Some 67 years ago Henry James visited Boston after a long absence from the United States and, viewing the incipient effects of what we have since learned to call “urban renewal,” he remarked: “. . . if I had often seen how fast history could be made, I had doubtless never so felt that it could be unmade still faster.” Most people here have become so sanguine about the prospects for “renewal” that James’s remark would sound to them like the wisecrack of an ungrateful guest. But the process of unmaking that James saw has really come into its own in recent years, to the point where “progress” has