Entr’acte

Abstract

The entr’acte, “Framing Urban Spaces,” focuses on two images by William and Thomas Birch that depict different aspects of the same Philadelphia streetscape, conveying the necessity of imaginative perspective to construct Philadelphia as a city. To use Birch’s words, these images, and the literary texts I read in Part II, meditate on Philadelphia as a city “raised, as it were, by magic power.”