# Going Gaga for Google



## SifuPhil (Nov 22, 2012)

I'm not usually a "look-back-and-sigh" kind of guy, but Google Maps changed all that.

Google Maps started life as the creation of two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, at the Sydney-based company Where 2 Technologies. Google bought out the company in late 2004 and within the next two years had established an impressive database of road maps and satellite imagery throughout the world, to the point where now you can look at your house and perhaps even find that you were caught on camera doing something weird.  

But my goals were a bit less exotic: I just wanted to see what the house that I was raised in 54 years ago looked like now.

My conclusion: some things are best left unexplored.






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I entered the address of my old house in the suburbs of New York City and saw it was still there, albeit looking a bit worse for wear. Well, I guess after 54 years (actually more like 36 since I moved out when I was 18) I look a bit worn myself. Like myself, the roof of the house was quite threadbare but the lower part of the property was lush with untended growth. 
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




I zipped around the old neighborhood for about an hour, with plenty of exclamations and curses sprinkled throughout. "Hey, Tony Massimo's candy store is gone!" and "Wow, they covered the blacktop in Frederick's Park with grass!"

Then I went past my old junior high school, the direct cause of my seeking out instruction in the martial arts due to being mugged there on a regular basis. The street-view approach brought back a lot of bad memories, to the point where I was once again looking over my shoulder as I moused around the gigantic and imposing old building.

I quickly moused down to The Square, the town center a few miles from my house, where I had transferred for my four senior high years. I expected to see good ol' Saunders Trades and Technical High School sitting there exactly as I had left it - kids on the front lawn playing Frisbee, eating pizza and getting stoned.

Saunders T&T HS was now the city Police Station and Juvenile Probation Court.

It looked as if someone had sucked all the color (and life) out that great old structure. The patina-coated copper flashing and gutters were gone, replaced with some space-age material. The windows that used to be knee-to-ceiling height, framed in ornate plasterwork, were now sensible - and ugly - Anderson high-efficiency / low E portholes that a pregnant mouse would have trouble passing through. All of the front lawn was gone, replaced by non-feeling asphalt.

OK, let's go right to the Square, the site of many hundreds of hours spent blissfully window-shopping and, as a wee lad, the ultimate destination for my accumulated allowance. There was a hobby shop that I favored with my custom since I was old enough to hide my cradle cap - I bought everything from plastic Revell model cars, to Tyco HO trains and those neat plastic building kits you'd glue and paint (mine usually looked more like a Picasso painting when I was done with it, but I was proud nonetheless), and finally to the Estes model rockets and Gilbert chemistry kits and supplies for my mad scientist phase. I even had Hobby Money back then - an early sort of mileage reward for frequent buyers. I was always buying SOMETHING from that place on a weekly basis, so I drooled in anticipation to see what Google Maps would reveal to me - some new mega-hobby shop, no doubt ...

... it was a bodega. A BODEGA!!! 





Perhaps Thomas Wolfe said it best:

*“You can't go back home to your family, back home  to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young  man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to  Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for  singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of  'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,'  back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the  cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world,  back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back  home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you,  back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed  everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the  escapes of Time and Memory.”     
*


*sigh*


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## InsomniacGirl (Nov 22, 2012)

Oh, I know what you mean! I love Google Maps because I too have spent quite some time looking up places I've lived in my life, neighborhoods, streets. The thing that really saddened me was when I Googled the address of a street that my grandparents had lived on back in my childhood, in Irvington, NJ. I knew that the area had gone downhill drastically over the long years, but I was extremely saddened to find that many of the old, beautiful buildings built in the early 1900s were either demolished, boarded up, or dramatically vandalized and ruined. Huge maple trees used to line the street, they're all gone. The road used to be cobblestone, now it's all pot holes. The old-fashioned candy store on the corner was gone. So sad. 

I did find the house and neighborhood where I grew up in though (Cranford, NJ)...it's still beautiful as ever, so that lifted my spirits!


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