My father had the brilliant idea to build a apartment house. Cost 15K. We sold it 50 years later for 525K. Bought a old (1928) colonial for 23K. Sold it 40 years later for, wait for it, 525K.
Third place I lived in, is a war zone in Springfield, Ma. Fourth place, looks like someone spent some money rather than cashing the checks for the 4 unit apartment house. 5th place, has a new house on the formally empty lot next to it. Number 6 is section 8 housing now. Still own 7, gotta stash the son somewhere… * will probably be the last place, in a 55+ community.
Elementary school torn down, now 6 houses, Jr. High still going strong, with more solar panels, High school gone, along with Tech school, one big building replaced the two.
My Ma still lives in the house I grew up in, about 40 miles from where I live now. While I go up and see her at least once a week I haven’t lived in that house for over 40 years. It’s directly across the street from a very large park.
One day I went there to find that out of the blue they took everything away. The 3 story metal slide, the monkey bars, the see-saw, the merry-go-round, the horse swings, the regular swings over concrete. Everything. They replaced them with just 2 little baby swings over wood chips.
The park looked so empty without all that good stuff. Stuff I played on as a kid going back to the early 1960’s. It was like putting the final coffin nail in my childhood memories. I was so pissed. I felt bad for all the children who would never know the joys of playing on all that cool stuff we had.
And before any of you babble about safety, let me tell you we never lost even 1 kid on that equipment. And burning your legs on a metal slide that heats to 312 degrees in July builds character!
Twenty years ago, when my kids were 6 & 10, we were looking for something to do one day, so I drove them to the house I lived in when I was their age. They were repeatedly shocked; first by the house (a row house so unlike me), second by the distance we’d walked, without adult supervision, to school, third by the places we’d ride our bikes to. At times they thought I was gaslighting them.
It’s been decades since I was “back home” in the place where I went to high school and
even longer since for the town for “grade school” and almost all of my friends and relatives from those days are either dead or moved away themselves. I have email contact with two classmates from high school.
All I have left of those days are memories and some of those are just fragments.
Email and rare phone calls are all the communications I have with the remaining people
from my pre-adulthood years. “Family” is either dead or moved far away from “Home.”
Except for a newsletter from a high school classmate I have no idea what my old friends are up to or even if they’re still alive.
My hometown in Southwest Arkansas is in serious economic decline.
It was a major regional source of health care. Two hospitals and a lot of surgeons. My mom stayed very busy providing anesthesia. Most of those surgeons are retired or dead. One of the hospitals has closed.
The mall that drew out of town shoppers is in serious decline.
My elementary school and junior high look the same. My high school is no longer open. They built a new one a few miles away.
The Junior college is doing well. I attended one semester there before transferring to a university.
My old house and street looks the same. But I wouldn’t know anyone living there now.
I used to think about moving back after retiring. But the decline in medical care has made me reconsider.
Mid-sized southern town, mostly manufacturing base – no long gone and closed down. It seems the only successful ones from my graduating class (who stayed there) went into medical fields, or some sort of government jobs. The remaining folks seem to be declining along with the town. I left a few years after high school, never to return, as did my only sibling. My folks retired and moved away a few decades ago, so I’ve never had a compelling reason to return to the old ‘hood’.
Been back to all my youthful haunts in the past couple of years.
House I was born in has been extensively remodeled, but still is there and the neighborhood looks pretty much the same. Like wolfman above, I was surprised that places that seemed so far to a 6-year old are really quite near each other.
House 2 in Indiana I lived in for 18 months (dad got transferred) is still there, but the trees all grew up (it was a new development with houses still being built) and it looks…drearier these days.
Houses 3 and 4 back in Ohio are still there, not much has changed about them.
House 1 was in a small town, the others in what we would call Suburbia these days.
I lived in Savannah Georgia from the early 1960s to 1975. I’ve gone back a time or two but the town of my boyhood no longer exists. In the 1960s downtown Savannah was a vibrant shopping district; Savannah got it’s first outlying mall in the early 1970s. The times I went back downtown was a ghost town and even the mall had been superceded by newer malls. The old brick-pile elementary and middle schools I attended are closed.
There’s also been a lot of development. Back in the day Savannah was damn near the only significant point of civilization between Hilton Head in South Carolina and Brunswick down the coast. Today there are a lot more roads and suburbs. Tybee Island was a half-developed rural town where mostly poor people lived; at some point it gentrified into expensive beach homes.
My Grandfathers house: This project started the year before my father did, and it is, dimensionaly the same today as it was years ago, but the tiny first floor looks nothing like it did, and after we sold it in the 1980’s the new owners blew off the room and added a second floor with 4 bedrooms upstairs. The Realtor photos look like they lowered the basement floor, but with all the photos shot wide angle, who knows. My grandfathers man cave, a/k/a the garages are gone.
I once did a Google streetview project of finding every house I ever lived in, back to the 30’s, in 17 states/provinces, about 40 of them. Only four were gone, the rest still there and recognizable.
Baseball HOFer and broadcaster Ralph Kiner is one who can’t. He was born in the New Mexico mining town of Santa Rita, the exact 3-dimensional site of which is now about 500 feet in the air above an open pit copper mine.