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 the coal-fields, beyond the old city limits at Vine, and extending to Callowhill and beyond. This created the city of Spring Garden. The river settlements, the Northern Liberties, Kensington, Richmond, grew under the triple influence of manufacturers and cheap coal, out of the villages whose farm-houses, taverns and mechanics’ dwellings of the early years of the century still dot the raw newer dwellings of the past forty years. Like settlements had grown in Southwark and Manayunk. The gaps and sutures still remain to mark the old divisions. The squalid stretches of South Street from river to river, for nearly a century the resort of cheap stores which sought city trade, and avoided city taxes. The like ragged selvedge along Vine, influenced, too, along much of the line by low, open ground. The gap fringing both banks of the Schuylkill, marking days when the railroad and the Market Street bridge made the more distant uprise of Fortieth Street more accessible than the lower region nearer. The bare and vacant patches about Germantown Junction, over which the old village has never quite grown down to meet the approaching city, where for various reasons of grade, access was not easy, and where institutions like Girard College and the Penitentiary, with a cemetery or two, like rocks in a moving stream, have stopped and divided the glacier-like spread of the city. These things have made Philadelphia, like London, a city of accretions from divers centres, and not, like Paris or New York, a steady, symmetrical and continuous growth from one organic centre.