The Best Thing That Happened This Week: Ed Coryell Sr. Got a Big Surprise

Carpenters Union’s Spring Garden Street headquarters. Photo | Google Street View

“Union Boss Didn’t See That One Building,” read the headline on the story in the Daily News (oh, Daily News, we will miss you if you go) about the abrupt ousting on Wednesday of Ed Coryell Sr., longtime leader of the Philly-area carpenters union. Also caught off guard — he says — by the news that Coryell’s Metropolitan Regional Council was being merged into another regional council based in Edison, New Jersey: union carpenter and U.S. Rep. Bob Brady. “I was surprised as anybody by what happened,” Brady told the Daily News. And local AFL-CIO chief Patrick J. Eiding added: “I think everyone was taken by surprise. … ” Whatever. All we know is that since Coryell didn’t sign on to the 2014 customer service agreement at the Convention Center (or at least not by the Convention Center’s deadline), bookings are up, conventioneers are happy, hotel rooms are full, and the end may be in sight for what the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority called, in a 2015 lawsuit against the carpenters, a “prolonged and malicious pattern of illegal and extortionate conduct.” Though we were getting kind of fond of those giant inflatable rats.

Follow @SandyHingston on Twitter.