And the winner is …. a sandwich?

To celebrate its 100th anniversary, Philadelphia magazine devotes its December issue to the 100 moments that have shaped Philadelphia over the last century. Included on the list are the filming of Rocky, the MOVE bombing, the Phillies 2008 World Series victory, and Frank Rizzo becoming police commissioner. But the mag says the single most important moment in Philly history since 1908 was the birth of the cheesesteak.

“Of all the contributions Philadelphia has given the world (like, say, democracy), none has become more identified with our city than the tasty concoction Pat Olivieri invented back in 1930,” the magazine writes.

Click here for a sneak preview of the list, and an oral history of the cheesesteak.

Photo by Chris Crisman from the December 2008 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

BY S. EDWARDS

The last time I saw Madonna on stage was her televised performance of “La Isla Bonita” with Gogol Bordello (whom I love, love, love) at Al Gore’s 2007 Live Earth concert. She seemed out of breath, out of shape (relatively speaking), and generally out of sync. But judging by her in-the-round performance last night at the Wachovia Center, the last year, which included her tabloid divorce from Guy Ritchie (reportedly being finalized today), has been good to her.

The 50-year old dynamo emitted a haze of brilliance (as captured on my four-year old Nokia phone) and never missed a beat as she shook her saucy stuff for a near-capacity crowd who paid up to $350 face value for the privilege (or $613 including the Madonna-less VIP party). Whether she was strumming a guitar, grinding with gypsy musicians, arriving to the stage in a 1935 Auburn Speedster, playfully engaging the audience (or antagonizing them: She told a man in the front, “You need to work out more if you’re gonna wear that shirt”), slamming down on her bejeweled kneepads, or showing up her much, much younger dancers, Madonna was excessively precise. Impossibly flawless. Or, as Chris Allen, the gentleman who flew in from Las Vegas and who said he was one of her Grammy dancers many years ago, put it: “She’s one remarkable android.”

If you can manage to get your hands on tickets for her Saturday-night performance in Atlantic City (only singles are available through Ticketmaster, but this is A.C., so if you know someone …), expect to hear a healthy dose of classics like “Borderline,” “Bonita,” and “Vogue”) as well as plenty of material from her more recent, less interesting body of work. But mostly, expect shock, awe, and a performance easily worth the price of admission.

Editor’s note: Philly Mag alum Tony Green shared with us this moving reflection of working the polls in Mt. Airy during Tuesday’s historic election.

The man’s face was gritty and pained, its wrinkles and marks forming a map of a hard life that included time in Korea as a U.S. Marine. He wore that part of his history in large letters on the back of his heavy leather jacket. He winced as another man and I pulled him up from a volunteer’s van.

He sat himself down again. “Give me a minute,” he asked, closing his eyes.

“You sure you can make it?” asked the driver.

“Oh, yeah. I’m gonna do this.”

We took him by the armpits and this time pulled him out as his face cringed in pain. But then his own power took over. He took hold of his walker, took the long step up the curb and slowly made his way into the Simons Recreation Center.

I’ve done politics since I was 17 years old — I’ll never forget standing in the middle of Haverford Avenue in rush hour giving people literature that I made myself encouraging them to vote for a man named Thacher Longstreth against another man named Frank Rizzo — but I’d never heard of the job “line manager.” Four election districts are housed in the sprawling Simons building, one of the top 10 voting sites in the city of Philadelphia and a busy place even when it’s not Election Day. The task I was assigned by the Obama campaign was to organize a posse of friends and volunteers to keep hundreds of people in the line that descended on us beginning at 6:10 a.m., 50 minutes before the polls opened.

We were this amazing crew of court jesters, cheerleaders, enforcers, beggars, pleaders, feeders of coffee, soft pretzels, donuts, swag and leftover Halloween candy for kids and concert managers — because of our status of one of the top ten, the Obama campaign had recruited a band and a jazz drum group. When someone threatened to leave the line, I used what I called the atomic bomb of guilt. I am good at guilt. I have a Ph.D. in guilt.

“Look,” I told a few people who were very close to giving up, “Barack Obama’s grandmother died yesterday. She can’t see her grandson become the first African-American president of our country.” Pregnant pause. “But you are here and you can be a part of it. Do it for Barack’s grandmother. Please stay.” I looked like I was going to tear up. A cynical person would say that that last part was contrived. But it wasn’t. I came near tears several times that day, that Election Day that made history.

I must confess that I did not have to use the atomic bomb very often, not when the line stretched way down Woolston Street. Rain, cold, crying kids, the risk of being late for work, the sheer pain of getting out of a van — nothing was going to take these people out of that line. Because up against those adversities was courage and history and pride and patriotism. It was a strength that lifted so many people out of cars, held them up by walkers and canes, pulled them by excited grandchildren and fueled them by the energy of a spirit that was so strong. It is true that these four election divisions in the mighty 10th Ward are overwhelmingly African-American. But this is not a story of race, so often credited as part of our city’s DNA, sometimes for the better, sometimes for worse.

There were dozens of people who struggled to the election booth with walkers, canes and the arms of volunteers or their children. But the Korean Marine veteran was the man I fell in love with. Once he entered the doors of the rec center, he had to take a left and begin another long walk. Another longest mile. He was alone now, he and his walker, and I watched him walk slowly down the hallway. I could have helped him but I knew he wanted to make this walk on his own. But when he came out, I experienced this rush of emotions, joy and pride for him, and then I really did drop some tears onto the pavement in front of Simons. No tears from him, though. As much as he could through the pain of each step, he had a small smile on his face. He knew he was a part of history, again, just like he was as a Marine.

God, I wish I knew his name, knew where he lived. I could learn so much from him. One of those lessons would be this, I suspect: It was nice what you did coming out here with us. But we didn’t need any line protectors. I fought for the vote, and I sure was going to use it on this day when Barack Obama was going to be our president.

I thought of him one more time as the polls were an hour away from closing and I asked the band, True Blaq, to play a song I dedicated to him in my heart. It was “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.”

And there wasn’t.

Tony Green can be reached by e-mail here.

Last spring, Barack Obama holed up in a Philadelphia hotel room and crafted the most important speech of his life. How that address came to be — and how people reacted to it — says as much about us as it does about him

By Matthew Teague

IN THE BEGINNING, back in the summer of 2004, Barack Obama spoke himself into existence. With a single speech before the Democratic convention, he took form in the American consciousness: “Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it” — here he placed his hand over his heart — “my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely.”

With that phrase he tilted straight at his unexpected name and skin color, and set himself apart from all other stars in the political firmament — a zig set against a predominant union of zags.

He ascended. The rise happened almost without pause until this past March, midway through the primary season, when video surfaced of Obama’s longtime pastor and friend, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, exercising his right to free speech with a particular vigor. Among other things, he referred to the tragedy of September 11th, saying “America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” and admonished his congregation to sing “God DAMN America.”

Political poison. Unavoidable catastrophe. How, people wondered, could Obama possibly distance himself from his lethal cleric? How could any speech cast Jeremiah Wright from the earth, hide him behind the moon, push him into the silence and darkness of the void?

Obama’s candidacy, whatever may come of it, pivoted on the moment. And so the speech he gave in response bears examination, from the series of crises and decisions that created it, to the role Philadelphia played in its final form.

I learned recently that at the National Constitution Center — the site Obama would eventually choose to deliver his talk — a staff worker had kept the speech. Not a video, or an audio clip, but the physical speech itself, swiped afterward from the candidate’s lectern. I wanted to see it, because in a field of almost universal abstraction, here we find the promise of a measurable artifact. Something with weight and displacement and, perhaps, some revelation about its creator.

At the Constitution Center, Steve Frank, the head of exhibits, led me into the sheetrock caverns beneath the deceptively enormous building. We walked through a maze of hallways, stairwells, and doors requiring electronic codes, and finally arrived in a room of beiges and grays: the center’s storage room, which seemed designed to lull to sleep any potential cat burglar. A row of file cabinets stood along one wall, and Frank opened the putty-­colored doors of Cabinet 1A.

Cabinet 1A, it turned out, serves as a sort of odds-and-ends bin for history. It holds, for instance, Franklin Roosevelt’s fedora, the familiar hat from countless textbook photos, which the archivist warned me against trying on. (Roosevelt, for what it’s worth, had a remarkably small head.) And Cabinet 1A holds other treasures on its shelves: an early printing of Irving Berlin’s sheet music for “God Bless America,” for example, and the first public, printed copy of the Constitution, published by the ­Pennfylvania Packet just days after the Founding Fathers drafted it, a block away.

And somewhere, in Cabinet 1A, there waited Barack Obama’s speech on race in America, delivered at 10:53 in the morning on March 18th, 2008.

Read the rest of “Mr. Obama Goes to Philly.”