A place I've never been to. A place I'll never go

With little exception, there is a heck of a lot of construction in Canada. Canada has among the highest construction per capita in the world.

that's not a thing, you would 100% know when buying that a building was listed

Strange take for Toronto where houses are being torn down and rebuilt as larger houses or high rises everywhere

I don't know that I'm always a fan of heritage designations, but they're not exactly a surprise to a buyer, right?

It's an ad hoc capture of the southland in the early 70s. I like to reference IMDB to try to see if the landmarks in the show still exist. Some do, some don't. The criminals used to live in some very nice houses up in Bel Air.

A recent example had Colombo at a winery. Well, the Pomona and Cucamonga Valley is where many of the wineries were back in the day. But, that's been transitioning away from that area for some time. The Ontario Airport exists where that winery was in the show.

But there's still vestiges of all that in the area, and the area is still in rapid change. What used to be dairy farms are all turning into warehouses or new residences. Yet, there's still that same old local convenience store on the corner in its 70+ year old building just down the street.

It's a very interesting place to just watch the change happen around you.

We now live in a place where the locals are warm and welcoming, but I'll never be one of them. My kids are, but I'm just a little different. When I go back to where I was raised, I'm no longer a local there either, just a little bit different. It's more than the place itself changing. It's as if there is some continuity that's been broken somewhere.

It's not bad, just odd. I can't quite put my finger on it.

But, looking back, I was the gentrifier.

I've seen what it was a few years before moving in there: prostitutes on the street at night. Mobile soup kitchen feeding them, and a group of eccentric locals who included a man without legs in a wheelchair. Folks who got pushed out of other parts of the city - finding a home and a place to just _be_

What I'm trying to say is that: your "from" and your nostalgia was somebody else's "to". Somebody else lost what was there, and then you came. And then you left and something else came. The city builds up layers. And there is a longing and a nostalgia and a wrenching... but those feelings are part of what's always been there even before you. Now that you feel those feelings, you've joined in another part of the cycle.

A couple of months ago, I was puzzled enough by the lack of large scale urban history services in the West to post this question (with examples of what was possible):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38090473

[1] https://jacobfilipp.com/streetviewsave/ [2] https://svd360.istreetview.com/

Our family's 1800s home was one of five, on 2 forking dirt roads that meandered thru the woods. From our front porch, we could see across the creek, out to where the prison grew alfalfa and corn.

Our dirt road+creek met the paved road; that was the school bus stop. Across the pavement and past a 40ac cow field was a domed radar installation. It served a nearby Nike missile base. The prison guard towers, maximum security and it's railroad were a half mile to the side.

The missile base left in 75. The train ended in 77 w/ stock sold by 80. My brother evicted us in 87 - and for good measure razed the house and every tree. I married and left the area in 90. The sprawling prison complex sold to developers in 2000s.

I visited my birth home (site) in 2019. I needed a map to find it. The paved road I knew had been ripped up and replaced with a different road going different places.

The cow field where I waited for my bus was a forest. In it's way, this was the most disorienting part of the visit.

The dirt road forking off of ours led to a sportsball park. It continued on a bit and was bisected by an 8 lane cross-county highway.

My dirt road was paved and ended at a cul-de-sac of townhouses where my neighbors had been. Our lot was occupied by the commercial nursery that my brother had built and later sold. Our ramshackle garage still stood for some reason. The fields across our creek were more townhomes.

I have historical photos of our home and nearby. However, I regret that we never took pictures of the 2 miles around our home - the land we walked and drove 1000s of times.

It certainly never occurred to any of us that the roads themselves would disappear.

Going back was nice, especially the few things that had stayed the same, but expecting everything to just freeze and wait for you to return one day was perhaps a little naive.

I'm in the USA, and any area with a large immigrant population will have a shopping mall or at least a few stores where signage is in English & the language of the local immigrant population.

The bakery in Denison Square is a clear example of a cultural mishmash - they offer many of the traditional hk style breads like pineapple buns, but also many twists that definitely have a Canadian influence (smoked beef sandwitch with milk bread).

https://bestneighborhood.org/race-in-san-francisco-ca/

Zoom out can you can zoom into any city and see at least in SF, LA, NYC there are huge areas where you can expect non-English to possibly be common. Sorry it doesn't cover Canada but I'm sure some searching can bring up something similar.

> What to Submit

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.