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I use to think of the town I grew up in as close to perfect as anyplace in America. It is the place I compare all other communities to. Though I have started to have second thoughts as I visit it today and experience other places through extensive travel in America.
If you have moved from the town you were born in, what do you think about your hometown today? Does it seem nicer (or worse) than you remember it? Do you ever visit your old neighborhood and explore the places of your youth? Can you ever really go home?
I grew up in Los Angeles in the 60s-70s era. Going back in recent years, ya can't go back! One apt. building I lived in for five years is gone. Bars on windows, overcrowded, overpriced, ugly, crappy, and scary. Hollywood area, natch. I loved growing up there though. Disneyland every year, easy weather, hikes up Griffith Park, X-mas dinners at the Laurence Welk studio, Denise Crosby was a classmate, Santa Monica beach most weekends in the summertime. PoP at Santa Monica. Then the place got all freaky weird by 1970. Well, even before that. Maybe 1968-1969.
Opps, let me add the places of my youth. Griffith Park had a huge fire which I haven't seen in person but saw on the news. Santa Monica though liked by many people is not my cup of tea today. I like it quiet. Disneyland is still there.
POP disappeared long ago. I would rather go to the Getty anyhoo.
The place I lived when I was born was not even a town. My parents lived on a small farm in a community too small to be a city. There's not much to see there.
Now I live in a city by the coast but I have lived a few other places.
I loved the town I grew up in in the 70's/early 80's (Gastonia, NC, near Charlotte). For a town its size (about 45,000 at the time), I was never bored. My parents still live in the house we were raised in and I live 30 minutes away. It's still the same in many ways (a good thing IMO).
I grew up in a North Suburb of Chicago, it was great palce then and now. I have since moved away and could never imagine living in or raising my own kids in any suburb. IMO the burbs, any burb suck.
I use to think of the town I grew up in as close to perfect as anyplace in America. It is the place I compare all other communities to. Though I have started to have second thoughts as I visit it today and experience other places through extensive travel in America.
If you have moved from the town you were born in, what do you think about your hometown today? Does it seem nicer (or worse) than you remember it? Do you ever visit your old neighborhood and explore the places of your youth? Can you ever really go home?
Born in Denver. Raised in Denver. Still living in Denver.
Hasn't changed a lot, really. More buildings, more people, more stuff--same attitudes and way of life (thank goodness!).
I grew up in one of Chicago's south 'burbs, as I kid I liked it quite a bit, as an adult I recognize that it was economically depressed and had problems with crime. When I moved away and heard people talking about the 'burbs collectively as some bastion of white upper middle class wealth, it doesn't reflect anything that I knew of 'the burbs' growing up as a child in which our welcome to the neighborhood gift was a plate of tamales and the kids put up a basketball hoop in a cul-de-sac when the park got too dangerous to play in at night (and there were no homeowners associations around to make them tear it down, in fact, nobody cared because most of the people who lived in the cul de sac were the parents of said kids).
I was raised in the Norfolk, VA area in the 1980s and 90s. The place then was a decrepit, decaying urban wasteland. Downtown was dead after 5PM (if it was ever alive before), there seemed to be more public housing than any other kind, with vacant parcels all over town where decaying buildings once stood. The 1950s and 1960s era "urban renewal" did more to kill the city than help it (common experience in most cities), and Norfolk never fully recovered. The smaller town of about 110,000 (and falling, now below 100000) next door (Portsmouth) where I spent most of my childhood years was much the same. Dirty little port town it was.
Today the two towns are faring much better. Norfolk is resurging quite nicely and a few years ago was proclaimed to be one of the nations top 10 booming downtowns. There is a lot of new development, redevelopment, and rehabilitation going on down there now. It's actually becoming quite a pleasant place. Portsmouth is getting better too, but it still has a long way to go.
Phoenix, need I say more.....but did go back several years ago with family to look at our old homesteads, several had been torn down of course. One on 3rd and Taylor St., my grandmother's house, very sad. A huge big brown glass windowed building in its place, ugh.
Did, however, spend much of my childhood in San Angelo, a wonderful place to grow up. Am only a few hours away, and enjoy going over to see the city and their wonderful university, Angelo State.
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