Steelerphan, that was magnificent. And kinda sad. Thank you.
After WW2 ended and my dad got out of the service, he, Mom and my brother moved into a couple of rooms in a large house in Worcester, Mass. I guess it was their first real domicile and was full of happy memories. There was a hanging lamp that they used to toss pennies and nickels in, and at the end of the week, they’d take the money to buy “chop-suey sandwiches.” They’d “wrestle” on the floor (at least that’s the term she used 
) and after her neighbor told her that they loved watching them through the window doing that, she made sure the screen was pulled down. Their landlord once chased a peeping-tom around the block - Mom said it was quite a sight since the landlord’s legs were so short and the peeper was so lanky - and the landlord caught him!
So, around 1995, some 50 years later, Mom and I are driving up to New Hampshire. We’re going through Worcester and decide to see if the house was still there. It was. We sat in the car for a bit, and Mom said, “I wonder if the owners have changed much of the inside? Maybe they’ll let us look around.” Mr. Landlord had died quite a while ago, and Mrs. Landlord had probably joined him (otherwise she’d be in her late 90’s). So, we knock and what do you know, but Mrs. Landlord answered. I was afraid we’d give her a heart attack as she recognized Mom and got very excited. We spent the afternoon with her and, except for a couple of new appliances, the place had not changed. The hanging lamp was still there. The linoleum floor that looked like an oriental carpet was still there. The furniture. Amazing.
To counterbalance everything, when we went through Sebring, Florida, we stopped at the hotel Mom and my brother lived in for the time Dad was training in flight school. The place had turned into a real dive and cafe in the hotel had become a sleazy bar. We asked for a cup of coffee from the bartender, and you’d have thought we asked for a cup of quarks from her puzzled expression. We had a good laugh over that one.
Steelerphan, where in northern NY did you live? I’m just asking on the offchance its the same school I went to where I was little (your description of the place is strangely a lot like what my old elementary school was).
When we were cleaning out my father’s apartment, we found photos of the house I grew up in, when it was first built and not yet landscaped, back in the '50s. I Alta Vista’d the address and got the names of the current residents, and sent them laser copies of the photos, with a note, and asked them that if the tiled copy of a Hiroshigi that my mother created on the kitchen wall still existed, could they send me a photo?
Never heard back from them. Bastards.
My folks have an old plantation home in Central Texas, built in 1851 by a father and son that participated in the Battle of San Jacinto. It’s just a couple of acres now but originally the lands extended all the way down to the lake (used to be a river) a mile or so away. 300 to 400 year old Live Oaks dot the yard and it most definately was a working cotton plantation in it’s day, employing slave labor. While Mom & Dad have lived there for 30 years now, that’s as far back as our family ties go with the place.
Several years back, a young black woman knocked on their door. Seems her great, great (etc) grandmother had been a slave on the place and had with the establishment of the Emancipation Proclamation received her freedom there too. This young lady’s relative had joined hands with the other slaves around the trunk of the biggest oak in the back, chanted a chant and thusly became free women and men.
I still think about that story every time I see that tree.
As an aside, Jesse James danced there and traded for a horse once and General Douglas McArthur played there as a boy when the house was headquarters of an Army camp his father commanded.
I’ve only seen my childhood home once since 1976, because it’s in a little town that is only accessible by driving, and I’ve never owned or driven a car. When my wife-to-be flew up from Florida to Ontario to visit me seven years ago, we rented a car and she drove there so I could show her where I grew up. I didn’t have the nerve to knock on the door, but we looked all over the property from inside the car. The house has changed a lot since I lived there. There used to be white asbestos shingle siding, from back when nobody knew asbestos was a health hazard. Now it’s vinyl siding. The black trim is now red. They’ve knocked out a hole in the living room wall to put in a bay window. The veranda is now incorporated into the house, instead of being where you first entered before going into the kitchen. The garage my father built is now another room, and the driveway he had bulldozed out and filled with gravel is lawn again. The two huge trees out front are gone. The huge tree in the back yard that had our rope swing on it is gone. The hedges are gone. The apple trees are gone. The ditch is gone and the well is gone. It was pretty disappointing, actually. It’s probably better all around that I didn’t ask to see the place, because I probably would have cried.
What was really different is that the field across the street from the house, where I spent much of my childhood playing, is now the site of a Tim Horton’s Donuts establishment. And the grain elevator and silos that they built by the tracks at the end of the street in the late '60s was completely dismantled. It looked like there had never been anything there.
It’s nice if you can go home again, but I don’t think I can call that place home anymore. It’s somebody else’s house now. I do get a chuckle out of wondering what they paid for it, or what it’s worth now, because my parents bought it for $10,000. The mortgage payments were $75/month. There’s a place you can never go back to!
Once. The swamp cooler was gone, there was no one living there (it had been rented out for a while, but not while I visited).
They’d painted the whole house white (yuck), put up an unecessary (IMO) fence, and torn up the patio pavers (but left the door stoop where our initials were carved).
Lived there over the course of three decades; it was not great to go back; but I touched base with some neighbors and mourned others.
I never told my folks I’d gone back, they had known I was going to be in town but had specifically told me not to go back (?). Dad and I were just talking about the town yesterday and he noted he had no intention of ever going back.
But compared to living in the ‘big city’, there were some ‘small town’ charms about it that I do miss.
The house my wife grew up in is in Biloxi, Mississippi and is now one of those “E-Z Loans” places. She said that when she explained that she used to live there and asked if she could look around, they looked at her like she was crazy.
I guess I can see their point. 
It’s probably a long shot, but the place is Jackson Elementary School in Batavia, NY.
This thread has me thinking of the various places where I have lived. I’ve moved around a lot, and I wonder about some of the places- what has happened to them? The ones I know about:
[ul]
[li]The house I lived in during seventh grade was demolished not long afterward.[/li][li]Same for the house containing three apartments I stayed in during college- it’s now a parking lot.[/li][li]The ones I mentioned above. (Hi, Opal!)[/li][li]The apartment house where I stayed during most of highschool is a women’s shelter. A Subway has been built in the front yard. Oh, the irony![/li][li]Two other houses I occupied are still standing, as is the building with my first apartment.[/li][/ul]
The ones I don’t:
[ul]
[li]When I moved to Florida, I first stayed in a small apartment in Hollywood, not far from US 1. I moved to a townhouse in Sunrise near the trunpike entrance on Sunrise Boulevard; then the Catalina Apartments in Boca Raton.[/li][li]My second tour In FL, I lived in the A-1 Motel on Nebraska Boulevard, just north of Fowler, in the beautiful city of Tampa. Is it still there (the motel, not Tampa)?[/li][li]I also stayed in a beautiful boarding house in High Point, NC. It was a blast- the house manager played D&D; there was a lesbian couple in the attic room (one was a stripper), an openly gay man had the room next to the bathroom and the extra room in the back was the veterinarian’s room. I wish I knew what happened to them all…[/li][/ul]
My parents still live in the house I grew up in, but I did go to my old dorm room the year after I moved, which resulted in me becoming friends with the guy that lived there. Steelerphan, that was a really touching story. I live about fifteen minutes away from Batavia, and the majority of my cousins attended Jackson Elementary School.
The odd thing is that the exact same incident happened to me.
I wonder why my mom reacted that way? :eek:
Three years ago my grandma died, and while my whole family was in town for the services, we hung out a lot at her house. One day a woman and her daughter came to the door, saying they read about my grandma in the paper and hated to bother us, but they used to live in that house and couldn’t they please take a look around for old time’s sake. It was so inappropriate. It still makes me mad when I think about it.
hapaXL
I lived in Oakland from age 5 to 22. The first house I remember was on the corner of 54th and Dover Streets, between Shattuck and what is now MLK Blvd. (was then Grove Street). I’ve driven by it maybe 2-3 times over the past twenty years. The first time was when Oakland was overrun by gangs and the place looked like a crack house. It was scary just driving down the street.
Times have changed and areas of Oakland have been revitalized. Last time I drove by the house it looked just fine - a painted, cared-for bungalow with, I’m sure, appallingly small closets. I hope the pink and black tiled bathroom has been updated.
As my school friends’ parents pass away, they’re often willed their family homes. In an area where real estate prices have soared beyond belief, they’re all grateful for their inheiritances. They report that the strangest feeling is that they now inhabit what were their parents’ bedrooms - rooms totally off-limits when we were growing up.
My first home was a flat in San Francisco, where I was born, on 3rd and Clement Streets. I drove by there recently, thinking that the shabby brown shingled dwelling was probably gutted and replaced. It is now a three-story single-dwelling unit that is breathtaking. The remodel was done to resemble a British timbered home.
I’ve yet to knock on doors but after this thread, I think I might just do that.
For awhile, I lived relatively close to the house in which I grew up in Tulsa. Every now and then we’d drive past it and I was always amazed at how small it appeared. The drainage ditches which lined the streeets, which originally filled with water up to my shins when it rained, were now only about ankle deep. The huge front yard was now postage stamp size. What was most suprising (and depressing) was how much downhill the neighborhood had gone. The older couple who used to live across the street had an immaculate yard, and it had obviously been sold to someone whose lawn care standards were not equivilent. The older lady down the street who used to grow grapes and make her own jelly had died and the grape vines along the fence were gone. The small Latino family two houses down had grown and the house was over filled with family who beat the property into the ground and parked cars all over the yard.
My own childhood house had slowly declined over the years since my family had moved. The garage in the back had been partially torn down and the yard was littered with rusted and rotting stuff. The side gate had been ripped from one of the hinges, so it hung with a lopsided grimace. The porch needed to be painted, and parts of the wooden siding on the house were bare from flaking paint. It was rather depressing and I didn’t drive by all that often if I could prevent it. I was too afraid to stop by and ask to see the inside.
On the other hand, for about four years we lived in another part of town (this time, I was older, and it was my home and the kids and I lived there). As we were preparing to move (out of state) we had a “almost everything must go garage sale”. Two older women stopped by and said that the house we were living in was the same place were in the 1950’s they’d grown up as children. The house had once been a duplex (it was now a single dwelling), and they asked if they could come in a take a look. They came in and told us all about the house and their families, and how things had been. They were amazed that the tile in the bathrooms had withstood time. Of course, everything was much smaller now that it had been in the 1950’s. It was kind of neat to hear about the house’s past life.
We’re living in another state now, and the house was built in about 1920 or so, and I’ve always wondered about who lived there, and what it looked like then. I’d love to know about it, but the only people who have ever stopped by were looking for the people who lived there before us who sold drugs. Thankfully, that’s been years ago, and they no longer knock on our back door looking for crack.
Yep, after the nieghbor who helped save my life died, some people moved in a destroyed his house. I wonder what happened to his goats. 
I have the most enormous rose bush beside my porch, about eight feet cubed, with strongly-scented deep pink flowers. When one particular woman was a child, she had passed my house every day, back and forth to school, and would look at the roses. When she was older and married, she bought the house. She says she bought it for the roses. Her husband died and her children moved away, so she moved away, too.
She called me and asked if she could have cuttings from the rose and I said of course. She took half a dozen and said she was going to send them to her children.
Her roses became my roses, and my roses became her roses, and now our roses are spread across the country.
I just got back from visiting my hometown where I lived the first 20 years of my life. I drove to my old house where I lived for 15 years. It was still painted the same color and the plants were bigger. The silver maple tree I planted in the backyard when we first moved in (it was literally a stick from K-mart for a dollar at the end of the season garden clearance) was now taller than the house. I almost went up to ring the bell, but I didn’t want to weird the people out. I also didn’t want to get all emotinal about my old house. I love my old house