The thing that surprises me every time is how small the town (~50,00 pop. ) and I don’t mean figuratively. The drive to that one store, on the way, way other side of town, that seemed so obnoxiously far away was about 3 miles. I think nothing of scouting twice that far for cheaper gas on a whim now that I’m old, and in a metro area.
The house where I grew up in the DC suburbs has been expanded and modernized.
The areas where my Dad’s family lived outside Pittsburgh were a wasteland when I was a kid, but now they are becoming vibrant suburbs for young families as Pittsburgh revivifies.
I forgot that I also looked at my grade school using Google Street View.
In the 1960s there were a few one-story buildings housing schoolrooms and a vast asphalt playground. Nowadays, the entire playground is filled with two-story buildings. The population of the school must have more than sextupled since I went there, and I don’t see any place for the kids to play anymore.
As for my high school, there used to be crummy old modular outbuildings which housed classrooms in the 1970s. Those are all gone and are replaced by two-story modern buildings. No loss there - those old outbuildings were unheated and un-air conditioned and were miserable to be in.
I live in the neighborhood where I grew up and my parents live in the house where I grew up (I bought a house on the other side of the block). Everything’s pretty much the same, even the people are the same for the most part. There’s a lot of very old folks here…I guess when I was a kid, it was full of kids. There’s more kids now than there were for a long while so that’s cool!
What’s weird is the rest of the city has changed A LOT. But since I’ve lived here the whole time and experienced the change little by little, it’s not jarring. What IS jarring is to sit down and think about what it was like 30 years ago. A lot of “I totally forgot about that!!” I can only imagine someone coming back now who hasn’t been here for 30-40 years. It would be quite weird!
My distinctly rural Maryland zip code has suburbanized during the almost 50 years I’ve been gone. I’m not affected good or bad by that but it was the driving factor behind my parents pulling up lifetime roots and moving away – to someplace rural like they were accustomed.
The one story home I grew up in is now a two-story. The house to the east of us is gone, as are all of the trees and our front porch. The high school and junior high school both burned down and were rebuilt elsewhere. The city hall moved and was closed, and is being torn down. The public library moved, but the building still stands.
I basically had two hometowns, since we moved when I was almost 12. The older one is intact, though all the cathedral elms are gone (Dutch elm disease) and the brick is faded. Some of the houses have had minor upgrades and one burned down, but otherwise, it’s the same. The local public school is gone as completely as if it’d been vaporized–just an empty lot. Even the asphalt parking area is no more. The Catholic school I attended has been vacant for some time, and the church just closed down.
The other neighborhood is vastly changed. Ours is the last house on that side of the street that hasn’t been replaced by a McMansion. I expect it, too, will go soon. 
But my junior high (now a middle school, of course) is still there and looks the same. My old high school, massively overcrowded when I attended, was massively expanded after the student population dropped significantly (go figure) but is still there.
I admit I miss the old days. I was blessed with a happy, secure childhood in a neighborhood full of colorful but responsible people.
Neighborhood kids playing in the front yard, is something NO ONE sees anymore.
I remember being a kid and telling my mom I’m going outside and having no real plan or destination. I’d just look for whatever house had kids playing in front of it and go play with them.
Been to just about all of them and still track most of them.
- Place where I lived as a baby is gone. Student ghetto apartments for grad students (my dad was the grad student. I wasn’t that smart at 3 months!)
2.House 1 in Ohio is also gone, replaced by awful apartments and the area isn’t one I’d like to be in. The fire station is still there where my mom would take me to look at the fire trucks.
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House 2 in Ohio is there along with some of the projects my dad did there. Got to go inside. Neighborhood is just as I remembered it.
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House 3 Indiana is still there and the neighborhood is extremely affluent now and was quite nice when we lived there
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House 4 Ohio (we moved around a lot) is still a very nice and very affluent neighborhood.
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House 5. Florida. Meh, I’d say the neighborhood is becoming more middle class than upper middle class. Seems like Florida suburbs go through these phases as there’s endless land to gobble up.
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College housing. Wow! My old dorm has gotten much nicer. I’d definitely stay in the dorms all 4 years if I was a freshman today. The house I moved to is still a student ghetto house although I could see that area getting bulldozed for some massive luxury student apartments eventually.
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Post college. I can’t even remember some of the places I lived as I worked on political campaigns and moved around a lot.
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I’m a real adult and working corporate jobs. I’ve always been a renter and so most of the apartments and neighborhoods have stayed the same. One notable exception was a place I lived at in Arizona briefly after a breakup and during my I want out of this state transition. It did finally get bulldozed and they’re putting in a high rise. Even when I moved in, they told us they’d only do 6 month leases. It was right smack in the recession and real estate collapse and they knew they’d eventually be sold. They told us they’re basically keeping the doors open for time being to ride out the real estate crisis but not to expect too much as far as improvements. They were right but it was fine for the few months I was there.
Guess I’m NO ONE, then. Because even in my neighborhood which has largely aged in place, I see it occasionally. And the Firebug and I used to frequently play horseshoes and croquet in the front yard.
I don’t know how old you are, but a big part of that is simply that, even in an environment that’s way safer for kids now than it was 25 or 50 years ago, parents are more aware of such risks that there are, so they insist on knowing where their kids are going.
Another thing is that a lot of neighborhoods go through the sort of cycle mine has been through: when it’s first built, lots of young couples who are planning to have kids, or already have young kids, move in, and for awhile, the neighborhood has wall-to-wall kids. 25 years later, those kids have all grown up, but most of those parents are still there, now empty nesters, or maybe the baby of the family is still in high school. There are still some families with kids in elementary school, but they’ll be kinda sparse in the neighborhood. So they can’t find each other just by going out until they’re of an age when they can wander extensively.
So if you’re in an older neighborhood, you shouldn’t expect to see kids out very often.
My experience is kind of the opposite of the OP’s: I go home to find that my sleepy old town/village has become a lot more high-tech with stores all over, cafes, solar panels(?) and whatnot. Which is happy, I guess, because I had worried long ago that that place was doomed for eventual economic ruin and decay.
There’s a third house, in between the two I’ve mentioned. For nearly two years after we moved east from L.A., we lived in a split-level in Bethesda, MD, inside what’s now the triangle formed by the Beltway and the two I-270 spurs. (They were just starting work on the Beltway then; I remember the sound of bulldozers through the trees in that direction.) Google street view says it’s basically still the same, with some small additions. I’ve had reason to be going to that part of the DC area lately, for the first time in many years; one of these days I’ll have to stop by and see it with my own eyes.
Grew up in the 50’s and 60’s a suburb of L.A. that I think was built early Post-WWII. Area, for miles and miles around, was largely but not quite completely fully developed at the time. There was an orange grove at the end of my block. Of course it’s all long-since fully developed by now.
I never had any particular reason to visit the old 'hood, except while visiting kinfolk elsewhere in L.A. I drove by just for a look.
The 'hood is entirely Hispanic now, for miles and miles all around. Most of the buildings, schools, shops are still there but all Hispanic now.
I was astonished at how narrow the residential streets are. I actually learned to drive in that? How do cars pass each other going in opposite directions? The sweet-gum trees that lined our block were of reasonable size then, but are monster giants now and the sidewalk is like a roller-coaster with all the cement blocks pushed up by the roots. The grass strip where the trees are, now seems way to narrow and is fully occupied by those trees. ( Photo. )
The houses look about the same. The house I grew up in is a different color now, landscaped entirely differently, and all the other trees are gone.
My impression is that the area is a little lower-class than when I was there, and maybe just a bit more run-down, but not at all a “bad” neighborhood where you would need to keep your car doors locked as you drive through.
I had three homely neighborhoods within a few miles, and another a dozen miles away, between Los Angeles and San Bernardino. The area of my first home, next to Grandpa’s small farm, is totally transformed and mostly de-treed. My other grandparents’ neighborhood now looks like poor sections of Guadalajara. The little development where I spent most of my childhood looks much the same except more on-street parking (most are ranch houses with garages on alleys) but everything around has undergone severe commercial development. My once-open elementary school is now a walled fortress. My last area, in the mid-1960s a hilly rural slum, has gone totally upscale, probably because the rocket plant down the road is now a state park, and the nearby redneck golf course was cleaned up. Of course much farmland has been suburbanized. There goes the dairy-air!
I wouldn’t go “home” again even if I could.
I was brought up in a small town where all the neighbors new each other. I road my bicycle to kindergarten. It was like the old family shows in the late 50’s / early 60’s.
the last time I visited there my old school was still there and they were working on it during the summer. The doors were open so I wandered in. I looked at my old Kindergarten room and it hadn’t changed at all. Even the piano I once played was still there. While I was reminiscing someone came up behind me and said hi. I thought I was going to be charged with trespassing. Nope. It was the principal. He gave me a tour of the school.
Not all of the charm survived but I have to say it was a very pleasant stroll down memory lane.
I moved across the country. Last summer on vacation visited all my childhood places.
Two elementary schools and high school were replaced by newer buildings. Junior High School was built in early 1920s and was tore down soon after I graduated. It’s been an office building for years.
My first two houses I was too young to remember. I don’t know where they are/were.
Next house looks about the same. It was in a farming community back then. Now more developed. A good thing is that the field that was behind the house is now a subdivision. I was able to go back there and get a good look at the backyard.
Next house is also about the same. It’s still in the family. Some clean-up is needed. Neigborhood looks about the same.
My folks sold my childhood home 40 years ago, 6 years after I’d left. Last time I drove down that street, the most striking thing was the lack of trees. Granted, it was a 50s era block of row houses, but several of the front yards used to have nice trees. Most of the houses had evergreen shrubs in the front. My mother had planted the slope in front of our house with all kinds of flowers. All those things were pretty much gone. The few people who stayed long after my folks left have since died.
Then there’s the area where I lived when I got married and where my daughter was born. It was a fairly nice suburb 36 years ago. Now it’s worn and many of the businesses are on the tacky side, at least judging from exterior paint. I miss what it was but I have no desire to live there ever again.
I have been working in my old neighborhood for the last couple of days trying to repair the fire alarm at the Tower. When I was in high school (1968) a section of houses were torn down and a high rise apartment building was erected. That building is now owned by the Housing Authority. There is at least one shooting or stabbing in that building a month. It has been poorly maintained and is falling apart. Bedbugs are rampant. The stairways are dark and dangerous. The elevators were not working yesterday.
My company maintains the building fire alarm, sprinklers and fire extinguishers. It is a never ending job.
When I was growing up, the neighborhood was decidedly lower middle class, and was never described as a “nice neighborhood” but the Tower has turned it into a slum.
I used to live in a six family house on the corner of two streets, I now live two blocks away in a house at the dead end of one of the streets.
I walk by where I used to live every time I take the bus to the stop right outside of it. The place I used to live in is now a parking lot. A church made six families homeless to have a parking lot.
I can’t go home again.