When conserving an historic streetscape with gaps in the urban fabric, often the appropriate solution will be a sensitive contemporary structure. But when one of the missing pieces is a monument that is essential to the understanding of the entire ensemble, one may have no choice but to engage in some sort of replication. No matter how much fidelity a replica might have to a lost monument, it can never truly replace it, or the historical associations embodied within it. The insertion of a new “historical” structure displaces the immediate past in favor of a privileged past further back in time, sometimes in service of a romanticized distant past, but just as often to obscure the memory of more difficult subsequent time. The reconstructions at Colonial Williamsburg and the recent replication of the Stadtschloss in Berlin are both cases in point. At Williamsburg the Governor’s Palace and Capitol building were reconstructed to return the core of the town to its Revolutionary War-era appearance, while evidence of the community’s free and enslaved Black population was suppressed in the context of Jim Crow-era Virginia. In Berlin the parliament building of the German Democratic Republic, the Palast der Republik, has been replaced by the Wilhelminen Stadtschloss, eliminating a significant monument constructed by the East German regime while implicitly endorsing the German colonial empire. The erasure of so much twentieth century fabric and the erection of “new” eighteenth-century landmarks will complicate the interpretation of the complex history of both sites for future generations.