The older I get, the more I notice I describe locations by what used to be there. If talking to a younger person, I have to stop and think about what’s there now, and actually, in some cases, I don’t know what’s there.
So I got to thinking about old places that are gone. The place Hubby and I had our first date, the place he proposed to me, the church we got married in, all gone. The first date place is now a bus station, the proposal place is an Oriental rug showroom, and the church is a day care center.
So, what important places in your life are now gone? Do you know what’s there now?
Number one would be my grandmother’s farmhouse; the property was sold and a housing development put in. With the landscaping, you can’t even tell where it was anymore.
My junior high school – the building is still there but it’s now condos. Good riddance I say.
The main street in my city - only about a few blocks long - used to be a mixture of houses and businesses all crammed together. This was in the 80s, I don’t know how it was before that.
Slowly the houses got torn down and even the old businesses got torn down and now it’s a bunch of free-standing businesses with small strip malls on either end. Over the past 35 years.
It just occurred to me that the final house got torn down just last year. It hadn’t been a residence in many years but it was a couple of different small businesses. Now the plot belongs to a gigantic Discount Tire store.
As a teen I used to ride my bike out to it and hang around and explore. I never saw the middle part raised. Checking Google maps… yep, it’s still there. Thank og, I think it’s removal would signify the end of the world. I don’t really like it there anymore, which is why I now live on the other side of the country. But mom still lives there and when I go back to visit her, passing by that bridge does give me warm fuzzies.
Crap! Missed the edit window, so here is what I was trying to add:
Oh, and along the lines of acorns falling far from the tree… okay, that’s a tangent, but it’s related to the topic… When I was very little, we lived in a tiny one-bedroom house that used to be farm hand quarters back when the land was farm country. When the area was suburbanized, they put in a street and proper homes, and there was a dirt driveway that ran between two of the street-facing homes to these farm-hand shanties - there were four of them arranged in a circle. We and a few other dirt poor families lived in those shanties. I remember my mom asking me to take the rent check up to the landlord who lived up at the end of the driveway, and it was $50. Fifty bucks a month! Looking back, my folks got ripped off! LOL! Anyway, I tell this story because over the passing decades, my mom has moved around a bit and now has settled down with a new husband in a nice new home in a new suburb that was built where the pasture used to be behind those shanties. She lives literally FEET away from my childhood home that is STILL a shanty with people living in it. I wonder what their rent is now…
Ex Navy nukes can say “It’s where Nuke School used to be!”
Naval Nuclear Power School was at one time located just off of Colonial Drive, north of Orlando Executive Airport.
It’s long gone, replaced by suburbia.
I remember it was a somewhat sketchy neighborhood back in the day, but maybe things have improved–we probably were the ones causing the sketchiness.
I just thought of another one – Rocky Point Park. Here it is in its heyday and now. (Although it’s been partially reopened, just as a place to go and walk by the water.)
This reminds me of the time someone gave me directions by saying “It’s next to where the old plating facility used to be.” That would be the old plating facility that was removed long before I ever moved to that town. Very helpful.
Two places I called home, one in Detroit the other in Oakland are now a parking lot, and a vacant lot respectively. The one in Oakland was condemned by the city after the Loma Pieta earthquake. Nearly every movie theater I frequented before age say 20 in Oakland are likewise gone. I forget what they made the Fox into and the marquee is still there, but that’s where I watched karate movies. There’s a Walmart where I saw Nightmare on Elm Street an SSA office where I saw Friday the 13th and a Sleep Train Mattress Center where I first saw Purple Rain.
The recruitment office where I joined the Army looks to have been torn down for new homes or a post office, I forget and it’s been sometime since I was in that part of Oakland.
A couple of years ago, my husband and I moved back to our hometown, because it’s a better place to raise kids than the city suburb we had been living in. Fortunately, Tony and I have pretty much the same “time stamp” for where things aren’t any more: “Can you stop at [store] for [item] on your way home from work?” “Where’s [store]?” “The old Western Auto.” Or “The funeral service is at the church that’s no longer the Catholic church, there on Highway 80.” Give us another couple of years, and we’ll be giving our kids the same kind of driving directions that my grandmother used to give: “Turn there where the old Smith barn burned down back in the forties, and then veer left at Old Man Jones’ place.” (Old Man Jones died after his son was killed in the Big War!) I still can’t find the “back way” to my Grandma’s old place, because a couple of dirt roads have been reconfigured in the past 25 years, so I just meander around, trying to identify falling-down tobacco barns, until I pinpoint “Oh, that’s Miss Minnie’s place, I’m in the right neighborhood!” My old junior high school is now the board of education building and alternative school campus, and the school where I attended seventh grade is now called by the name as my old junior high. I still call both by the wrong names. The movie theaters are now a dialysis center, the performance arts center (an actual positive change - restored and well-utilized,) and a parking lot. The falling-down hotel that used to house a bunch of sketchy businesses along with my little sister’s dance studio has been restored and is used as city hall - another beautiful change.
To my mind, the biggest loss is the old windmill that used to stand at the other end of the dirt road going to Grandma’s. I loved that windmill, plus it was a great landmark for giving directions. Back in my day, none of the dirt roads had actual names - everyone lived at Rural Route 1, Box 112 (Grandma’s actual address.)
Other places of significance that are gone now:
The first, second, fifth, sixth, seventh, and ninth houses where I lived as a child. The fourth house is still standing, but the big, beautiful azalea bush is gone, and someone tore down the awesome screened side porch. My granny’s house is gone - it was across the road from my first home - and so is her enormous dogwood tree. She’d be sad about the tree. Grandpa’s barn is gone, but my brother is remodeling the old house into a pond house and building a cabin on the old barn’s slab.
The directions from Princeton to Bell Labs Holmdel, using back roads, included “turn left at the pink barn” which never got changed even when the barn got torn down.
There is also this. There used to be a shopping center one block over, a remnant from when the street one block over was a main drag. It got torn down 12 years ago and replaced by a development. I heard a fellow dog walker refer to them as the “new houses” which is just what we still call them.
They put a parking lot on a piece of land
Where the supermarket used to stand
Before that they put up a bowling alley
On the site that used to be the local Palais
That’s where the big bands used to come and play
My sister went there on a Saturday
You’ll (hopefully) be happy to know that the Fox Theater is still there, though it doesn’t show movies any more…now it’s a concert hall. We saw Flogging Molly there last year; it’s a fabulous building.
there was a home on a beautifully landscaped yard where you turned into my old childhood neighborhood. They even had a greenhouse. Immaculate landscaping. It was sold after they died and turned into a Walmart and a Ryans Steakhouse sits exactly where their home was for at least 40 years.
My uncle’s service station that he operated for 20 years is now a car glass shop.
I often remember prior businesses. We used to have Kens Pizza in several towns. They are all re-purposed buildings now. Western Sizzlers are all gone and re-purposed.
A famous landmark in my small hometown was a distinctive crooked tree. Its image is used in the seal of the town, and is the logo on signs and such. The tree has been gone since before I was born, but I know the corner it was on because my parents always pointed it out (the corner) when I was growing up.
So, when I first met my spouse, who is not from the town, and introduced them to the town, I pointed out the corner where the tree stood as a famous landmark. My spouse now knows how to get around town by orienting to “the corner where the crooked tree was”.
Hmmm…I think I could accomplish the same thing by introducing additional fictional landmarks…“that’s where the Mr. Mooney’s house was before it was leveled by the tornado”…“that’s where the old bakery was before it exploded”…
I was born exactly 3 months before the first boomer. What this means is that there were always new schools/additions/dorms being built, in anticipation of the coming onslaught . . . and their deconstruction, years later.
A major wing was added to my high school . . . boys’ gym on one end, boys’ pool on the other end, connected with mostly science labs. Now they’re removing that wing, and renovating the original building.
The middle school was brand new when I went there. Now it’s being demolished.
When I was a college freshmen, it seemed that the entire campus was abuzz with new construction of classrooms and ginormous new dorms. I haven’t been back, but I know those dorms are long gone.
Up until a few years ago, the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader used to run a supplement once a year or so with where places used to be just so those new to the region could ask for (and follow) directions. Edwardsville was always "go to where the Pit Stop Diner used to be and make a right(or left depending on which direction you were going on the Ave).
