[De Minimis NY]

I couldn't agree more with Crawford.

It's become increasingly obvious that NY isn't going to hold the title for the world's tallest building going into the furture and eventually many emerging market cities are going to catch up with respect to general density as well. The one thing that NY will always have (assuming we protect buildings like that), though, is a legacy of certain types of buildings that you can't find to the same degree anywhere else in the world.

I remember being a kid and going to certain European cities and wishing that NY was a bit older so that we would have been in an economic position to build more stuff on par with Parisian baroque architecture back when things like that were still being built. At the time I didn't see older NY buildings as having that kind of importance. As massive glass towers become the norm in dozens of cities around the world, though, these kinds of classic NY buildings are going to take on new value. I imagine/hope that children visiting NY from Shenzhen in years to come will feel much the way about tenements in NYC as I did about the streets of Amsterdam or Vienna.