When I asked people on the street what they liked about the place, they replied overwhelmingly, in one way or another, that they liked the town’s “old-fashioned feeling.” Urged to cite specifics, they quickly got mired in circular reasoning: They liked the buildings because they were old-fashioned, and they liked old-fashioned things because they were old and antiquey, and … It was like Greenfield Village, where nobody seemed to notice that there were no cars around. These were educated people for the most part, but they were members of a culture that had long ceased to value place except as a
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