'A movement that began in earnest when Penn Station fell in 1964 has not run its course. Preservation can continue to be a force for good-but not the way it was a half century ago.'

摘要

My first job out of graduate school was an internship at Preservation, the magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, D.C. It was the early 2000s and the magazine overflowed with ads and famous bylines, thanks to the pre-internet economy and an editor-in-chief named Robert Wilson. Wilson and the other editors saw themselves as cultural omnivores in a field that had become ossified and narrow. So they ran articles about a road trip through the Navajo Nation, the reglazing of Lever House, the glories of Las Vegas' fake monuments. To highlight the break with old-school preservation, Wilson pointed to the cover of an issue published before he had helped relaunch the magazine in 1996. It showed a white woman in colonial garb, holding a teacup in a stuffy period room. You could almost hear the grandfather clock ticking forlornly.