A leading opponent of the Greek Revival, Gilman, like most Continental architects of the day, evidently knew better what he meant to leave behind than whither he wished to proceed. His Boston church initiated no national wave of Gibbsian church architecture; indeed, the sixties were the heyday of Victorian Gothic design for churches in the United States. His City Hall, on the other hand, set off a nation-wide programme of public building in the Second Empire mode; for Boston was now for a score of years the artistic as well as the intellectual headquarters of the country in succession to Philadelphia. In this programme municipalities, state authorities, and the Federal Government all participated actively during the decade following the Civil War. In the case of many Federal buildings, only nominally the work of the office of the Supervising Architect, where A. B. Mullet (1834-90) succeeded Rogers in 1865, Gilman acted in these years as consultant, and was probably the real designer rather than Mullet or his assistants. These vast monuments were mostly constructed during General Grant’s presidency. Parisian in intention, yet American in their materials, they are withal rather similar to Second Empire work in England. Few were completed before the mode went out of favour as changes in architectural control sometimes make evident. In the case of the New York State Capitol in Albany, for example, begun in 1868 by Thomas Fuller (1822-98) and his partner Augustus Laver (1834-98), both arriving from England via Canada, Eidlitz and Richardson took over jointly in 1875, modifying the design of the building very notably above the lower storeys towards the Romanesquoid. Thus it was finally brought to completion by them and others in the following twenty years. The very tall tower on the Philadelphia City Hall, begun in 1874, was finished over a decade later. This tower, whose crowning statue of William Penn still tops the local skyline, has hardly anything in common with the Louvre-like pavilions below; yet the whole is nominally the work of one architect, John McArthur, Jr (1823-90), the grandfather of General Douglas McArthur. Undoubtedly the association of these prominent buildings with the unsavoury Grant administration and the fact that there were—at least in the two cases mentioned above—major financial scandals involved in their slow and incredibly costly construction played an important part in the early rejection of a mode so associated with the public vices of the decade after the Civil War. Not many of them are extant today other than the Boston, Albany, and Philadelphia structures just mentioned and the old State Department Building in Washington (Plate 82B).