Googling the places where I lived as a kid

[starroute]

It's a slow night, so it occurred to me to Google the address of the apartment building on the West Side of Manhattan where I lived as a kid. I came up with three addresses for people who currently live there -- one in a listing of "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Health Science Librarians," one in a listing of childbirth class providers, and one in "The Internet Photographic Handmade Postcard Trading List."

Somehow, I get the feeling that if I went back there, I'd find the place had been yuppified out of all recognition.

Then I checked the address of the building in Queens where we moved when I was in high school, and found a listing for a doctor with a highly multi-syllabic Indian name who'd been cited for negligence. (I think even in the same apartment where we lived, though I can't remember for sure.) I have the impression (and not just from the one listing) that the whole area is now heavily multi-ethnic.

I have mixed feelings about all this. On one hand, I'd be willing to bet that both neighborhoods are far more interesting and fun to live in now than they were forty years ago, when they mainly consisted of middle-class Jewish nuclear families. I actually feel a little jealous about that. On the other, it's kind of strange to think that the places I remember so vividly in some very real sense no longer exist.

What about the rest of you? Do you know what the place(s) where you grew up are like today? Have they changed much? For better or for worse? And how do you feel about it?

[havocmom]

1. Can't go home again? Maybe

I visited a childhood neighborhood years ago. Hadn't seen it in about 20 years.

Wonderful neighborhood in Long Beach, Calif. There were families from all over the world and a park across the street. We used to have great pot-luck, block party sort of gatherings once in awhile. Set up tables in the huge front yard of the 4-plex I lived in and everybody came, brought food and records. Mom would bring out the little Magnavox record player (small but in a maghogony cabinet) to the yard and we would dance to music from all over the world. A woman from France got my crotchey grandfather up making a good attempt at a can-can. There were blonde kids learning hula and Hawaiian kids learning to jitterbug. The old Russian couple who never learned English sat and clapped.

It was like growing up in a kinder, gentler version of the UN!

The block we lived on has been leveled. That's the bad news. Good news: They made it part of the park. So on my vist back, there was some saddness, but some pleasure too. The place that was once the bedroom of a shy kid who used to hang out in trees in the park is now home to a tree!

I danced with a few ghosts and continued down my own evolutionary path.