In the Middle States architectural activity was chiefly centred in Philadelphia and New York, and one or two other towns, where a number of manor-houses, still extant, attest the wealth and taste of the time. It is noticeable that the veranda or piazza was confined to the Southern States, but that the climate seems to have had little influence on the forms of roofs. These were gambrelled, hipped, gabled, or flat, alike in the North and South, according to individual taste. +PUBLIC BUILDINGS.+ Of public and monumental architecture this period has little to show. Large cities did not exist; New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were hardly more than overgrown villages. The public buildings--court-houses and town-halls--were modest and inexpensive structures. The Old State House and Faneuil Hall at Boston, the Town Hall at Newport (R.I.), and Independence Hall at Philadelphia, the best known of those now extant, are not striking architecturally. Monumental design was beyond the opportunities and means of the colonies. It was in their churches, all of moderate size, and in their dwellings that the colonial builders achieved their greatest successes; and these works are quaint, charming, and refined, rather than impressive or imposing. To the latter part of the colonial period belong a number of interesting buildings which remain as monuments of Spanish rule in California, Florida, and the Southwest. The old Fort S. Marco, now Fort Marion (1656-1756), and the Catholic cathedral (1793; after the fire of 1887 rebuilt in its original form with the original façade uninjured), both at St. Augustine, Fla.; the picturesque buildings of the California missions (mainly 1769-1800), the majority of them now in ruins; scattered Spanish churches in California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and a few unimportant secular buildings, display among their modern and American settings a picturesque and interesting Spanish aspect and character, though from the point of view of architectural detail they represent merely a crude phase of the Churrigueresque style. [Illustration: FIG. 220.--NATIONAL CAPITOL, WASHINGTON.]