Philadelphia is not just a pleasant city in southeastern Pennsylvania. It is also a state of mind — and not a good one: “corrupt and contented,” Lincoln Steffens called it. The most Philadelphia thing I ever witnessed in Philadelphia involved an airport contract awarded to a firm called Notlim Services, which was to be paid $1 million a year to provide baggage-handling services as a subcontractor under a contract awarded to another firm. No one had ever heard of Notlim Services, which turned out to have no business address, or business, or employees, or anything else. It occurred to a local reporter that “Notlim” was “Milton” spelled backward, and that the mayor, John Street, had a ne'er-do-well brother named Milton. Surely not — that was too cynical even for corrupt and contented Philadelphia.
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