America’s oldest continuously inhabited residential street. Thirty-two rowhouses, the earliest built in 1728, lining a cobblestone lane barely fifteen feet wide. Two and a half centuries of American history, from colonial Philadelphia to the present day, compressed into a single block.

Elfreth’s Alley housed the working people who built Philadelphia into colonial America’s largest city—silversmiths, furniture makers, shipbuilders, shoemakers. Not the wealthy merchants whose Georgian mansions line Society Hill, but skilled artisans living in modest comfort. The houses reflect this: Georgian and Federal-style brick rowhouses, well-proportioned but unassuming, with paneled doors, multi-pane windows, and small courtyard gardens.

Most colonial American streetscapes are gone, demolished for progress. Elfreth’s Alley survived through luck and determination—a preservation association formed in 1934, National Historic Landmark status in 1960, and generations of residents who chose to maintain old buildings rather than tear them down. By 1989 when Masumi photographed it, the street had become proof that historic preservation could work: authentic architecture, functioning as contemporary housing, drawing visitors without becoming a museum piece.

Masumi’s seven-foot panorama captures the full length of the alley, those thirty-two houses stretching across the composition like a timeline of early American domestic architecture. Her collage technique suits the subject—fragmentary images assembled into composite view, the way we actually experience a street as we walk its length, glancing at doorways and windows, taking in the whole while noticing the details.