Belfast

This would be Belfast, envisioned with a planned 300-foot tower a few years from now. Let's compare and contrast with an after-a-car bomb shot from 1970:

My parents remember — with all the imperfections of nostalgia — courting each other in the late 1950s and walking around towns in Northern Ireland enjoying the many gaudy little window displays that so quickly after 1969 turned into ugly steel-shuttered shop fronts that opened late and shut early, and offered store owners and shoppers alike little beyond a grim subsistence.

In the eight or so years I have lived in New York I am stricken when I see some elegant, elderly hardware store disappear to be replaced by a vast glass and steel highrise, often in what seems like a matter of weeks. But when I see the gale-force changes rage across Northern Ireland these days, I can only say, bring it on, the more the better, for that poor wee place.

[Bomb photo by Normko].