Prologue: The Naked City There are a million stories in the naked city. That line closes the 1948 classic film noir The Naked City . The film itself, drenched in shadow and filled with the grit and swelter of a hot city summer, is a crime story set in New York. The movie, innovatively filmed in the city itself, out in the open, without stage sets, also purports to be, as the narrator explains, a story about the city itself. Its closing line, uttered by that same narrator over scenes of the city at night, has always struck me as the most astute characterization of any city: a great city is, at one level, a vast accumulation of its individual stories. Some extraordinary, some quite quotidian, each different and every one undeniable. We can imagine, if you like, that these stories exist in two directions--horizontally across the city at any given moment, and vertically through time. These two axes are equally important, for just as the city belongs to those who occupy it from day to day, their stories carry on a conversation with the stories--histories--of those who have been there before.

Part of what makes any great city great is this on-going, effortless dialogue between past and present. That conversation contributes to the unique sense of place every real city has. If there are millions of stories in the naked city, then there have been almost a million stories--and histories--written about the naked city. Historians who have turned their attention to the city have found political cities, places where great men gathered to do great deeds, and they have found cities teeming with radical women and men who came together to challenge those allegedly great men. They have found immigrant cities which functioned as beacons for millions looking for better opportunities, and cities which in many cases turned out to be squalid, oppressive, xenophobic places, places which made a mockery of American high ideals. They have found economic cities, bustling ports and thrumming factory towns, and they have found cultural cities, places where writers, painters, architects and institution builders drew their inspiration and made their mark. They have found cities on the rise in all these respects, and cities in decline. And of course, all these histories are at once right and incomplete.

As the most complex and interesting thing human beings have ever created, it is probably impossible to capture the totality of the city in any single book. As one of the older American cities, Philadelphia has a longer history than most other places. But even more than that, it has also generated an enormous literature about that history. Sam Bass Warner, writing his own book about Philadelphia, noted that Philadelphia had become "a leading center of urban history." That was in 1987, and in the subsequent years the shelves have grown even heavier with volumes about Philadelphia, making my task even more daunting. So I should be clear at the outset. This book does not even aim to be a comprehensive account, or a full history. I certainly can''t claim to have read all that has been written about Philadelphia and its region.

Rather, its purpose is consider Philadelphia as part of a larger metropolitan region, to examine how the region has evolved over time and to hint at what might face the city and region in the future. Philadelphia, and all American cities for that matter, have always existed in the center of larger regions, but by and large we haven''t understood them that way. When we look at regions in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, our model is usually that of center (city) and periphery (hinterland), town and country. Given the way metropolitan regions have developed since the Second World War, however, that model no longer works. Like other older American cities, Philadelphia''s population and economic prowess have both decreased even as the size and economic prosperity of the region has grown. Which, then, is center and which is periphery? As we work toward a new model to understand regional dynamics we have, generally speaking, seen our cities pitted in an antagonistic, largely racial struggle with their surrounding suburbs. In this view, white suburbs have grown since the end of World War II like parasites feeding off the shrinking, increasingly black body of deindustrializing cities. Philadelphia''s story, then, is the same at Pittsburgh''s, Detroit''s, Chicago''s and St.

Louis''s. George Clinton, the intergallactic funk musician, summarized this version of the state of metropolitan America in the 1970s as succinctly as anyone when he riffed about "chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs." I am, I confess, largely sympathetic to this view. There are no end of examples illustrating how Philadelphia''s suburbs have siphoned resources, population, jobs and more from the city, all the while taking advantage of the city in many ways. City schools are underfunded by the state, as is the public transit system. Since the eighteenth century, Philadelphia has led the country in medical research and training, establishing the nation''s first hospital and first medical school among other things. Today, the city''s medical centers groan under the burden of caring for a disproportionate number of the region''s poor and uninsured. Suburbanites in great numbers from both Pennsylvania and New Jersey treat the city as their playground, using it for everything from high culture and art to drugs and prostitution, while simultaneously, often angrily disavowing any notion that they share any responsibilities for the city''s considerable problems.

Yet, much as this gets the big picture right, it doesn''t capture the fine grain of metropolitan realities. Especially in Greater Philadelphia. More so than Greater Boston or Greater Chicago I suspect, the Greater Philadelphia region has always had pockets of racial and class diversity. It contains several small urban centers and towns of considerable age, each with its own identity, and each connected to the urban center in certain ways and independent from it in others. In the eighteenth century, Philadelphia itself had the largest, most influential black community of any city in the nation; in the nineteenth century black communities grew elsewhere--in South Jersey and West Chester, Pennsylvania. Later, West Chester would nurture both the African American painter Horace Pippin and Bayard Rustin, the tactical genius behind the civil rights movement. Coatesville''s black community included Essie Mae Washington-Williams''s aunt. Washington-Williams, the daughter of savage racist Strom Thurmond and his black housekeeper, was raised by her aunt in that African American community.

In the 1950s Bucks County became the site of the second Levitt Brothers development. It was all white, and when a black family tried to move in, they were greeted with racist hostility. And at the same time, five miles down the road from Levittown, Concord Park was developed to be an intentionally integrated suburban subdevelopment. By all accounts it worked wonderfully well. Race and racism are undeniably at the root of much of the visceral hatred some suburbanites feel toward the increasingly black and brown city. When John Street, Philadelphia''s second black mayor, tried to make a speech at the opening of the Philadelphia Phillies new baseball park in the spring of 2004, he was booed for nearly five minutes. The vast majority of fans who come to root for the Phils, needless to say, are from the suburbs. Here again: another example of suburbanites using the city for their own fun, while treating with contempt the mayor who helped use city funds to pay for the stadium.

(Of course, Philadelphia fans would boo their own mothers if they struck out with runners in scoring position, so maybe this episode didn''t have much to do with race.) But for others the emotions are probably more complicated. According to Philadelphia Inquirer editor Chris Satullo, what many suburbanites feel toward the city is "an angry love." He explains: "People who grew up in certain city neighborhoods and moved out to the suburbs literally can''t go home again. It hurts too much. When they do, they find their old neighborhood has fallen apart, their old house is derelict. They react irrationally. Whey they try to make some sort of sense of the situation, they wind up blaming the people who live there now.

" I can confirm that assessment if only anecdotely. Some years ago, I wrote a newspaper essay about Levittown and about the post-war suburbs generally. In it, I argued that fear--especially the racially-based fear of blacks by whites--drove much of the flight to the suburbs, particulary in the 1950s & ''60s. I got lots of hate mail about that piece, most of it confirming my premise in the first place, spewing as much of it did about niggers and spics. One letter, however, caught me by the throat. "You do not know whereof you speak," it defiantly began, and the rest is worth quoting at some length, "until you have lived with the sound of police sirens every night--until you can recite the names of the shopkeepers in your area who have been robbed, stabbed, shot, and killed--until you have received a call from the hospital that your son has been badly beaten . until you live through the terrible day when a friend of your son, with whom he had eaten lunch, had been robbed and killed. He was 15 years old and only a child.

" The writer--anonymous, so I don''t know whether male or female, black or white--went on: "That is when we decided to leave--it broke my heart to leave the house where my children grew up--the neighborhood where I grew up. It still hurts to think about." Anger and love in equal measure. Because, as Neil Young sang, only love can break your heart. These antagonisms, and the consequences that flow from them, are real. Yet despite that hosti.