Philadelphia City Map Poster — Risograph Edition

About this print

Philadelphia map poster

Philadelphia sits between the Delaware and the Schuylkill, and that geography has shaped the city since William Penn laid out his grid of straight streets and open squares in the 1680s. Market and Broad still cross at City Hall, and the orderly plan of Center City gives way at the edges to older, stranger patterns: the tight blocks of South Philadelphia, the river bends at Manayunk, the long diagonal of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway cutting against the grid toward the art museum. A map of this city reads as a record of how a plan met a landscape and a few centuries of people.

The appeal here is recognition. Anyone who has walked from Rittenhouse Square to the Italian Market, run the loop along Kelly Drive and across the river, or commuted in from Fishtown or West Philly carries a rough version of this shape already. Seeing it drawn out tends to fill in the parts between the places a person knows well, and to make the whole city feel more like one connected thing.

The Risograph Edition is a design treatment, a look borrowed from mid-century duplicator printing: limited, slightly offbeat color, soft overlaps, a touch of grain. The result is graphic rather than literal, closer to a poster than a reference document, and it holds its own on a wall next to photographs or other prints. It is meant as art for a room, not something to navigate by, and it suits anyone who has lived in Philadelphia, left it, or keeps finding reasons to go back.

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Map details

Location

Pennsylvania, United States

Collection

Cityscapes

Edition

Risograph Edition