Sometimes I Love Preservationists. Usually I Just Want to see Them Put in Prisons For a Very Long Time

By now the story is familiar: some architectural gem is going to be torn down so that a developer can build blocks of ticky tacky. The Preservationists come down and pester City Hall and hold Press Conferences and Pass Petitions, and so forth and so on and on and on. Nowadays it usually ends in the courts. On and on and on. And the result is generally about as logical as a toss of the coin, but much energy and resources go into it. So much so, that doing anything requires a war chest of funds to battle the Preservationists, who will get sentimental over the damndest things.

This, for instance.

Now, I will admit that I don't think I have seen the building in person, and one must be very careful (almost to the point of not-do-it-at-all careful) of judging a building solely on photographs. However, is this the sort of thing that needs preservation? In New Orleans?

I love good modernism (which this may be. I don't know), but there are limits, and this preservation for the sake of preservation is nothing more than silly sentimentalism, just as the fever pitch campaign to save the last Doggy Diner in San Francisco was.

People need to realize that simply because they have gotten used to a thing, doesn't make it an essential and eternal part of a place.

Now, I am against the wholesale flattening of areas, and the conquest by monolithic chains, peddling cultural dreck in the name of consumer choice, but this hardly counts as that.

What this idiocy does is to make it harder and harder to build anything, and New Orleans needs that right now about as much as San Francisco needs more poofters.

Also, I am noticing a disturbing trend, where local governments are totally in thrall to faddish causes and to these lobbyists who pretend not to be lobbyists, because they don't make money for their work. With the sort of third-rate dreck that goes into City Politics, we end up with the ideas that have the most volume winning out, and normal people simply do not have the time to spend fighting the pet cause of each and every village idiot. So, the result is that we have city councils racing each other to be more in line with the Village Idiot Platform (see foie gras, smoking regulations, tinkering with election procedures, tragicomedia around the way to honor holidays, etc.).