Manayunk Views

Manayunk Views by Patricial Ingersoll is located in the Manayunk neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Painted on a retaining wall at the east entrance to Main Street (at Ridge Avenue), the mural’s design incorporates bridge arches that connect diverse views of the Manayunk area. Through its location and its theme of the annual bike race, the mural connects Manayunk to the rest of the city. Ingersoll often frames her landscapes in an architectural setting. For this mural, she chose the arched supports of a bridge, which creates a trompe l’oeil effect where the bridge seems to be holding up the roadway above.

The bridge’s arches, painted to simulate rusticated stone, are a nod to Manayunk’s Victorian past. The archways frame a series of lush local vistas. The scenes in each arch are subtly unified through the use of color and the horizontal continuity of the summer sky, vegetation, and flowing water. A bridge over Wissahickon creek leads to the central triad of views. A steep flight of steps ascending to a historic Victorian mansion stands next to an aerial view of the town nestled among steep hills. A bucolic scene of the Manayunk canal, once an important means of transporting goods to and from the town’s textile mills, mirrors the receding linear perspective of the Victorian steps in the next scene over. The sequence concludes with the Green Lane Bridge of the Schuylkill River.

The mural was restored in 2015 and again in 2020.