Worse still, to hear Street tell it, Nutter never called to seek his counsel as he struggled to extricate the city's budget from red-ink quicksand.
Nutter certainly could have done worse than to consult with Street, who collaborated with another former mayor, Ed Rendell, to pull the city back from the brink of financial ruin when Street ran City Council.
Just judging by some of the revenue-enhancement ideas his team came up with, Nutter really did do worse than he could have by consulting Street.
But for all the hammer and chisel work Nutter has done on the Street memorial, he may not have damaged Street's legacy as much as Street did recently.
Started in a Daily News editorial-board meeting last week. Street, with no prompting, told us about a couple of guys who, he said, stopped him outside a restaurant.
"Do you think we'll ever have a black mayor again?" Street said one of the men asked him.
I didn't get it at first. So, to be sure we didn't miss the message, Street clarified it.
"I'm telling you," he said emphatically, "in many quarters of the African-American community, they don't see him as a black mayor."
As the only other black person in the room, I felt like I was listening to some brain-dead cousin spilling family secrets just to get noticed. The episode conjured up a set of memories I had packed away in some dusty bin in my mind years ago.
Suddenly, it was the '60s again, when one black man could pass judgment on whether another was black enough to merit the title. We were the only race on earth with its own credentials committee.
Aside from the forced march down memory lane, what bothered me most about the remark was that it seemed to confirm a really erroneous image of Street as a race-baiting mayor who favored blacks over whites.
It dragged him back to the furor over his remark that "the brothers and sisters" are running the town. It will again become the prism most people will look through when they judge the Street years.
As if the racial-identity remark were not confusing enough, Street went on to all but list the white candidates who have sought his support for a primary run against Nutter, including Sam Katz, whom Street judged to have no merit when he ran against him, twice.
I found this stunning. Katz is a man who emerges every four years for his quadrennial butt- kicking. Any Democrat with enough life in him to frost a mirror beats him with ease.
Even with his administration hobbled by corruption charges, Street soundly thrashed Katz, beating him by larger margins in some white wards than he had in his previous win over Katz.
But, in Street's mind, Katz has somehow become a viable candidate in a race with Nutter for the Democratic mayoral nomination. If not Katz, Street intimated, he may support Tom Knox or Tom Mix or Bill Green Jr. or Sluggo the wonder mouse, for that matter. Anybody but Nutter, Street seemed to say, as if beating Nutter were more important than the future of a city he claims to love.
At this rate Street's name may go down in history with Anthony Morris Jr., who fled to Bucks County in 1738 to avoid being notified that he had been elected mayor.
Now there's a mayoral legacy that you couldn't diminish even if you tried.
Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith
