"I think a mayor really only has five of his eight years to accomplish anything. It takes the first year to really get set up and in the fourth year he's worried about getting re-elected—the focus isn't just on being the CEO/administrator of the city. The fifth, sixth and seventh years, there's little disruption. But in the eighth year, it's not that he doesn't want to be productive, but people are already looking at who's going to run the city next. But, your legacy is the whole eight years.

Rizzo, to some degree, was unique when it came to all that. People thought he was larger than life, and he was. In his last year, we moved ahead on a lot of things. It's been too many years ago to accurately recall all the details, but I know we were working on the Vine Street Expressway, a [Regional Rail line] to the airport and I-95. They all started under our administration.

We were active through his eight years. Part of that, probably, is that people thought he might be running again at some point so they treated him differently in his eighth year. They were worried that he was going to come back. So to some degree, people were afraid to treat him like a lame duck.

The only thing we put aside was cable TV. [Proposals on how to divide the city for incoming cable technology were] going through City Council at the time. We made a political decision to leave that for the next administration, not because we were lame ducks, but it was late in the administration and would take some time to get done. I guess you could call it lame duck, I don't know. Lame duck syndrome gives an impression that you can't do something because your power's gone to get things done. That certainly wasn't the case with Rizzo.

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I do remember the last day, putting on a blue suit and white shirt and going to work. I remember being sad that I was leaving the job; I mean, I loved the job. It's hard to walk away from something you love so much. The friendships you have, to some degree, stay on, but you lose touch with some of the people you worked with.

I'm sure he was feeling it, too, though I don't know if sad would be the word. This was a man who dealt with power his whole life. From being police commissioner to politics and then comes one Monday, and he's still mayor, but on Tuesday, Bill Green is. I'm sure he had a sadness, but he didn't show it to me.

We would get together for Saturday breakfasts and in the later years sometimes the conversation would come up: What are you going to do now? People were looking forward to their futures but I had no sense that he regretted anything. That was the way it was the whole last year with him.

When it comes to Rizzo's legacy, I think most people would agree that the city operated in a very efficient way under him. I could drive around the city and show the [recreation centers] he gave the city and three highways built under his watch, but he also stopped the crosstown highway, the one at South Street that would have cut the city in half. To this day, I'm proud that was blocked.

And then there's the Vine Street Expressway. Now, it's definitely a sexier story to talk about him with the billy club in the cummerbund, but he saved a very old Chinese Catholic church. It was originally right in the way of the road, but he made sure we moved the whole highway to protect a building that was very important in that community.

He also brought back the mounted police, which we still miss today. Sylvester Johnson had to make a tough budget decision with that, but we definitely need it. When it comes to staffing, we had some 8,400 police officers in 1975. That's part of the problem we're having with all these young kids killing each other today. We may not need 8,400 today, but we definitely need more than we have.

People that loved him, loved him, but there was a dichotomy of feelings about him. Regardless of what they thought of him, nobody could question his ability to get things done in the neighborhoods. I really miss him."