So there's this group on Facebook I love called Vintage Los Angeles that shows tons of pics of LA over the last 100 years or so, and a lot of them are awesome, such as: Western Avenue, 1895: 1950's Billboard on Sunset Blvd: Vine Street, 1941: And so on. Do you guys know of any vintage pics of your town?
My town hasn't changed a lot in the last... 500 years. The two main streets in town were built between 1200 and 1500. My house is in the new part of town that was built on top of demolished mediaeval buildings back in the 1630s. Here is an 1958 photo of the ice-cream cafe at the other end of my street with the Munster in the background: And this is what it looks like now: Here's an aerial shot of the whole town. This is what it looked like in 1690 for comparison:
Villingen. It's a ~1200 year old market town in the Black Forest. The original walls and most of the buildings in the old town within are still present and in use. My house dates from 1638 and is one of the newest builds in the altstadt.
Here's some of Vancouver, BC, by semi-famous photographer Fred Herzog. I love his photos. My father remembers this era in Vancouver's history well and has shared a lot of his memories with me. Both the Regent Hotel (visible on the left) and the Balmoral Hotel are still around, although you wouldn't want to stay there. The corner visible in this picture used to basically be the commercial center of Vancouver. Now it's ground zero of allegedly the poorest postal code in Canada, the "Downtown East-Side". Urban decay is a strange thing. This is the same corner, but a better view. There are very few business left open on this corner today. At this time in its history, Vancouver was famous for its neon lights. This street remains Vancouver's "Entertainment district" with a lot of clubs and bars. Most of the neon is gone; in the 70s the neon was thought tacky so much of it was removed. Very sad IMO. I'm not sure where this picture was taken but it sure is pretty! Really captures the climate, sigh.
No dramatic changes around here since photograpy was invented (except cars), but: Late '800: in the sixties: today: today, same place seen from the roof of that palace: Late' 800: in the sixties: today:
Hmmm, which city. Where I live is a typical suburb. A small village with farms growing into an extension of Copenhagen. Not that interesting. Where I grew up is a young town by Danish standards, small and about 200 years old. So I'll pick where I work. Copenhagen: Copenhagen is old. But two fires i 1728 and 1795 more or less destroyed any remaining medieval buildings. But most of the buildings raised after the fires are still part of the city. The most famous fire is probably the bombardment by the British in 1807 (which shows that the notion of bombarding civilians wasn't a modern idea). But the earlier accidental fires did more damage. 1807 1890 9. April 1940 4. May 1945 1950 1963 Today (the building on the left is where I used to work):
Here's one of where I grew up, circa 1916. I believe the cluster of buildings in the background at the bottom of the hill are where "downtown" is now. Keep in mind where I grew up still is small enough that there isn't a stoplight in town. The buildings in the foreground probably don't exist anymore and are probably street, parking lot, or National Park buildings.
The traffic lights in my town are turned off in the evenings and on weekends as there's not enough traffic to make it worth keeping them on.
Still vintage(ish), but just replace the cars with more modern ones and it almost looks identical (at least for a busy summer weekend): Here's the same street from the other direction, in the present day: I think the one blue grey house is in all three pictures. I'd have to ask my parents, who lived there since the '40s.
I live in That London. New Cross, to be precise. Here it is at the turn of the 19th/20th century. The top shot is taken from the second floor window of the building with the flag on in the second, it seems. This building is now a grotty pub. This major junction is about five minutes walk from my house. It has a selection of corner shops, cafes and tramps. Sadly no horse-drawn carts. The building behind the cocoa tram is now a bank. The road is still recognisable but has been rejigged recently because this is a main artery from Central London and busy does not even begin to describe it. This post is being awkward about the images, so here are links: http://www.ideal-homes.org.uk/__data/assets/image/0017/357101/new-cross-road-01771-750.jpg http://www.ideal-homes.org.uk/__data/assets/image/0009/357093/new-cross-gate-01545-750.jpg
1920, tower/war memorial for WW1 being built: 1924, fascist rally, Mussolini is nominated honorary citizen and inaugurates the memorial: 1938, pre-war military parade: today:
That's an awesome looking place, Hunty. I so need to visit London and its surrounding areas at some point.
I live in Redmond -- Seattle suburb, home of Microsoft. I can walk to this intersection in about fifteen minutes from my home. It's a bit more built up now, and those lots are no longer empty, but thankfully the trees are still pretty similar. Here's the same intersection today, though this is taken from the opposite corner of of the intersection, about where the Shoe Hospital is in the first photo, and has some extreme HDR effect going.
I'm trying to imagine what the No Fish sign is for. People keep bringing them in? A statement of intent?
It's Bergamo, a town near Milan (those are the two centers, the medieval one in the walled old city uphill, and the new neoclassical/fascist style center they built downhill in the early '900)
Live Water Surf Shop You can usually tell a Stinson Beach resident (or former one) by the fact that they have one on their car. It's our little badge of honor. Stinson is right in the middle of the Red Triangle, and is usually on the list of the top 10 beaches with shark attacks in the US. Needless to say, we don't like great whites all that much.
There's a whole Flickr set for old photos from Tulsa, Oklahoma where I grew up. The ones at the beginning of that set are from an amusement park called "Belle's" that are particularly bittersweet. I went there all the time as a kid and it's sad to see it fall into such ruin.
This is fun, more for what I'm turning up about my town while googling for pics than anything else. I live in Framingham, MA, which has the dubious distinction of home of the World's First Shopping Mall, Shopper's World: It wasn't a fully enclosed mall, but it had a roofed walkway that opened onto an inner court where there was miniature golf. Oh, and that Jordan Marsh anchor store was a Building of the Future! It had giant plexiglass windows. Shopper's World was torn down in 1994 to make room for... Shopper's World. A new non-mall entirely made up of big box stores surround a couple of acres of parking. Here's a picture of the railroad station from downtown that was built in 1885. My wife takes the commuter rail from the station right next to this building every day. Nowadays this station is a mediocre steak house. I think that picture is from before it became a restaurant. Just a block or two from me is the minuteman statue, that was dedicated in 1900: You can't really see it there for the crowd and the flag covering it up, but it looks like this: Except that's not where it is today, that's about a mile down the road in Framingham Center where it was originally erected. They moved it near my house in 1941 and faced it towards Boston, because that's the way the minutemen were facing when they marched to take Boston away from the British. See, during the revolution, Washington camped outside of Boston and the British sat inside Boston drinking their tea and being mean and stuff. We had no way to get them out, and they didn't have much interest in coming inland to be shot at. So Washington had a guy named Henry Knox bring all the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga to Framingham and stash 'em here. Which he did, and then in the dead of night they ran them into Boston and put them on the heights overlooking the city. The British woke up and found a whole bunch of cannons aimed at them, so they got in boats and sailed away with all their loyalists, who became Canadians. Henry Knox is available for parties and business events: And I would totally have him at my next party, except the service he works for is based in Philadelphia.
