Heritage Gems

A heritage gem is a small town that survived intact, and the interesting question is always what stopped it from being rebuilt.

Usually failure. Money left and nothing replaced what stood. Bruges was preserved by the silting of its channel; Havana by an embargo that removed the means to demolish anything; Trinidad by the collapse of Cuban sugar. Poverty is the most reliable conservation officer there is, and it is not a compliment to anyone.

Sometimes law. Charleston passed the first historic zoning ordinance in the United States in 1931, after northern buyers began shipping panelled interiors north. Santa Fe wrote a building style into its code in 1957.

Occasionally an act of will. Warsaw's old town is a reconstruction from eighteenth-century paintings, and UNESCO listed it as exactly that. Noto was not rebuilt on its ruins at all but on a new site ten kilometres away, in a single style, at once.

Say which it was. These portraits name the mechanism, because a town saved by bankruptcy and a town saved by ordinance are not the same place.

Ask what stopped, and in which year.