The Strawberry Banke living museum is a tremendous asset to downtown Portsmouth. It bolsters and safeguards the city’s historic character against modern encroachments like minimum lot sizes, arbitrary zoning codes, and synthetic building materials.
Their Heritage Houses Program is a great example of this. Rather than allowing classic houses to be torn down in favor of McMansions or faceless apartment blocks, the organization and its donors acquire and rehabilitate the properties to their former glory. They are then leased as offices or rental homes.
Cities function a lot like superorganisms – just as you’d rather repair your current arm from injury rather than cut it off and get a prosthetic, cities seem to function better when old buildings are maintained rather than constantly replaced. For more on this, I strongly recommend Jane Jacobs’ seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs was credited with saving Manhattan’s Greenwich Village from destruction by Robert Moses’ fascistic highway building (and neighborhood destroying) program.
