The thread about how far you live from where you grew up got me thinking about this little country store not far from where I grew up. It was called the Buttery and Beanery, and it had been there long before I was born*. It was a fairly nondescript cinder block building with two gas pumps out front, and a kerosene pump next to the building. The kerosene pump is probably an antique by this point, it looked to be of 1950s or 60s vintage, probably dating from when the place was built. The regular gas pumps were newer, but were still old style analog pumps with the rolling dials, at least at the time I moved away in the early 2000s. The actual store housed a little convenience store, restaurant, and ice cream shop. I have fond memories of that place, from my parents taking me there for ice cream as a kid, to getting lunch at the restaurant, to occasionally buying gas there when I became old enough to drive.
I’ve always thought if I was ever back in the area it would be nice to grab a meal at the restaurant just for old times sake. So I went to look for the place on Google Street View. First off, the amount of new development in the area since I left is immediately noticeable, but not surprising since it’s a reasonable commuting distance from Charlotte and the whole area has been growing fast. But the disappointing thing is that while the building that housed the Buttery and Beanery still stands (and the old kerosene pump is still there even), now it houses LKN Weddings and Events, a catering company. I guess I’ll never have a chance to go back there.
So, what are some places you have fond childhood memories of that are now long gone?
Most everything at this point. There was an ice cream shop in Juneau, AK, where my mother would take me for a butterscotch cone. Long gone. There was a place in Anchorage called “Leonard’s Variety”, run by a guy named Benny Leonard. He would pay us 25 cents an hour to put price tags on his goods and he had ice cold sodas in his toilet tank. Long gone, put out of business by large department stores.
Hanson’s amusement park at Harvey’s Lake. I drive past where it was at least once a year; most times I find myself within 50 miles of the place. I actually worked there for a while and the long “games row” building where I worked was one of the last things torn down - 40 years or more since it closed. So much around the lake is identical to how it was, the houses and beach and so much else. But that big empty patch which I am sure will soon be developed will always be a hole in my heart.
Hummmmmm, sheesh, so much changed since I was a kid. Where to start? Growing up my town was about 80k and the neighboring towns 30k or less in population.
Today its all grown or growing together into one city called the Boise Metro Area population just under a million. That used to be the entire state! As a kid I used to hike along and sometimes in the river to get to the good fishing holes. Now there is a paved path from the foothills all the way to almost the next county with plans to extend it and connect it with that county’s path. I used to hike and hunt and shoot in areas of the foothills that are now high-end subdivisions. In fact there are homes all through the hills, in groups and single forerunners of the development that is sure to come.
Some movie theaters are gone, downtown is utterly different.
Eh, in a nearly 50 year span I’d be worried if things didn’t change.
Holly Ravine Farm in Cherry Hill, NJ. It was a farm (where you could feed the animals) and a dairy bar/restaurant. That’s where I used to love getting raspberry sherbet (why CAN’T I find raspberry sherbet for sale in stores anymore?) and Dad got lime freezes (a kind of shake made with lime sherbet).
It’s now a small shopping center (my mother worked in the CVS there for about ten years). There’s still a field with horses/cows behind it, though.
Also the Echelon Mall movie theater in Voorhees, NJ. It’s not like it was some historic landmark, but it was a small (four-to-six-screen) mall movie theater where I saw some of my favorite movies. The first one I remember was a re-release of Snow White in the mid-seventies–I guess I was about three or four. And also Disney’s live-action Candleshoe (an underrated little gem which introduced me to Jodie Foster, and also featured David Niven, Helen Hayes, and Leo McKern). The Muppet Movie, one sunny Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Gremlins. The last known re-release of Song of the South. Star Trek IV.
(Heck, the entire Echelon Mall–now “Voorhees Town Center”–is now a ghost town, while Cherry Hill and Moorestown Malls still thrive. Half of the old mall is torn down and replaced with outdoor stores and restaurants–not many of which have thrived–and practically the only store even open in the old mall is the Boscov’s. There are plans on the table to, once again, take a shot at revitalizing it. I hope it takes this time, but I still miss the mall in its old form.)
When I enlisted in the Navy some forty-five years ago, I needed a security clearance for my job and the form asked for every address I’d lived at since birth. Mom was still alive and I could take the form home on boot leave. Between old records and her memory we came up with them all, mostly in Southern California and about half of those are under freeways, now. “Good luck with the NIS talking to the neighbors,” she said wryly.
The BelLoc Diner on Loch Raven Blvd near the Baltimore Beltway was a really neat old diner. It’s gone. They bulldozed it. Now there’s a Starbucks on the site. What a waste…
Filled with nostalgia by posts in this thread, my mind wandered back to Allonby, where we used to have a holiday caravan on a site (not sure what the US would be -holiday trailer on a park?). We used to spend the whole summer holiday there when I was a kid - and bits of Easter, weekends when the weather was good and so forth. Summers on the Solway Firth, playing on the beach. An ice cream from Twentyman’s store, where they sold shrimping nets and beach balls. The swings by the riding school, where you used to see the horses trail out to ride along the beach (way out of our league). It’s 400 miles (and fifty years) away as I type - but via google earth I am able to find out right now what has become of it. Now there’s a moment of trepidation for you.
Answer: nothing. I was really taken aback. It’s almost all exactly as it was - the caravan parks are still there, as is Twentyman’s (!) In this google earth view, you can see that they still have beachballs for sale. The car park is paved now - you used to just drive onto the grass to park. But it’s remarkably little altered in fifty years. (The hills you can faintly make out over the Solway are, BTW, Scotland).
I recently went back to Washington State after 20 years, and recreated a circuit we used to drive regularly, Everett (where my wife and I lived as newlyweds) to LaConner, all the way through Whidbey Island, then take the ferry back to Everett.
The circuit was beautiful and remarkably unchanged. Except for Everett. Everett was never really nice, but it had some green to it. Now it all looks like varying shades of Gray.
I could never live there again. Other places in Washington State, sure, but not there.
Sometimes you can’t go home again, even if you never left.
We’ve lived in our house for 27 years now, and our area has gone from a quiet two lane FM* road with a Dairy Queen and a bait shop, to a massively trafficked 4-lane highway. It sports every known pox on decent living from CVS to Walmart to Starbucks. We found out earlier this year the wooded area north of us has been rezoned for 4500 new houses. These will be those horrifying dense-pack zero-lot-line abominations that builders seem so fond of.
My old childhood neighborhoods are terrifying gangland now, so I can’t go home again anywhere.
*Farm to Market road - a unique Texas designation, AFAIK.
The park itself still exists, but the fountain at the top of Paseo Invierno got remodeled; the remodel removed the words used by a long-gone king in his swearing in. I don’t remember the whole speech, but once I was old enough to understand it, the part about “… to respect the Laws of the land, Improving them and never Diminishing them…” really brought home that the idea of kings of old as being willing and able to do whatever their dick said on any particular day is… somewhere between oversimplified, incorrect and a damn lie. I miss the old fountain.
Huh. I was born in Detroit, though my family left there not long after I was born in 1966. Since then the city dropped considerably in population. I don’t remember it at all, though, so I don’t really consider Detroit to be “home”. Home is where I am.
The earliest place…home, I recall, is Chanute Air Force Base, in central Illinois. Don’t bother looking for it; it closed a while ago. Geez, 26 years ago.
I think I’ll go off and feel old now.
My grandparents moved several times, but for a time they lived in Bruceton, Tennessee, where I’ve visited, and which was featured in The Atlantic in 2015 as a Ghost Town of the 21st Century. You really can’t go home again if you’re from there.
My neighborhood on the NW side of Chicago has changed quite a bit since I grew up there in the 60s/70s. Back then, it was mothly folk of European ethnicity - lots of Italian and Polish. Now it is mostly Mexican. Not inherently better or worse, but just many local businesses and services cater to a different demographic.
When I was young, the main streets within 4 blocks of my house had a variety of good-sized stores: Walgreens, Kresge’s/Woolworth’s (dimestore), Pennys/Goldblatt’s/Polk Bros (department stores), A&P/Jewel/National (groceries), and any number of shoe stores/jewelers/clothing stores whatever. Last time I drove thru, there were an awful lot of tattoo parlors and payday loan stores.
The biggest changes started in the mid-late 70s, when a new mall (the Brickyard) was developed about 2 miles away. Mysteriously, over a short period several of the existing stores caught fire! :rolleyes:
The biggest loss is the local movie theater. Pretty much that entire block was taken over by a thriving produce market.
My overall view of the neighborhood is likely unfairly tarnished by the fact that my childhood home - which my dad always kept in top repair - is now pretty run down. I’m sure the neighborhood is fine - just serves a different demographic.
The house where I lived right after I was born is now a highway. The first apartment I had is gone and replaced with a new building. And to follow the above mention of military bases, RTC Orlando is gone. NATTC Memphis is gone. Naval Station Mare Island is gone. VS-41 has been decommissioned. Navy Supply Officer school in Athens, GA is gone. I’m pretty sure none of those were my fault…
A friend of mine went back to Houston to visit family, and decided to drive past her childhood home. When she got there, she saw that it was surrounded by caution tape, and her old bedroom was just a gaping, smoking hole. Apparently, it had been a meth house for a while at that point, and they’d been cooking in her old bedroom… which had blown up, just a few days earlier.
My answer would have been Roy Rogers, but they’re slowly coming back. They actually never completely disappeared, as a lot of the stores in the region were franchisee-owned, mostly concentrated around Frederick, Maryland. They’re coming back down toward DC.
The house my mother grew up in on Wisconsin Ave in DC was turned into a bookstore sometime in the 70s. It made the local news once because Michael Jackson once randomly stopped in there sometime in the 80s.
My high school is gone. Well, technically the school itself moved to a new building, and the old buildings are still standing but they’ve been converted into an elementary school and a middle school (it was a very large campus, for a high school) and the interior is completely different.
About 3 miles from our cabin was an old general store called Rask’s. This was in the 60s and 70s. It had been there since my dad was a kid - maybe before that. I can still smell it! Roy had a little bit of everything. He sold gas, bait, pop ice cream, candy, all sorts of miscellaneous stuff. I wish now as an adult, I could go look through the store. All I was concerned about at the time were the ice cream bars and pop! I remember my mom bought a cake mix one time - it had expired 2 years prior. It had old wooden floors and a squeaky screen door. Every weekend we’d bug my dad to go to Roy’s. Besides getting a treat, we’d get to “drive”. The whole way was on a dirt road. We’d get to take turns sitting on my dad’s lap and steering the car. I remember driving past it in the 2000s. It had caved in and grass and brush had taken over the parking lot.
The was a frozen custard place in Silver Spring that (as I recall) had no name - we always called it the “Reindeer place,” because of the silver reindeers on the roof.
They made the best custard in the universe. It was torn down to make way for the Silver Spring Metro station, and now they are gone forever.
And then there was Gifford’s and Roy’s Place and Hobbies and Arts and Lipman’s and Industrial Photo.
