Peter Binzen, ‘dean of Philadelphia journalism,’ dies

Peter Binzen, a newspaperman who covered Philadelphia for more than five decades and whose books presciently explored the frustrations of working-class Americans, the rise of Mayor Frank Rizzo as their bellicose local political hero and the bankruptcy of the Penn Central railroad, died Nov. 16 in Bryn Mawr, Pa.

After the Bulletin closed in 1982, he was recruited to the Philadelphia Inquirer by Gene Roberts, who was the paper’s executive editor and later became the managing editor of the New York Times.

Published in 1970, the book, a sympathetic (though not necessarily admiring) portrait of President Richard Nixon’s newly expressive silent majority, concluded, “We neglect the working American at our peril.”

“The Wreck of the Penn Central” (1971) chronicled the 867 days between the ill-fated merger of the Pennsylvania and New York Central Railroads and the combined corporation’s bankruptcy.

The Honorable Frank Rizzo (1977) profiled a police officer who surfed a wave of law-and-order oratory, only to sink in what the authors described as a catastrophic mayoralty.

After college, he decided against law school, sold subscriptions at a New Jersey weekly, freelanced, worked briefly for United Press, and joined the Bulletin in 1951.

“It was said that if a housewife sitting on her front stoop saw a fire engine go by in the morning, she could learn where it went by reading the Bulletin in the afternoon,” Mr. Binzen told the Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society in 2003.