Page:Historic towns of the middle states (IA historictownsofm02powe).pdf/369

 Thomson. The city flowed across Broad Street, and solid blocks pushed their way in brick and white marble, turning later to New York's brown-stone, up each flank of the city on Pine and on Arch, spreading out in an area beyond Broad Street, which the crash of credit, and the failure of the State for a season to pay the interest on its bonds, left tenantless, often roofless, covered with mortgages and the prediction, heard first under Governor Keith, 1725, repeated within this decade, that the city would never need the houses which a boom had erected.

The city of the period before the war had now been built and the suburbs had grown close to the consolidation of 1854. Railroad access had created, across the Schuylkill, the village of Mantua, which was to become West Philadelphia as it extended southward and was reached by new bridges and street-car lines. To the north, just beyond the old British redoubts, factory owners, managers and foremen, mechanics and operatives, with the retailers they required, had built their homes on the higher ground, north of the great industries growing on the low and lightly taxed land, easily accessible by railroads from