This talk is part of a larger project, "Writing City Space," which looks at representations of two different urban sites: lower Manhattan in the late 19th century and inner-city Philadelphia roughly a century earlier. In both cases, I use the work of urban historians and geographers to think about how authors and characters move through and shape their urban settings. The book will cover both literary and "sub-literary" or ephemeral texts, but its New York section centers on Alger, Stephen Crane, and Jacob Riis; the Philadelphia one on Benjamin Franklin, Charles Brockden Brown, and George Lippard.