February232008
It’s a rather recent trend that buildings are built with the assumption that they’ll be torn down before a century has past. The Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians built structures whose wrecking crew, they hoped, could only be led by God(s) and Angels after— whatever their society’s version of— the “Final Battle” took place. We however, with far too great a sense of time, construct even our greatest skyscrapers to be largely disposable. Yankee Stadium, ‘the house that Ruth Built’, where Gehrig played, where the Mick hit home-runs, where some of my best memories with my father take place, in less than a year will become ‘the condos built over Ruth’ and not only are most New Yorkers fine with that, but they seem to be applauding it as an ‘upgrade’. So it goes, I guess, but I repeat: Those who forget history are themselves doomed to be forgotten.
