"Summarizing Philadelphia is not easy. It is both as worldly as San Francisco and as parochial as Des Moines; as glittering as a miniature Manhattan and as run-down as Buffalo. In some ways, Philadelphia is America's smallest major city or else its largest town. Although a million-and-a-half people live here (six million if you count the extended metro area, a triangle roughly connecting Allentown, Atlantic City, and Wilmington, Delaware), it seems, at times, as if everybody here knows everybody else, like some enormous club. To an amazing extent, Philadelphia is a city of lifers; if you were born here, the odds are unusually good that you'll die here, too. Philadelphians rarely seem in need of new friends, because they have so many to begin with, and people who move here from somewhere else tend to report identical feelings of displacement and alienation. One recent newcomer told me that moving to Philadelphia felt like walking into a difficult class halfway through the semester."
2001
James A. Michener
Prologue
Some Good in the World: A Life of Purpose
Edward J. Piszek
