Lara Kozak wrote:

> It saved beautiful stuff but it is falling fast ( I was there in Dec.
> 1996 - see photos at http://www.tomco.net/~larak/cuba/cuba.htm.

Creighton's computer is down with a virus so he may not be able to respond to your
message for a while.

A few of the BP preservationeers, through PIN/APTI,  have been quite active in a
Poland/American preservation exchange. Your comments, and the information on
buildings in Cuba is interesting in this respect. As to the effect of multinational
corporations... a very impressive project in Warsaw was financed by Citibank. Here
in the US there is an interest in corporations, such as the GAP, Barnes & Noble,
Disney, for moving into and rehabilitating historic buildings.

Without an influx of capital the buildings will remain vacant and increasingly
become derelict. The idea behind having a corporation restore a building is that it
is more efficient to raise $40M from one source, rather than in $100.00 increments.
If the prevailing sentiment is to keep multinational corporations out of Cuba then
you are leaning more toward the incremental approach - if anything is done in this
manner it will probably mean restoring of small buildings in insolation from each
other - where one individual is able to crusade for the specific building. There
are many buildings in America that have been in *restoration* mode for +20 years
due to lack of capital. There are many more buildings in *abandoned* mode.

In Harlem there are many beautiful 19th century buildings extant in part because
there has not been an influx of capital allowing for "destruction by maintenance."
Increasingly there is interest in adaptive reuse of tehse buildings... I doubt any
multinational corporation wanting to move into Harlem and sell sneakers, ice cream,
or books and computers would be stopped by anyone from restoring an existing
building.

][<en Follett

--
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