The Civil War of 1861-5 did not bring architectural production to a stop; indeed, it seems to have had a less inhibiting effect than the aftermath of the financial crash of 1857 in the immediately preceding years. In Washington the building of Walter’s new wings of the Capitol, initiated in 1851,[214] and of his cast-iron dome, designed in 1855, continued until their completion in 1865, right through the war years at President Lincoln’s express order (Plate 82A). There is nothing specifically French about this new work at the Capitol, even though Walter had the assistance from 1855 of the Paris-trained Hunt. On the other hand, the original more-or-less Romantic Classical edifice that had finally been brought to completion in 1828 by Bulfinch after so many changes of architect was largely submerged. The new wings echo in their academic porticoes the broader portico of the original late eighteenth-century design; but the cast-iron dome (see Chapter 7), rivalling in size the largest Baroque domes of Europe, has a high drum and a Michelangelesque silhouette of the greatest boldness in contrast to the Roman saucer shape of that designed by Latrobe and not much raised in execution by Bulfinch. It was not in Washington that the Second Empire mode was first introduced for public buildings; Washington, indeed, would never again be the centre of architectural influence that it was in the Romantic Classical period, although the new state capitols begun in the sixties and seventies were mostly capped with imitations of Walter’s dome. A ‘female seminary’ on the Hudson River, endowed by a brewer, and the new City Hall in Boston, Mass., both dating from the opening of the sixties, are the first monumental instances of the new mode that dominated the field of secular public building until the financial Panic of 1873 brought the post-war boom to a close. James Renwick,[215] who designed the very extensive Main Hall for Matthew Vassar’s new college at Arlington near Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1860, was specifically instructed by his client to imitate the Tuileries—not the New Louvre—and so he did in an elaborately pavilioned composition of U-shaped plan crowned by various sorts of high mansards. This overshadows in significance his earlier Charity Hospital of 1858 on Blackwell’s Island in New York, already mansarded but very plain, and his Corcoran Gallery of 1859, now the Court of Claims, in Washington, with a rich but muddled façade still rather flatly conceived.