I think there is a strong argument for the Library of Congress or some other public/quasi-public entity to archive Google Maps/StreetView data. Redevelopment has been an ongoing fact of life for much of the time I've lived in my area, and huge swathes of the landscape are nigh unrecognizable from when I was a kid. However, a lot of the way things were is preserved in that map and image data. I think this is valuable for any number of applications, let alone the basic act of grounding oneself within the fact of the change that one's environment has undergone over time. Unfortunately, for however grateful I am that Google has made all of this available to us, I don't trust them to preserve it all long-term. I don't think it would be a good idea to let it all slip through our fingers without a plan.
Why rely on Daddy Google so much in the first place?
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):
Going forward? We probably shouldn't. Unfortunately, there's no way to go back to 2008 and build a rival dataset. Not without an elaborate space mirror/FTL craft/telescope set-up, at least.
As to your question, if I may wax poetic: the history of America (the nation) is short and filled with episodes its residents would like to forget. That brevity makes those events (and the desire to bury them) all the more poignant. As way of an example, which I only recently learned about: Why is much of the East Coast forested? It's not because we didn't clear cut hundreds of thousands of acres of old-growth timber to use for slave-worked farmland which was scarred by the over-planting of cash crops, apparently.
I'm sure that's not the whole story, but I imagine that it's part of it. It's so much easier to push New Thing if people don't know what Old Thing is being demolished to make way for it.
As a stopgap, you can download Streetview spheres to your computer. Start with one place that's nostalgic/important to you. For one-at-a-time downloads, use a set of bookmarklets [1] I created for this purpose. For downloading an entire area in bulk, I'd like to shout out Street View Download 360 [2] from young up-and-comer Thomas Orlita.
You see names written in Chinese and English everywhere in the USA? Or did you mean something else? Because if that's what you meant to say, that is absolutely not how things are "everywhere in the USA".
I live in Texas, and have lived in California and New York. In all three of these places the areas with a large Chinese presence will have stores with names in both Chinese and English.
This is absolutely common in the US in pretty much any large city, I can't imagine someone having never seen this before in the US unless they never lived or went to an area that was diverse. And its not just Chinese, many places will have Korean names, Japanese names, and of course on the other end Spanish names accompanied by english but most are more used to this.
As someone who regularly shops at those sorts of places, there is a large part of the US population that ignores or is otherwise unaware of them, most of my family included. I've had multiple conversations where people have been shocked when informed that there's an Asian or Mexican market a short distance away that they had no idea existed.
I see it in Chinese restaurants, sure. And in Chinatowns. (And with Spanish in the southwest.) I don't see it on "almost every store" "everywhere in the US", though.
Nomdep was referring to the pictures in TFA -- the rest of the comments are explaining why a mall may look like that. Not an entire city.
A reasonable interpretation of "you see that everywhere" is "most cities have a mall or neighborhood that would result in a similar set of pictures.
It's incredible how many "hackers" in this thread don't understand how quantifiers work in contexts other than code. How the hell does this industry translate business needs into code without this rudimentary skill?
Yes, it is very common in urban and even suburban USA to find stores, and in larger cities entire neighborhoods of stores, where names are in both Latin and some other script, and other text is in English and some other language (whether or not both use the Latin alphabet.) It's not too uncommon in, say, California to see this for several different east asian languages (Chinese being the nost common generally, but there is regional variation), Spanish, and maybe Arabic and/or Russian, in a single moderately sized city.
From what I've seen, it is an established and expected cultural practice for "ethnic" restaurants in US to have bilingual menus regardless of their actual location. It could be a Mexican restaurant in an area that is 99% white Anglos, and it will still have menu in English and Spanish.
Personally I think it's great; it means that you get some exposure to other languages even if you never leave your corner of the woods.
Not sure about Toronto, but there are a lot of places like that on the BC side. I don't know if it's true or not, but I heard once that leading up to the handoff of Hong Kong from Britain to China there was a lot of immigration to Canada, due to their easier process than that of the US. It could also just be an Asian neighborhood like you'll find in pretty much every major city.
That was one of the major events, but in general there has been a steady trickle of immigrants from Japan and China to American and Canadian west coast settlements for the past 150 years or so. As with most diasporas, the way it usually works is that the first people come there because it's cheaper and/or because there's work available, and then once they establish a local community, more immigrants start coming there preferentially because they have friends and family, because there are services available in their language etc.
In BC, Richmond in particular has been a recipient of many of those immigrants from Hong Kong, which is why its population is still majority ethnic Chinese, and even many official signs are bilingual.
Yes, almost all US cities have at least a couple grocery stores that stock imported products and have signage in multiple languages. most common is Chinese or general “Asian” but larger cities have more specific stores that specialize further on Korean, Vietnamese, etc.
It's common in Canada for ethnic malls and stores whose proprietors and customers are mostly first- and second-generation immigrants, that they'd have signage in their own language. There's no rule enforcing it and no rule against it, except maybe in Quebec.
Quebec's language laws are fascinating, the newest version "requires non-French signs to be accompanied by French descriptions that are twice the size." Since the goal is "to ensure French predominates the visual field of storefronts," you can have the logos be the same size as long as the tagline is in French.
I think the word you are looking for is "totalitarian". The legal system there virtually guarantees French as the only acceptable language. Even native-born Quebecois who are also native English speakers need to go through a process to be permitted to school their children in English.
Go to any large/well-known US city and you will with almost 100% certainty be able to find an area where this is absolutely common. I live in Texas right down the street from one of many asian street malls/plazas in my city where the majority of the store names are first written in either Chinese or Korean. I'm certain its likely the same in Canada
That area of Toronto has a huge Chinese diaspora. I have many memories of trekking to Pacific Mall (also mentioned in the blog post) on public transit with my anime-watching friends in highschool to buy pirated DVDs and other merch. A nearby Walmart has bilingual English - Chinese signs inside.
I'm curious where you live that this seems so unusual.
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.
In most of the southeast you're only going to see English. Even in medium size towns. Texas is completely different however, where you can easily see 3 languages alone set of store fronts.
I was wondering about the same thing as GP. I live in a European capital (one of the smaller ones), and I basically don't ever see anything like this. If there's any signs in other languages then they're almost always in English. (We don't get much immigration from English-speaking countries.)
Interesting! Is that because you don't have large immigrant populations, or is it more cultural where it's seen as important for newcomers to assimilate to the local culture?
In the US & Canada, of course, the vast majority of the population is descended from people who immigrated here. It would make sense for it to be more normalized here for public spaces to cater to those who don't yet speak the local language.
We do have large immigrant populations, but have a fairly active integration policy. It's not a major success, but at least free language education seems to have helped a lot.
There's foreign languages on "call family in your home country" type ads and on various official information (e.g. posters during the pandemic), but very rarely on storefronts and the like.
There's many pockets in Toronto with high density of Chinese commerce, the area around Steeles east of the IBM campus is one. Pacific Mall mentioned in the article is only one of the commercial centers in the area. There's also Metro Square a few blocks west, the T&T plaza next door, Skycity on Midland/Finch, and various other small plazas around the area, full of Chinese food goodness.
I grew up here. There's a lot of people in this area (generally non-working members of first gen immigrant families, think gma and gpa) who don't really speak English. My parents took me to these malls for a glimpse of the culture where home is (and to make me practice mandarin). As second-gen immigrants grow up, some have opened their own businesses too, combining aspects of Canadian and Chinese culture. To me now, it feels like home.
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).
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.
It's like the 21st century "China town". Many new migrants prefer avoiding downtown and the old China towns so have built new ones, complete with huge parking lots.
I have a similar feeling when I bring friends to places I spent lots of time, but which have now been completely transformed by redevelopment. I can walk through and visualize my old surroundings as if they were still there, but I just can't convey them to others who are visiting to the first time. The best I can do is show old google maps photos.
> I have a similar feeling when I bring friends to places I spent lots of time, but which have now been completely transformed by redevelopment
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.
Earlier this week I went back to the small town where I went to school, something I've been meaning to do for the past two years. It's still a nice small touristy coastal town, absolutely relaxing, with wonderful fresh air and a really nice walk in the beautiful spring weather. But it's not exactly the same town. Stores have close, buildings repurposed, neighborhoods redeveloped and some things have just been torn down. I used to recognize a ton of people, but the population have changed over the past 25 years, now I don't know anyone.
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.
As a kid, riding on the freeway to grandma's, I'd always wonder what that weird building with the futuristic windows in the distance was. Later, as a teen, working out near there, I learned it was a mall, but already mostly closed down, except for the Chang's Mongolian Grill.
Thankfully, someone went to the trouble to retroactively put some information about it on the Web.
I can empathize with the author after moving away from Toronto almost 20 years ago, so much from when I was a teenager is gone. I'm not "from" where I live now, and where I'm "from" no longer exists, I just feel perpetually detached from everywhere now.
One of the reasons I like to watch "Colombo" is that it was essentially filmed in Los Angeles and around Southern California.
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.
Apparently people who grew up in East Germany have this but worse. Their "home culture" (TV shows, snacks made by the state snack factories) got "demolished" when East Germany got absorbed into Germany...
I had trouble getting an apartment in Leipzig a few years ago, because so many of the (older) landlords didn't want "Wessies" in the house who would just leave in a couple of years rather than staying and joining the house community.
I happened to grow up during the age of my country's rapid development, both financially and culturally. I was too young to truly experience "the old times", but I got a lick of them and now I feel this weird nostalgia towards the entire esthetic. Things will just never be the same, modern world is completely different.
I've tried explaining this feeling to people so many times. Unmoored is a good word.
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.
interesting. i moved around as a kid a lot too, and later as an adult as well. but i have the totally opposite reaction. as a kid i didn't have any friends because of the frequent moving. but i love exploring, and now i feel at home everywhere i go. every place creates new memories, and i make new friends. especially going back to any place a second time always feels like coming home to me. whereas getting to a new place fills me with a sense of adventure. moving to a new city or country is like exploring a new neighborhood in my hometown. i guess the key point is that i feel as connected to the place where i am now as to the places where i grew up. effectively, the whole planet is my home.
I get the "the whole planet is my home". It’s just that to me there’s no reciprocity. It’s a one-way thing. And no matter where I am, I know I’m just passing through.
what kind of reciprocity are you looking for? i made friends in most places, and outside of europe i generally felt more welcome too. but then, i grew up pretty disconnected from family, so i probably just don't know any better and what makes me feel at home is different from what you might expect.
As a military brat, time is intrinsically connected with place for me. Once I leave someplace, it's often some time before I'm able to visit again, if I ever get to. I became aware very early in adulthood (maybe, unconsciously, in childhood) that what's thought of as familiar is reliant on temporal as well as geographic proximity. Things cease to exist as you knew them quite quickly.
Even if nothing gets built or demolished, trees grow.
When I first moved out on my own, I went to live in a very hip neighbourhood in Toronto - West Queen West. It was gentrifying, and had a lot of artsy spots, cafes, hole-in-the-wall nightclubs. It was an amazing time living there. A little bit of grit, a little bit of hip. Electro music. Coffee culture.
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.
That's beautifully put. Every city I've lived in, there were stories of the good old days. "You should have seen this place ten years ago." As I grew older and lived in more places, I would hear stories about a city where I was "from". How it's changed now with all the new people moving in, how it used to be in the glory days. And I was there, living those glory days that they're reminiscing about, a place in the past that no longer exists.
As I'm getting ready to move from yet another city, I reflect on how it's changed. She's no longer the city I used to know - and I'm no longer the person I was when I moved here. It's time to go find my next "to". Others will move in and make where I'm "from" theirs.
I loved your story and the pictures. The rebirth was satisfying to see, how the merchants were able to find a new home for their village.
Yeah, it's this constant cycle of change, where what's new and exciting for one person might be tinged with loss for someone else. And yeah, that feeling of nostalgia and longing, it's like this shared thread that ties us all together in the cityscape. We're all part of this ongoing story, adding our own chapter and feeling the echoes of those who came before us.
> The good thing is that, after 5 years of
> construction, a beautiful new mall stan… just kidding!
>
> This is Canada. The place where construction
> has to stop because you’re not allowed to uproot
> a tree on your own property. Or a vindictive neighbour
> holds up your project in Committee of Adjustments, until
> you build them a new deck as a bribe. Or construction
> is blocked by a surprise Heritage Listing on your
> building. I could keep going!
Little throwaways like this are brushstrokes in a much bigger picture.
Yeah it's an exaggerated rant, including the idea that you can't uproot a tree on your property which is only somewhat true, but it's not much different than most developed countries including the U.S.
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.
> 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.
Construction of what and where and what does highest mean? If we're talking residential, we're mostly talking about McMansion style new suburbs where there wasn't anything to complain except nesting waterfowl. Vancouver is only barely an exception, and I'm sure others do exist, but it's hardly characteristic of the nation
I'm of the opinion that if something is a sort of "heritage site," the government should be required to purchase it, and it should not be owned by private parties.
Not true. Many buildings are on the heritage “of interest” list and remain there for decades and as soon as someone goes in for permit to do something drastic, it gets moved to the heritage protection list and your rights are severely limited. Sometimes just being in a heritage district but not having a specific listing is enough to get classified when you want to do work.
This is from direct experience in Canada working in this industry.
I am the post's author, and I was referring to a specific building [1].
My understanding is that the owners bought it, unlisted, with the intent to develop it into something else. The City then suddenly made a case for designating it as a heritage property.
This is an area with powerful neighbours who have a lot of time on their hands.
I actually think there's a strong case for preserving this property. I love the look. The architecture is very unusual for Toronto and it looks striking. But, it is always a bummer when you purchase a property with plans to do X, and then get a surprise designation after you pay the money.
The reason this happens is that effectively anything except a single family home is banned.
So when a multifamily project is approved on a lit, developpers are thrilled to put a high rise - there's so much pent up demand they know it'll sell out.
On the other end, the ultra rich want bigger mcmansions.
I would argue that what is missing is mixed-use medium-density buildings. Blocks of exclusively residential buildings discourage people from walking to do their daily errands, because shops are too far from their home. This in turn increases the amount of car traffic in our neighborhoods, which sucks for everybody but especially for people outside of the vehicles that are causing that traffic.
My understanding of what's happening here in Toronto: it is such a hassle to fight for any new construction, that the only projects that are "worth it" are highrises. This means that 4-5 storey residential condos/rentals are not being built. Only the biggest buildings.
I might be out of touch, my read on Toronto some 14 years ago was that the city was dominated (at arms length) by the Toronto TSX - the single largest mineral resources exchange on the globe.
Mining mining was behind large law and accounting firms, underpinning the professional service layers, and driving the demand for high end mansions, out of town el ranchos, tax write off hobby projects for spouses etc.
On a pie chart for cash flow I'm guessing minerals and energy are still the big tickets there?
My original comment was only focused on construction approvals and the challenges with the City' Committee of Adjustments. Things are changing, where power to approve projects is moving more towards the Provincial level (which has pros: a saner, faster process. And cons: less ways for you to shape your local community, industrial-strength corruption)
In terms of economics, I'm not an expert. It looks like much of the local economy is based on reselling the same houses to each other at ever increasing prices.
I bought many things at this offshoot of p-mall. It was there long before Pacific Mall, but gradually became its undersized sibling. There was a kitchen supply store there that had great stuff at good prices. I still have many of those purchases and use them often.
It had the advantage of being a lot quieter than Pacific Mall, although parking was equally impossible. I'd usually walk through P-mall for fun, and then use this place to actually shop.
> 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.
I like that Google Maps now lets you view a time in the past of a location on Street View. I hope this serves as an archive of sorts of how things used to look, at least from the outside, for decades/centuries to come.
If the various locations I’ve lived and visited become unrecognizable like this, at least it would allow me to get a glimpse of how it used to look.
I once went to see an antique palace with my wife, which according to Google reviews was home to a 3-star hotel with a restaurant. Turns out the hotel was long gone, the property turned private, and the new owner didn't notice us and locked the gate when leaving, trapping us and our car inside. We jumped the fence and found the guy and kindly asked him to come back and open the gate.
89 comments
[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadA 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
As to your question, if I may wax poetic: the history of America (the nation) is short and filled with episodes its residents would like to forget. That brevity makes those events (and the desire to bury them) all the more poignant. As way of an example, which I only recently learned about: Why is much of the East Coast forested? It's not because we didn't clear cut hundreds of thousands of acres of old-growth timber to use for slave-worked farmland which was scarred by the over-planting of cash crops, apparently.
I'm sure that's not the whole story, but I imagine that it's part of it. It's so much easier to push New Thing if people don't know what Old Thing is being demolished to make way for it.
[1] https://jacobfilipp.com/streetviewsave/ [2] https://svd360.istreetview.com/
Is the post a joke with photos from Asia malls (or AI generated)? Or it’s just common in that part of Canada?
This is absolutely common in the US in pretty much any large city, I can't imagine someone having never seen this before in the US unless they never lived or went to an area that was diverse. And its not just Chinese, many places will have Korean names, Japanese names, and of course on the other end Spanish names accompanied by english but most are more used to this.
A reasonable interpretation of "you see that everywhere" is "most cities have a mall or neighborhood that would result in a similar set of pictures.
It's incredible how many "hackers" in this thread don't understand how quantifiers work in contexts other than code. How the hell does this industry translate business needs into code without this rudimentary skill?
It’s quite likely that the only people around here who can read the Chinese menus work there or are related to those who work there.
Personally I think it's great; it means that you get some exposure to other languages even if you never leave your corner of the woods.
In BC, Richmond in particular has been a recipient of many of those immigrants from Hong Kong, which is why its population is still majority ethnic Chinese, and even many official signs are bilingual.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-storefront-si... https://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/new-regulations-will...
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.
In the US & Canada, of course, the vast majority of the population is descended from people who immigrated here. It would make sense for it to be more normalized here for public spaces to cater to those who don't yet speak the local language.
There's foreign languages on "call family in your home country" type ads and on various official information (e.g. posters during the pandemic), but very rarely on storefronts and the like.
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.
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.
https://tanasbournemall.blogspot.com/2011/12/tanasbourne-mal...
As a kid, riding on the freeway to grandma's, I'd always wonder what that weird building with the futuristic windows in the distance was. Later, as a teen, working out near there, I learned it was a mall, but already mostly closed down, except for the Chang's Mongolian Grill.
Thankfully, someone went to the trouble to retroactively put some information about it on the Web.
Ironically his former home got turned to a, well not a mall, but a convenience store.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can't_Go_Home_Again
- Heraclitus ~5th century BC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus
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.
Which, you are right, isn’t bad. Just odd.
Unmoored is adequate.
Even if nothing gets built or demolished, trees grow.
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.
That's beautifully put. Every city I've lived in, there were stories of the good old days. "You should have seen this place ten years ago." As I grew older and lived in more places, I would hear stories about a city where I was "from". How it's changed now with all the new people moving in, how it used to be in the glory days. And I was there, living those glory days that they're reminiscing about, a place in the past that no longer exists.
As I'm getting ready to move from yet another city, I reflect on how it's changed. She's no longer the city I used to know - and I'm no longer the person I was when I moved here. It's time to go find my next "to". Others will move in and make where I'm "from" theirs.
I loved your story and the pictures. The rebirth was satisfying to see, how the merchants were able to find a new home for their village.
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.
> 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.
Construction of what and where and what does highest mean? If we're talking residential, we're mostly talking about McMansion style new suburbs where there wasn't anything to complain except nesting waterfowl. Vancouver is only barely an exception, and I'm sure others do exist, but it's hardly characteristic of the nation
that's not a thing, you would 100% know when buying that a building was listed
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-68...
This is from direct experience in Canada working in this industry.
This is an area with powerful neighbours who have a lot of time on their hands.
I actually think there's a strong case for preserving this property. I love the look. The architecture is very unusual for Toronto and it looks striking. But, it is always a bummer when you purchase a property with plans to do X, and then get a surprise designation after you pay the money.
[1] https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2018/cc/bgrd/backgroundf...
Strange take for Toronto where houses are being torn down and rebuilt as larger houses or high rises everywhere
So when a multifamily project is approved on a lit, developpers are thrilled to put a high rise - there's so much pent up demand they know it'll sell out.
On the other end, the ultra rich want bigger mcmansions.
What's still lacking is sane 2-8 unit zoning.
Mining mining was behind large law and accounting firms, underpinning the professional service layers, and driving the demand for high end mansions, out of town el ranchos, tax write off hobby projects for spouses etc.
On a pie chart for cash flow I'm guessing minerals and energy are still the big tickets there?
In terms of economics, I'm not an expert. It looks like much of the local economy is based on reselling the same houses to each other at ever increasing prices.
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 had the advantage of being a lot quieter than Pacific Mall, although parking was equally impossible. I'd usually walk through P-mall for fun, and then use this place to actually shop.
> 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.
If the various locations I’ve lived and visited become unrecognizable like this, at least it would allow me to get a glimpse of how it used to look.