On a July morning, at the tender age of five, I watched the building next to my Bronx tenement capitulate to the blows of a wrecking ball. The devastating simplicity of a dead weight buckling a masonry wall has stayed with me all my life, mostly because this theater of destruction is repeated in New York on a near routine basis. Thousands of buildings disappear in a pile of dust and brick each decade, to be replaced with others. Arguably a necessary evil in a large city, the practice had by mid-century become foolishly indiscriminate.
