Cherelle Parker has vowed to shut down the city’s open-air drug markets, but the task may be beyond any one mayor’s reach.
Prior to being elected Philadelphia’s 100th mayor—the first woman in the post—Cherelle Parker pledged to make Philadelphia the “safest, cleanest, greenest city in America.” Her election was a rebuke to the city’s left-wing Democrats, who had hoped to capture City Hall and remake it in the image of Seattle, San Francisco, or Portland. The Left’s favored mayoral candidate, Helen Gym, had the support of woke millennial elites and the Working Families Party, as well as endorsements from national left-wing figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Gym’s well-funded campaign overshadowed Parker’s, but in the end Parker, a native Philadelphian, triumphed over Gym, a Columbus, Ohio, native who had moved to the city to attend the University of Pennsylvania.
