The grandest testament to the Second Empire style’s cultural impact in Philadelphia is City Hall. In 1871, the same year as the fall of Napoleon III’s regime, Scottish-born rchitect John McArthur Jr. began construction of this grandiose and expensive essay in the Second Empire style. Modeled heavily on the Lefuel’s additions to the Louvre in Paris and smothered in allegorical statutes, the stone structure took thirty years to complete, by which time it was out-of-step with the cleaner lines of the neoclassical style.
