Crunchy Con: Cash poor, culturally rich?

Crunchy Con: Cash poor, culturally rich?

The connection between economic decline and historic preservation: "An American town that was doing well until the Civil War, more or less, and then was frozen for a hundred years, today looks vastly better than a town that was swamped by the modernist bulldozer. The paradox, of course, is that relative poverty froze the town at what was a beautiful era of architectural history. (I think one of our regular readers who lives in an old New England village remarked the other day that the reason her town is so lovely and walkable today is that it was poor during the era when cities were rebuilt to accomodate cars and the assumptions of mid-century modernity)."