Renwick was at least as eclectic as such Europeans as Ballu and Ferstel. Having made his first reputation with the building of the Anglican Grace Church in New York in 1843-6—if not very Camdenian, this is at least a fair specimen of revived fourteenth-century English Gothic—he continued in the Gothic line with the Catholic St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, begun in 1859 and completed (except for the spires) in 1879. That vast two-towered pile, however, is Gothic in a very Continental way, resembling Gau’s and Ballu’s Sainte-Clotilde in Paris and Ferstel’s Votivkirche in Vienna more than anything English of the period. In the late forties Renwick had also been the agent of Robert Dale Owen’s ‘Romanesque Revival’ aspirations in designing the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (see Chapter 6). For such things as the Smithsonian and his churches Renwick had plenty of visual documents on which to lean, either archaeological treatises on the buildings of the medieval past or illustrations of contemporary foreign work. But for Vassar College, very evidently, he was dependent for his inspiration on rather generalized lithographic or engraved views of the Tuileries. Nor could he, at this relatively early date, borrow much from published illustrations of contemporary English work in the new international Second Empire mode. The particular plastic vitality of the Americanized Second Empire is already notable in this early example, however, even though the rather crude articulation of the red brick walls is remote from anything French of any period from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. Later buildings by Renwick in the same mode are richer and closer to Parisian standards, but their architectonic vitality is considerably less. The Boston City Hall,[216] built by G. J. F. Bryant (1816-99) and Arthur D. Gilman (1821-82) in 1862-5, is a smaller but suaver edifice. Although it is a compactly planned block, the articulation of the walls by successive Roman-arched orders, coldly but competently executed in stone, is boldly plastic below the crowning mansards. However, just before this, for the Arlington Street Church of 1859-61, the first edifice erected in the Back Bay district that Gilman was just laying out,[217] he had turned not to France but to eighteenth-century England for inspiration, basing himself chiefly on the same churches by Gibbs that had been the most popular American models in later Colonial times.