Quote Originally Posted by Honky Tonk View Post
Fine. Just don't scrap them, burn them, spray paint them, then leave them standing for the next 30 years, to destroy the neighborhoods around them and leave the neighbors having to deal with them.
The ruins of antiquity were indeed scrapped, burned, painted, vandalized and left standing for the next 3,000 years, and only was it until much much later, say, like 200 years ago, that people started to appreciate them and act to preserve them.

Here's one example, from a review of In Ruins, by Christopher Woodward:

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Built around A.D. 80, a grand oval arena for gladiatorial contests and feeding Christians to lions, the Colosseum had survived time and Visigoths but succumbed to slow attrition during the later Christian Era, when various popes leased it as a stone quarry for their construction projects. Workers burned its marble to make lime for use in mortar; beggars took shelter under its arches, and successive earthquakes toppled it further. By the time Charles Dickens saw it in the 1840's, he could perceive its ''awful beauty'' and desolation as a ''softened sorrow,'' representing ''the ghost of old Rome, wicked wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod.''
In 1779, William Beckford, a sybaritic Englishman, was disgusted to find it colonized by monks praying the Stations of the Cross, and noted wistfully that they were fat enough to make a lion's mouth water. ....15th-century poetry by the man who would later become Pope Pius II. ''Oh Rome! Your very ruins are a joy,'' he wrote. As pontiff, he tried to outlaw marble burning and scavenging, but to little lasting effect.

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Sounds exactly like what is happening today.