A City Not a Museum

Good Binyamin Appelbaum piece on the difficulties of building in NYC. The data will be familiar but I especially appreciate this vibe which we need more of:

I hope someday I’ll be walking with my children on the Lower East Side or the Upper West Side or Brooklyn Heights. We’ll pass one of the places where my ancestors lived, and the building will be gone. In its place will stand an apartment building, housing a new generation of New Yorkers.

See also my piece Against Historical Preservation where I wrote:

…a confident nation builds so that future people may look back and marvel at their ancestor’s ingenuity and aesthetic vision. A nation in decline looks to the past in a vain attempt to “preserve” what was once great. Preservation is what you do to dead butterflies.