Imagining Philadelphia: Travelers' Views of the City from 1800 to the Present by Philip Stevick


Imagining Philadelphia: Travelers' Views of the City from 1800 to the Present
Title : Imagining Philadelphia: Travelers' Views of the City from 1800 to the Present
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0812233778
ISBN-10 : 9780812233773
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 216
Publication : First published August 1, 1996

In travel narratives, in correspondence, in diaries, and even in fiction, travelers to Philadelphia have bequeathed to us a bounty of "as many Philadelphias as there are observers." Philip Stevick's collection of outsiders' observations captures what the visitors thought they saw and how it felt to have engaged the life of the city. Some travelers visited the classic destinations of earlier times, such as the great waterworks complex; others reacted generally to the tone and temper of the city. Together, these accounts fall into patterns that often convey a mythic reading of the city, as a place of uncommon order and symmetry, for example, or a place of great torpor and dullness, or a city extraordinary for the way in which elements of wilderness interpenetrate the metropolitan core.

Stevick finds that the city has inscribed itself on the imaginations of two centuries of visitors in ways that are often compelling but unpredictable, a parallel city to the place on the map and the street under foot, a city of the mind, an imagined Philadelphia.

Imagining Philadelphia: Travelers' Views of the City from 1800 to the Present Reviews

  • Marianne Evans

    Mrs. Frances Trollope. (1832) “You have nothing to do but walk up one straight street, and down another, till all the parallelograms have been threaded”.
    This 30 year old Alabama girl discovered her new Philadelphia the very same way. It was 1987 and street by street, I marveled at delicious smelling food carts, lovingly nicknamed Roach Coaches. I scrunched my face at the perpetual Rated XXX sign hanging over a Market Street theater. I grimaced over the homeless lying all over sidewalks. I mused at the many historic statues. I giggled at the baby clothes shop right next door to the sex toy store on Walnut Street. I thrilled at the thought that I was wandering down the same paths of Ben, Betsy, Alexander, and George. Oh Philadelphia; it was love at first sight, and I have never fallen out of love with her.