Around every 2 years I visit my hometown. It would be more like every year if all the business I loved weren’t closed. Now the only thing I visit for is the central park and the architecture of the college, but even the most nostalgic part of the college has been torn down – a Brutalist-era walkway over a road between buildings which I thought was megacool when I was growing up especially since it connected like 4 buildings in an elevated walkway with plenty of space to play or hang out on. The other concrete structures are great, too, but I appreciate them more as an adult than I did as a child.
I grew up in the Baltimore suburbs about 90-ish miles from where I live now. But my folks moved to the county to the north in '79, and the family home since then is not one where I ever lived. As it happens, I’m at that place right now for a brief stay, but it’s not my hometown.
I have looked up the old neighborhood on Google maps. Lots of changes since I moved out on my own.
After 10 years of living in various places, ranging from 10 miles, 60 miles, and 250 miles away from where I grew up and where my parents still lived, I moved back to within 10 blocks of them, and have been here ever since. So yeah. I’m very familiar with my “hometown”.
Born and raised in Chicago. Currently live in a suburb - can see the Chicago skyline from within a mile of my house, and go into the city periodically. But it has been at least a decade since I’ve been to my old neighborhood (NW side, Belmont and Central).
I live in it! I go to church less than a mile from my house, my workplace is just over a mile from the house, and right across the street from the hospital I was born in!
I drove to Milwaukee for a Brewers game last summer, and when I realized that I’d pass within ten miles of my hometown, I left an hour early.
It dredged up so many fun memories…
Hey, there’s the bakery that dad would get us ‘crullers’ at… come to think of it, he was letting my mom sleep in every Saturday, and keeping us away from home… And there’s the drug store with the spinner rack full of comics. At 12¢ each, I could usually buy two! And speaking of comics, I just realized that I wore my Superman pajamas with a red beach towel cape to that ice cream stand. Wasn’t embarrassed at the time…
I can walk to the house where I grew up in about twenty minutes I am just a homeboy
I didn’t return to my birth town (Juneau, AK) until 50 years after I left (at age ten). I happened to have a job with a public housing agency that had some properties there, so had to travel there for one of our projects. Interesting to see it from an adult’s perspective.
What was it like when you returned? Were there a ton of changes? My small hometown has hardly changed a bit, except for older houses being replaced with newer larger ones.
I didn’t have any particular interest in posting in this thread until I saw this. I don’t particularly remember mentioning where I grew up, but I guess I did somewhere. I remember the whole Valley as being mostly bland – no particularly good or bad memories. Not at all a “blast”. I guess I just wasn’t into any of the right scenes.
I grew up in an area we called Pacoima, but I eventually came to think it wasn’t really. The real Pacoima, I guess, in in the neighborhood of, say, Van Nuys Blvd and San Fernando Road. I remember that area as being heavily Hispanic. Where I lived was not, but it is now. My nearest main intersection was Woodman Av and Chase St. – I was never quite sure if that was Pacoima or Panorama City. According to modern signage in the area, it’s clearly Arleta.
I graduated from Poly in 1969, and have been back occasionally over the years to visit parents and other kinfolk – a very small number of whom still live around there or are even still alive. They lived in Studio City for a long time. My father passed away about ten years ago and I haven’t been back since.
Some places I’ve lived have changed so much it gives me the creeps to visit. I got fairly sick around 2000, enough that I went to live with my folks for several weeks. I didn’t have my car with me, and I felt stranded there. Again in 2004 I was fairly sick, enough that I lived with my parents (father and his 2nd wife). It was expected to be about 6 weeks, but ended up being 8 months after which I was still too sick to live independently so I went to live in a “board-and-care” home (essentially, what you might call a “rest home”) for another 8 months until January 2005. At least I had my car with me that time.
That all creeped me out enough that I’ve never wanted to go back, and after my father died, I never did. It’s been my life’s work ever since to get and stay as far away from Los Angeles as possible – I moved to Fresno, then to Rohnert Park. My long-term goal was to keep moving farther north away from Los Angeles until I reached the North Pole. Now, as fate happened, I’m in the San Joaquin Valley about thirty minutes south of Modesto. But it always gives the the willies now just driving or visiting anywhere to the south of here.
that wouldn’t happen to be Niles Michigan, would it? you might know some of my infamous family from there
I have 2 places I’ve lived off and on most of my life one in Indiana and I’m still in the other one in ca … and until 1988 i bounced between the two regularly …id go back once or twice just to see the family there
I still live there, and always have except for a few years my family lived in New York; and I was too young to recall much if anything of that.
Not really, not since Mom died 15 years back.
One sibling lives there but we are not close; quite a bit of the extended family but we never tended to hang out especially as adults.
We’ve gone back for funerals and the like, of course.
We actually pass through the town a couple times a year - it’s an alternative to driving through NJ/NYC/Connecticut to visit our daughter in Vermont, and gives us a lot more bailout options in case of traffic surprises (not to mention, quite a bit more scenic).
I currently live in an inner-ring suburb of the city where I was born and grew up, about a block from the border, so naturally I often have occasion to go into my old hometown. And my mom still lives in the house I grew up in, within easy biking range, so naturally I often visit her. In fact, after college and grad school, I specifically chose to move back to this area so as to be close to family
For the last 20 years I have lived west of Detroit, over 3 hours from the town I grew up in rural town in Ohio next to the Indiana border. I’ve gone back there about twice a month in those 20 years. Still go eat, drink and play pool at the bar my dad first set me up on at the age of three.
Still have few relatives there, but most of the old timers are now gone except for my mom. After she passes I imagine I will still go back, but not that often. A couple of times a year my cousins and I will just drive around and point at things that changed or people that died or gone to prison. It’s a break from the big city life.
I was born in Washington DC so I’ve been back there a number of times since leaving over 50 years ago, usually visiting Bethesda and Rockville where I actually grew up to see the houses we lived in there. We moved to the Philadelphia suburbs when I was 13 and my parents stayed there the rest of their lives, my brother still lives there, and I have a few friends that still live there. Aside from short periods in other locations we lived in New York for close to 20 years before moving the the Great State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and we still visit friends and family living in New York regularly.
These wasn’t a long distance between each one but it’s now something of a haul from here to DC and even the allure of stuffing myself with crabs in Baltimore probably won’t get me down there anytime soon.
No. I was born in a certain city in the West, but we moved to West Texas, after a brief sojourn in Arkansas, when I was five for my father’s work. So I consider that West Texas town my hometown. Parents dead, no family anywhere in Texas, hate my hometown with the strength of a thousand burning suns. So no. The last time I was there was 20 years ago for my father’s funeral. Never intend to go there again.
My parents lived there until Mom died 14 years ago, and havent been there since. But when they were alive, I’d go at least every year if I happened to be living within 600 miles, a one-day drive.
I was born in Torrence, CA, and lived the first couple of years of my life there and in Sparks and Reno, NV. Divorce brought us to Michigan. I only have flashes of memory out west before coming into full consciousness, so I guess my hometown is a border town with Canada, here in Michigan.
I go back because I have relatives there, but also because it’s an international border with Canada, and for any destination east of London, it’s the better than than going through Windsor.
It is and always has been and always will be a town with “great potential,” due to its location on Lake Huron and the St. Clair River. No one ever seems to be able to realize that potential, though, so it remains a stagnant little place with limited tourism potential. It’s nice enough if you live there, but there’s not much reason to visit if you don’t.
Yes because I live in a suburb of my hometown