Personally, i feel we tend to compress history and imagine some form of cohesive rationale behind what came before. On the Bowery now there are buildings that just post date the Colonial era and buildings dating from 1950s. Buildings two centuries apart have as little contextual reference to each other as this does to that 1950′s building (if not more). Seeing that as cohesive context compresses 200 years into some vague clump now called “History”.

Lately there’s been so much stress in NY about buildings distorting the context of the neighborhoods they’re proposed for. Can we please once again allow cities to behave like cities? Can NY preservationists not assume that anything not clad in brick, or “sensitive to context” is somehow an affront to the neighborhoods character.

As an example, the Empire State Building has nothing to do with the context of the 19 century row houses it replaced, and sat amongst when it was built. Do we still lament it’s insensitivity to that context now? I would argue not.

Let’s not leave the future only bad references to a mis-remembered past.