(FORTUNE Magazine) – It has been nine years since the present writer vented his view of preservationism, and nothing much has changed in the interim, including his view. The last time we went around this track, the big preservationist issue here in the Big Apple was whether some local real estate operators, who had paid good green money for the ancient Biltmore Hotel, had the right to tear it down. The media were besieged by white-shoe types voting a sentimental no because they had once attended a prom there or something. Luckily, the fox- trotters did not prevail over the entrepreneurs, and where the Biltmore once stood there is now a sleek office building called the Bank of America Plaza. Please do not write in to say that you are against interstate banking. Having no natural limits, preservationist logic is ever at war with economic growth. Suppose our ancestors here in Gotham had similarly put sentiment ahead of economics. Once upon a time, New York was called New Amsterdam, and Governor Peter Stuyvesant built a wall across lower Manhattan to keep out marauding Indians. Over the years, quite a few folks might have felt their scalps were saved by the wall, but the unsentimental British tore it down anyway and replaced it with Wall Street, which became home to the world's greatest capital market. Please do not write in to say that you are against program trading. During the past few years, the preservationist movement in New York has been strenuously satirizing itself. The opportunity to do so emerged in the early Eighties, when assorted developers and city planners began to zero in on the possibility of transforming Times Square. You might have thought there could be no possible dispute over the need to reshape this zone, whose population of pimps, drug dealers, transvestite prostitutes, and three-card monte dealers annually scales new heights of perversion while collectively keeping thousands of nervous folks from visiting the adjacent theater district; but, of course, the development plans instantly ran into preservationists who turned out to be rather fond of it all. So here is heavy thinker Howard Kurtz, long a New York-based staff correspondent of the Washington Post, bemoaning the potential loss of the area's ''funky vitality.'' Here is community activist Joyce Matz telling the Chicago Tribune reporter how much we would all miss the ''glitz, lights, and a little bit of sleaze'' in the area. The case for depravity chic is also registered in an op-ed piece in the Times whose author solemnly worries that the ''essential dowdiness'' of the area could be lost forever. Also urgently needing to be mentioned is the guy from the Sierra Club, who is suing to block the Times Square project, which, he claims, will make the area ''boring as hell.'' Possibly he means that there will be fewer thrills for members on hiking expeditions across 42nd Street. He could be right at that.