In New York, Boston, and other large cities the vast granite piles in this mode that long served as post offices are all gone. In Chicago the Cook County Buildings built by J. J. Egan in 1872-5 have also long since been replaced. In San Francisco Fuller & Laver’s extensive group of Municipal Buildings was destroyed in the fire that followed the earthquake of 1906. This must have been the largest, the richest, and plastically the most complex production of the whole lot, with its triangular site, boldly articulated massing, and central dome. Though threatened by every new administration, the State, War and Navy Department Building built by Mullet in 1871-5 still stands, overshadowing the nearby White House. This is perhaps the best extant example in America of the Second Empire—or as it is sometimes called locally, the ‘General Grant’—mode (Plate 82B). The tiers of Roman-arched orders in fine grey granite, borrowed by Gilman as consultant architect and presumptive designer from his earlier Boston City Hall rather than from Paris, tower up storey above storey to carry mansards of various different heights above the complex pavilioned plan. Cold and grand, almost without sculptural decoration, this could hardly be less like the New Louvre or the old Tuileries in general texture; nor is there any of the playful semi-Gothic detail of Knowles’s and Giles’s London hotels or of the festive colouring and lush ornamentation of Brodrick’s at Scarborough. The contrast of the old State Department Building with its _pendant_ on the other side of Lafayette Square, Mills’s Grecian Treasury, finally completed by Rogers a decade earlier, is shocking to most people. Yet it is fascinating to read here the representational aspirations of an age that found its most significant expression, not in its public buildings, but in the new skyscrapers which first rose in New York at just this time, Hunt’s Tribune Building and the Western Union Building by his pupil George B. Post. Both, incidentally, were heavily mansarded, and the one by the American-trained Post was much more typically Second Empire than is the French-trained Hunt’s (see Chapter 14).