Pat White wrote:
> Classic buildings, though, shouldn't be as disposable as that. Destroying
> old buildings is like destroying local history.
I agree in general, but not as a hard-and-fast rule. It's a shame
to see history destroyed. At the same time, I don't think we need
to preserve every single shack and shop for eternity. But I do
wince each time one of these classic Baltimore rowhouses is torn
down because fire or simple deterioration from lack of maintenance
has made it too hazardous to leave standing.
Hmm. That brings up another point -- not all buildings that ought
to have been preserved are lost to "progress". Especially in the
US, an awful lot of historical buildings were made of wood, less
durable than stone. It's still tragic to lose history, even when
we can't blame greed for it.
> Maybe that's why many North
> Americans have little sense of history. The older buildings are continually
> being replaced, so history is something you see in a book, not something you
> walk by on the way to work, or a place where you meet your friends.
I think a large part of it is that we're just such a young nation.
As countries go, we're sort of adolescent. But thinking about it,
where we do have historic buildings they're usually museums or
offices of local government, not places people hang out. The
exceptions that come to mind are all shools. Unless you count
simple homes that happen to be "old" (for some value of "old");
in high school I had friends who kept having to chase tourists
out of their living rooms because folks would wander into the
"charmingly preserved historical building" assuming it had to
be a museum or similar attraction.
> I'd be
> surprised if there are _any_ buildings in North America as old as 560 years
> that were built by the Europeans and their descendants.
If there are, the place to look would be St. Mary's, Maryland.
IIRC, that's the oldest continuously inhabited European-established
settlement on the continent. But I'm not sure whether any of the
original buildings were preserved.
Anyplace else you'd want to look, "560 years" is kind of pointless.
> (The ancient
> pueblos and Mayan ruins aren't in cities, in daily use, like old buildings
> in Europe are.)
*nod* Which makes their age kind of ... abstract, in a way.
They're these preserved artifacts, as opposed to being a
_connection_ to a distant past.
All of this really just serves as explanation for the classic
joke about the difference between Americans and Europeans.
(One things a hundred miles is a long distance. The other
thinks a hundred years is a long time. I first heard it from
someone whose family had an apartment in a building a few
hundred years old in Vienna, who pointed out that in that
city, that building wasn't considered "old".)
-- Glenn
