Contra Thomas Wolfe, you actually can go home again—but once you see how much it’s changed, you may want to leave just as quickly. When Henry James, after spending most of his adult life abroad, returned in 1904 for a 10-months-long tour of the United States, he was dismayed to find that many of the old buildings and spaces he once cherished had been obliterated—such as his childhood homes in Boston and Manhattan’s Washington Square or the “dusky lecture halls” of Copley Square, where his