The sensory experience of Philadelphia comes every time I walk through it or ride through it. It’s exciting and refreshing, but it’s still not enough. I want secrets both delicious and dark. I want the intimacies of the people who make this city so unlike any other. Which is where Philadelphia magazine comes in…. Its journalism is the best of any urban magazine in the country, tough when it has to be, unflinching when it has to be, compassionate when it has to be…. If you want to know the heart of Philadelphia, the complete heart with all the different veins, sit back and enjoy and read these wonderful pieces…?Buzz Bissinger, from the ForewordIn the 1960s and 1970s, Philadelphia magazine was a pioneer of the so-called New Journalism and largely defined the template of what a city or regional magazine can be. At a time when most city magazines were Bibles of Babbitt, peddling gaseous boosterism and selling content to advertisers, Philadelphia was breaking china in Main Line drawing rooms, shining light into the smoky back rooms of Old Philadelphia power, and writing unflinchingly about the city’s seamy underbelly…. One of the staples of the magazine has always been the profile, an in-depth prose portrait of a newsmaker or larger-than-life character who in some way defines Philadelphia. This volume brings together, for the first time, some of the best of these pieces. The subjects are among the brightest lights in the recent history of Philadelphia?with a handful of infamous charmers and oddballs included for good measure?captured with a greater depth and intimacy than in any other medium.
?Robert Huber and Benjamin Wallace, from the Introduction