to involve John Street.

"I made the assumption that Mayor Goode would manage the political side of the project. That proved naive," Gil Wetzel, then Bell's president and chief executive, recalled. "John felt excluded . . . disrespected. That had to be dealt with. He wanted caretaking."

Street froze the project, denying Bell a required letter of support from Council.

Bell tried to repair the damage. Wetzel took his hits at heated community meetings in North Philadelphia. And when Street agreed to a meeting only if the pair met at dusk on the jogging path along Boathouse Row, Wetzel grabbed his running shoes.

"We jogged, and walked, and sat and talked," Wetzel said. "I think it was important to John that he be given the respect, to be met on his turf."

To please Street, Bell promised to hire from the community. Bell also agreed to help fund $2 million worth of housing for the area. His conditions satisfied, Street dropped his opposition, and the computer center was built.

A similar scenario unfolded a decade later when Temple announced plans in 1995 to build the Apollo basketball arena at Broad Street between Montgomery and Cecil B. Moore Avenues.

Temple needed Street's help getting zoning approvals. Street wanted Temple to provide $5 million for affordable housing. Temple balked. Street sat on the zoning change.

Eventually, the university capitulated. The Apollo was built.

In both the Bell and Temple cases, neighborhood residents established nonprofits to build the housing. None of it has materialized.

The East of Broad Community Development Corp., created to spearhead development with the Bell money, was shuttered amid allegations of financial mismanagement.

The North Philadelphia Housing Development Corp., in charge of Apollo-related housing, has not built anything yet, either. About $2.5 million of Temple's money sits in city coffers, waiting for the city to approve plans for several dozen housing units.

New York University professor Larry Alan Bear chronicled the Bell controversy in a 1990 book, The Glass House Revolution: Inner-City War for Interdependence. Bear said he interviewed 50 people: corporate executives, Temple officials, and community residents on both sides of the issue.

Only one person turned him down, he said: John Street.

Years later, Bear recalled asking a North Philadelphia resident involved in the dispute how Street could be an effective leader while seeming so obstinate.

"I asked: 'Doesn't he ever make you angry?' A smile came over her face, and she said: 'You've got to remember, Larry, he's where the power is. He's got the power. You don't knock the power.' "