Frank Rizzo’s presence had long left the house, which exuded a warmth that I did not expect from the abode of a man with such a notorious reputation.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Rizzo ran the Philadelphia Police Department as if it were his own plantation with overseers and treated people of color with contempt. He was a man whom many felt was both a racist and a bully, and whom others adored without question.
The house, though, felt as if he had never lived there. I sensed none of his boorishness, only a feeling of quietude in the place – now chaotic and thick with people milling through its rooms – that likely came from his wife Carmella. There was a touch of femininity in many of the non-political items that felt like a woman’s hand had been near. A long table of porcelain figurines and other delicate items were likely her collection.
I was at the house this past weekend for an estate sale of items owned by Rizzo, who died in 1991, and his wife, who died in July. Family members had taken all that they wanted and left the rest to be sold. One potential buyer suggested before the sale that the family should have chosen to do an auction where active bidding would have fetched higher prices.
Not necessarily. The prices at the estate sale were fixed, and they were ridiculously high: 20 bucks each for black and white photos of Rizzo – “too much,” one buyer said; $95 each for those porcelain women that looked to be Royal Doulton – I don’t think so; $250 for a Hamilton mantle clock, $175 for a glass ashtray – Are you kidding? I rarely go to estate sales because of the high prices.
The best buys may have been in the garage, where nothing had a price tag and a guy at a table near the front door called out a price when you asked. That’s where you could find Rizzo tailor-made monogrammed dress shirts for $20 each, motorcycle helmets, gun-cleaning products and boxes of yellow rain slickers.
The interior of the house was still rooted in the past, although there were no antiques. The furniture, wallpaper and lamps looked to be from 1973 when the blue-collar South Philly-born Rizzo bought the house in tony Chestnut Hill, and with renovations spent more than $400,000. The purchase raised eyebrows because he was only making $40,000 a year as mayor. The wallpaper looked as pristine as it did the day it was hung, and the carpeting on the floors had been kept very clean (pink carpeting in the living room didn’t have a spot on it.)
Some of the items for sale, though, seemed so antithetical to the public image of Frank Rizzo. “I didn’t know he was into Asian,” one woman observed. Neither did I. Maybe that was the wife’s doing?
Some of the relics from his years as a police commissioner and two-term mayor were placed behind an open glass case with two assistants nearby. If you wanted to see something, you couldn’t just reach in. You had to ask to see it, which was a good idea because small stuff tends to walk away – in someone’s pocket.
Rizzo was known for an infamous 1969 photo of himself with a billy club in his cummerbund. (There was a billy club at the sale but I doubt that it was the same one.) And the demoralizing photo taken by a newspaper photographer in 1970 after Rizzo’s police raided the Black Panthers Party headquarters and forced the men to strip to their underwear.
And his 1980 tirade against a KYW-TV reporter on the sidewalk outside his house as he walked his dog. (As we waited outside for the sale to start, one woman mentioned that she wanted to take a photo at the spot where Rizzo called the reporter a “lush” and “crumb creep.”)
I saw one photo of Rizzo with a nightstick in his cummerbund among a large group of black and whites on a dining room table – selling for $20 each – but no photo of the disrobing. In a basement cedar closet/room, there were multiple copies of different newspapers with front-page stories about the sidewalk confrontation.
The cedar closet/room also held suits, coats, shoes, rain boots, boxes of new socks and other items belonging to Rizzo and likely not touched since he died. Outside the room were a half-dozen hats.
Against one wall in the closet was a gray vest with a bullet-proof lining. I watched as a man fingered the $300 vest, wondering aloud whether Rizzo had actually worn it and hesitating about buying it. “I’m going to take it,” he said, finally. “I can use it in this town.”
Many people were walking around with stuff to buy and a long line was forming to pay up. Many of these folks, I’m sure, wanted a “piece” of Frank Rizzo or something that he touched or worn. Anything from the house would be great for conversation and bragging: That crisp white shirt with the initials “FLR” on the pocket? Rizzo’s. Those Louis XV-style chairs? Rizzo’s. That passport? Rizzo’s (got it for $950).
I went to the sale to look at a mini replica of a John Rhoden sculpture titled “Nesaika” outside the African American Museum in Philadelphia. I could not find it on the first day of the sale, but we were told that new items would be put out each day. I probably couldn’t have afforded the piece anyway.
As I was leaving the estate sale, I saw a man and woman looking over a Rizzo portrait. The woman questioned whether the $450 she paid for it was too much. He reassured her that it was not. I think it probably was.
Here are some other items from the house, which itself is on the market for nearly $1.7 million:
