Every now and then I’ll cruise google satellite and street view looking for the places I’ve lived, worked, went to school, or just visited often, like the homes of family members where I stayed overnight more than once. Some places from my early childhood weren’t easy to locate since I was too young to know the address, and others were difficult because the official street address had changed since my time there, but eventually I managed to puzzle out most of them. Somewhere along the line I started dropping pins, and then my OCD kicked in and I had to mark all of them.
I tried to be consistent about which category I put places in, but then I noticed when zoomed out, some symbols would end up in the wrong place relative to others (especially that yellow star) and symbols for less important places would end up on top of places I considered more important, so I had to fudge things a bit. Not that it matters much to strangers, but anyway. Here’s my history in map form.
I’m also upset they killed that travel history. I missed the memo and didn’t back up/document a significant event that could’ve been very useful for legal reasons.
For someone as old as I am, I’m shocked to discover that only three of the places I’ve ever lived have been torn down, and all three of them were short-term rental apartments.
I did get the memo and backed up all my devices but it still wiped everything out.
I had to grieve that loss and move on.
Sorry you also experienced this.
As far as I know, every place where I’ve ever lived is still standing:
Four single-family houses
A two-flat
A three-flat
Three apartment buildings
Two college dormitories
The only one that I’m not sure of is the house where my parents lived when I was born; we moved from California to Illinois when I was three months old. Neither of my parents remember the address of that house, and so, I’ve not been able to ever look it up on Google. However, it was in San Jose, which has undergone tremendous growth since 1965, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it was torn down at some point.
The two-flat I lived in from age 3 months to 3 years, and the house I lived in from 3 to 10, are both within 15 miles of where I now live, and when I drove by them this summer, they were still there. My parents are still in the same house we moved to when I was ten, and I was there last week. The rest, I’ve looked up on Google recently, and they’re all still there.
I prefer using Google Earth which has more features. But I was dismayed to find recently that my childhood home had been blurred out. Apparently, anyone can request this of Google and the current owners must not have wanted any snooping. It sucks because I always enjoyed watching the evolution of the house, but at least I have photographs.
I forgot to add: the Google Street View picture of my parents’ house, up until a year or so ago (when an updated picture was taken), had been taken when the Google truck was driving past the house at the same time that my dad was walking from the house to his car, parked in the driveway. They blurred out his face, of course, but it was clearly him.
Fyi if you didn’t know, there’s often a tiny link along the bottom edge where you can browse back through the dated history of previous photos. It’s like virtual time travel.
Yeah, I would be too. so sorry. I’m glad I marked things in a way that they don’t just erase.
Wow, that is a lot of bullitt points. If I marked every place I ever visited like that it wouldn’t be anywhere near as extensive.
Three of my former residences have been torn down as well. Two were Army barracks and one a rental house. I marked those 3 spots as close as I was able. Google Maps doesn’t let me mark arbitrary spots on the map anymore, it apparently wants me to pick actual street addresses or other marked map features.
Most of the military places where I lived on base have been remodeled / torn down. Then again it was back in the 1980s when I was there and much of that stuff was WWII era “temporary” construction. It was well-past its should-tear-down date when I was there then.
But everyplace I’ve lived before or after, or during but off-base, is still there substantially unchanged. Two of my old houses now have pools and in some cases the trees are a lot bigger, but that’s about it.
Of former workplaces, almost all of the buildings still exist, just with different tenants in them.
@Ponderoid looks like you’ve spend some time in my neck of the woods- NE Indiana.
I do like to go back and look at the houses I used to live in because they’ve changed so much. Especially the house I lived in until I was six. I’m kind of mad they cut down the redbud tree my grandma planted and took off the deck my uncle built… even though it’s been 40+ years since I lived there.
Just today I learned that travel history existed! So I can’t comment on that.
But today I did just find out (from visiting it using Google Maps) that one of the only strip malls that I am nostalgic for got torn down. One of the two that I am nostalgic for was actually pretty crappy in reality but I grew up there, so I have fond memories of playing video games in the Woolworth and eating at the Your Host diner. That one is still up, but has seen its better days.
But there is one that used to actually be pleasant. It had adequate overhead protection and even a mini courtyard so that it didn’t feel like you were out in the open and exposed to the sun and rain. Now they’ve torn down the nice part of it and rebuilt it without any cantilevered overheads or courtyard. Okay then.
I live a mile and a half from a strip mall that is sort of like it, but my exposure to it is only half as old as my exposure to the other one, so it’s less nostalgic, and the non-anchor stores are half empty. I am nostalgic for the K-Mart that used to be there until like 10 years ago and is now a storage place.
I sometimes visit my old haunts in Google Earth on my Oculus Rift VR system. I can get a pretty realistic 3D experience of walking around the places where I used to walk around in real life.
I just looked at the first house I ever lived in as a child in Juneau. It’s still there, but has peeling white paint instead of peeling gray paint. Then I looked at the house I grew up in in Anchorage. They finally took out the evergreen tree at the corner of the house that I used to decorate with lights every Christmas. It probably became so big that it was threatening the roof and foundation.
Then I looked at the condo my wife and I lived in in Anchorage. The big beautiful blue spruce that I planted and decorated each Christmas is gone, probably because of root issues. However, the birch and the crabapple trees that we planted are still there.
Lastly, I looked at our home in Portland. The guy who bought it has let the yard go wild. The trees need pruning and he let the planter boxes I built die out. My beautiful rosemary bush is dead. A fucking shame, is what it is. We sank a lot of money and labor into making that place look beautiful from the street. I can’t figure out how to see a view from above, but I’m afraid of what I might see in the back yard.
I lived in a lot of other places, but those addresses are but a distant memory now.
Just switch out of street view to the normal top-down road map view and select the “Satellite” display option.
My first house was a then couple year old place in Las Vegas. I too spent a bunch of time and money going beyond the simple grass & stick-trees the developer had put that the original owner had barely maintained. Whole lotta weekend labor and trips to Home Depot and nurseries and … It’s good being 30 and filled with nest-making ambition. Or at least it was.
About a year after I sold it, so 35 years ago now, the neighbors said the new folks let it all die. Once Google Maps was invented I checked and the front and backyards have always been just bare ugly dirt since. Still are now. Ugh.
Other than that, the place is instantly recognizable as the same house or one of the clones up and down that neighborhood.
Yep, I lived my middle school-ish years in Fort Wayne, '78-'82.
And also try clicking the “3D” button and holding down ctrl while mousing around to tilt and pan the camera; sometimes this lets you see around the trees and buildings for a better view.
I used Google Maps to try to find the summer cottage of my youth, a wonderfully idyllic rustic place with only cold running water (hot water had to be produced on a wood-burning stove), but man, that place was beautiful and imbued in me an eternal love of nature!
It was hard to find because the area has changed so much, but due to some distinctive landmarks, I found it. OMG, the whole place has become urbanized! What was once a collection of cottages a few miles away from a tiny village is now basically a town!
The rest, I’ve looked up on Google recently, and they’re all still there.