The war found a city which, united, had more than the area of London (Philadelphia, 82,807 acres; London, 74,692), and at almost every stage of the growth of the two a quarter of the population of the vaster metropolis. Since room is the chief factor in civic comfort, there has never been a year in which the average man has not been just about four times as comfortable in Philadelphia as in London, and he has always had higher wages by a quarter to a half, paid less for food and lodgings, and paid more for clothing, light and coal. He has lived here, a family to a house, where a quarter of London has been a family to two rooms. Most of all, for twenty years past has this growth of the small houses of labor gone on, their number swelling faster than the tale of families seeking them. These conditions, secured by a wise civic policy early in the century, had reached the full development, which they have since maintained, at the opening of the war. Inexpressibly dull was the extension the city now made, the dreary reaches of homes, which oppress the stranger west of Eleventh Street, and appear in unvarying blocks on the North and South Streets, the building operations of the ’40s and ’50s, in whose even rows were the last, worst expression of the dull, utilitarian spirit of the pre-war, pre-centennial period. Napoleon LeBrun built the Cathedral and the Academy of Music, a brick shell holding a shapely and grandiose interior, and Walton and McArthur added to the pseudo-classic. When the Jayne Block went up on Chestnut, east of Third, it was believed to be the largest single business building yet erected on the continent. The Girard, 1852, was one of its largest hotels, and echoed the Italian palace front which Barry had taught London in his Reform Club. [Illustration: THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. STATE HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA.] The development in manufactures after the war, railroad expansion and the somewhat deceptive prosperity of the Centennial gave the city the same sudden burst which Chicago had in 1893, and Philadelphia took on the aspect in the next twenty years, 1876 to 1896, which the great city will always hold. Cheap freights poured in new building-stones, and the easily worked green serpentine was used in the University buildings and the Academy of Natural Science on Logan Square. It was employed in the Academy of Fine Arts, less agreeable than the earlier front of the same institution, now a theatre on Chestnut. The architectural impulse first felt at the Centennial broke up the traditions of a century, and building of the last twenty-five years, often _bizarre_, always shows, even in the humblest row, intent, design and recognition, however uncouth, of the just claim of decoration.