The grand train depot at Broad and Filbert bustled with travelers. When these commuters and visitors exited the station, they found themselves overwhelmed by the smells and sounds of the city.

The air in 1879 was thick with a mix of horse manure, cooking food, and coal and steel smoke. It rang with the calls of a dozen newsboys hawking their wares, the bangs of hammers, and the shouts of construction workers at nearby Penn Square.

Steps from the busy rail terminal, the world's tallest building was rising. Laid out on a five-acre site at Market and Broad Streets, this was City Hall, the new center, as commerce and people moved west from the Delaware River.

Philadelphia was being shaped into the city we know today. The Inquirer was there to record it all.

The New Public Building, as it was then called, was a monument to Philadelphia's Iron Age, a symbol of its power, prestige, and population growth. The operations of government had long been crowded at Fifth and Chestnut Streets. A special election in 1870 decided the location of the new building: 51,623 Philadelphians had voted for the winning location, while 32,825 wanted Washington Square.

It was a massive undertaking, the largest masonry building in the world, with more than 700 rooms. Until its completion in 1894, the construction site was a blur of activity, with deliveries of granite, wood, metal, glass, stone, ceramics. Materials arrived by trains and horse-drawn carriages, some of which ran along tracks to reduce friction.

The so-called Scotch Mafia dominated this phase of construction, including architect John McMahon, mason and contractor William Struthers, and sculptor Alexander Milne Calder. Working on-site, Calder created more than 250 relief and free-standing sculptures for the building, including the 37-foot-tall, 24-ton statue of William Penn that tops the structure.

John Wanamaker, a successful merchant with two stores, saw how this building would become the hub of the city. He placed his great department store, the 12-story granite Wanamaker building, in City Hall's shadow. It would be completed in 1910, and "Meet me at the Eagle" became a part of the local lexicon.

In 1879, William Penn's "greene country towne" was a cosmopolitan center of business, culture, and manufacturing: If it could be made by hand, it was made here.

"Philadelphia was at the top of its game," said Roger Lane, a history professor at Haverford College. "They had iron and coal, steel and shipyards, and Baldwin locomotives. They made watches and wallets and baby carriages, and basically anything you could make."

Geographically, the city was as large as it is now, although with 800,000 people as compared to today's 1.4 million. The growth was due to 1854's Act of Consolidation, which added outlying areas to its boundaries.

The old borders were the Delaware River and the Schuylkill, and Vine and South Streets. Consolidation added the Townships of Roxborough and Byberry, the Boroughs of West Philadelphia and Bridesburg, and the Districts of Kensington and Southwark. The city still had a disjointed feel, but its newspapers helped unify the populace.

"I don't want to call it a city of neighborhoods, but a city of distinct areas," said Randall Miller, a professor of history at St. Joseph's University. "You could see a critical mass of a particular group putting its stamp on a particular area. Believe it or not, reading the newspaper was the kind of thing that binded people together, in the sense that they were common city people, part of something larger than themselves."

Suburbs began to flourish, thanks to the rail lines put in for America's 100th birthday. Many who could afford to moved to homes along the railway's Main Line, its stops memorized in an easy saying, "Old Maids Never Wed and Have Babies Period" - Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, Paoli.

The rails also took the city's focus away from the river.

"It would be the trains that were really transformative for Philadelphia and the nation, and not just those stretching across the continent, stretching Atlantic to Pacific, but the local train network that led to a more accelerated pace of suburbanization," Miller said.

"You had systems being built that had a profound effect on the character of Philadelphia. In 1879, you're beginning to see a city that's going to look a lot like it will for the next 100 years."

While the port still flourished, shipping was no longer front-page news.

Instead, every edition of The Inquirer had at least two columns of train schedules, noting how the Pennsylvania & Reading Railroad was departing for the "Coal Regions" with local stops at Germantown and Manayunk.