Demolition is the default, and each of these dodged it: a 200-ton synagogue put on rollers and moved a mile, a scholar’s 32,000 books kept in his own order, a winding frame left standing after every pit around it went, a station whose fittings nobody stripped, and a field pattern the plough never flattened.
A 200-ton 1863 synagogue rolled a mile through Madison to save it
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Umberto Eco's 32,000-book personal library, opened exactly as he left it
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An 80-foot concrete winding frame, all that's left of Big Mary
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An 1860 Irish station, closed since the last freight run in 1993
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Ridge-and-furrow fields plowed by hand, never flattened since
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