Huh. We lived in a number of houses but as an elementary school kid the longest/most memorable one (time wise) was one that was in a suburb at the edge of the urban area (at that stage). I used to walk almost the whole length of the road from where my school bus dropped me to home. There was a stream /river near the house which I wasn’t supposed to go to but of course I did (typical Gen X kid who wandered unsupervised most of the day) and one day I was trying to catch tadpoles and fell in and got soaked and couldn’t go home until my clothes had dried out so I didn’t get into trouble! I didn’t have any friends on the street because most of the kids on that street (in fact, in that town)spoke a different language and went to different schools, so I spent a lot of time on my own during the week after school.
Then, everything changed quite dramatically. We moved back to the city I was born in after 6th grade. There, we lived in an apartment with a bunch of other apartment buildings around a big park, a couple of blocks from the beach, with a lot going on in the area within a few blocks’ walking. There were a few people from my school in the area, and I also made friends from the bus (a public bus that went past many of the schools in the city) who lived around the park. We’d often go to the park and hang out after school, and weekends on the beach were easy. There was also an ice rink down the road that from about 8th grade we’d often go to on weekend nights - it was a magnet for teens in the area. When I was a bit older, from around 15/16, we’d go to the hotel clubs in the area (drinking age 18 but the bouncers always let us in), nothing out of hand, just enjoying the dancing and stuff.
I lived in two houses growing up. here were a bunch of kids my age around the first house. I remember riding bikes everywhere and walked to first grade with some friends from the neighborhood. My youngest sibling was born that year and we moved that summer to a house that was a few miles away. Our development was on a modest hill at the edge of the Valley (there were actually cows on the facing hillside) meaning there were no neighborhoods immediately adjacent in contrast to nearby flats where it was block after block of houses. So fewer kids to meet, perhaps 60-70 houses in our hillside tract. I remember how pretty it looked around Christmas when many houses had lights up and the hills seemed so colorful, in the years before the 1973 oil embargo. This was the time in the San Fernando Valley when they were still knocking down orchards and to build houses. About 1/4 of a mile away was a new development that I used to go to with a few neighborhood kids to ride bikes thru the empty lots as they were graded (it was another hillside) and later walk through the houses under construction. Summers were hot, stretches of 90-100F or more were common. As kids we just didn’t know it could be any different, but the houses had A/C and once or twice we’d go to the big public pool. Time seemed to pass differently back then, the stretch from school letting out to the 4th of July seemed like a full summer in itself. On the 4th there would be fireworks over many of the city parks and I fondly remember laying on a blanket waiting for it to get dark for the show.
One of the friends my age live next door to another family with a few kids and for some reason the two families hated each other so neighborhood kids had to pick one family or the other. Unfortunately I ended up making the wrong pick because my friend’s dad lost his job in the Aerospace bust so they moved away. Also this house was poorly situated in relation to the junior and senior high schools, being right on the boundary about 3-4 miles away and drawing kids equidistant on the other side. Both my parents worked so I wasn’t part of a carpool the way some kids were since my parents couldn’t take a turn; it was the bike for me. Even though there were hundreds of us, most of the kids I met in school ended up being too far away to easily meet outside of school. And of course there was the hill to discourage extra trips out of the neighborhood. Our immediate neighborhood was middle-class but not far away around the schools was a sizeable somewhat lower income area. Sometimes I’ve wondered what life would have been like in that other neighborhood. I would’ve gone to a more academically oriented HS (only about 1/2 mile away) and been around more kids my age.
Bad Photo Tour for me. My first house was in a small town in OK on a street that had a fire station midway and a hospital at the end. It was about four blocks long. There was an alley in back where my mom allowed us to play. We could also get a dime from her and go to the Tastee Freeze behind the fire station for a cherry ice or dip cone via the alley. She didn’t let us stray very far.
We had a mimosa tree out front where my sister had a three branch fork to sit in, but I only got a two branch one (no back rest). It seemed like we could spend hours out there. I used to have recurring dreams about coming back to visit the house and finding little packages that people had left for us there in the tree.
We didn’t have many kids on the block, but the neighbors grandchildren came every summer from CA for a month. On the day they were supposed to arrive, we stayed with our noses pressed against the window for hours then scream with joy when they pulled in the driveway. We played rag ball in our backyard under a big light on the back of the house many nights. The houses on both sides had storm cellars and people from all up and down the street would take shelter there. We and the grandkids had a seance one time in theirs with a small fire in a dish to summon spirits. We got the @#$& scared out of us when a pencil we put in our fire popped loudly as it burned. Good times! We also had our parent’s friends with kids visit fairly often.
Then when I was entering 6th grade, we moved a few miles outside of town. There were no kids on our road for several years as we were one of the first new homes that were built. It was pretty boring. My younger siblings, especially my brother, had many kids to play with by the time he was 6 or 7. Two of them were Blake Shelton and his brother Ritchie. Of course my bro was allowed to ramble all over the place unlike my older sister and me.
My younger sister now lives in the second house and from google street view, it looks to be in disrepair or at the least, the trees are overgrown and need to be cut back. We don’t see each other after the death of my mom, when my two sisters allowed me no say in her care in the months before she died. I have no desire to see it again after both my parents were gone.
For some reason, as far as home location, I have many good memories of living in town, and few from our second house. We only had kids around to play with for one month in summer, so I don’t think the lack of kids our age had much to do with it. I think it’s because my older sister and I became teenagers in that house and soon became too old to play marbles in the dirt. She stopped being my companion as we had separate interests and friends, So we had a lot of arguments and not so much fun together.
In my young childhood, up to almost age 11, we lived in an apartment on a dead-end street. My recollection is that it was a reasonably nice apartment, but most of the town was single-family homes so we were considered a not so nice part of town. Working class area. I remember the parents out with the lawn chairs at night in the paved yard/parking area and the kids running around. There was a wooded area at the end of the block where we would play sometimes. The surrounding area was being developed with homes. Mom did not drive until the end of our living there so we walked down the big hill to the supermarket or took the bus to the nearby city for shopping.
My parents finally found a fixer-upper house and we moved. Lots of work to make it livable. Also a mostly working class neighborhood, with nearby streets more middle-class. Walked to school and played outside alot. My mom started to drive and then got a job so was not home at lunch time when we still walked home for lunch. Town pool and local playground filled our summers, with a few weeks at girl scout camp. No real vacations.
Highly recommend using Zillow to look up any previous residences you have lived in if they are still standing. You won’t get dish on all of them, but many may have inside pics or yard pictures which can be cool or surprising to see!
The house I grew up in does not currently have inside pics but WOW, while I could tell you that it was small, 3 beds, 1 bath, it is shocking to know that 6 of us lived in a 964 sq ft house!!! (It did have a basement that was not finished but that we definitely used)
The house I grew up in was in suburban New Jersey, built in the 1930s and on 3/4 of an acre. My parents bought it for something like $20,000 in the 1960s, sold it for $75,000 in 1975. Went on zillow to find it had been torn down and replaced with a “modern farmhouse” for sale for $3 million.
The house I grew up in was older. It had 2 bedrooms & a full bath on the first floor and 3 bedrooms & a full bathroom on the second floor. It wasn’t a huge house (rooms were relatively small), it wasn’t fancy, but there was a lot of private space between our bedrooms and the basement. I thought it was huge as a kid, but it was small by today’s standards.
The area has become very desirable for younger, hip people - and the house has been remodeled to now have 7 bedrooms, 2 full & 2 half bathrooms. I can’t tell from online pictures how they added on for the additional space. They have to have added so much on the back that the backyard where we had an ice rink in the winter must be gone. The description on Zillow says it’s an open floor plan, which baffles me - I don’t know how they did that (they must have completely gutted the first floor).
The house is worth so much that my parents would be aghast. The taxes are based on a lower value due to the way property taxes work here - and they are ridiculously high. I assume that the kids living on that street today have a much different life than we did (back in the days of dinosaurs).
We don’t have Zillow where I grew up but I looked at street view on google for the house I mentioned earlier. As I had expected to see by now, it’s no longer at the edge of the urban area it was but rather slap bang in the middle of suburbia (and in fact the street has been extended on the other side of the stream). However, the street looks really sad. It had been I guess solidly middle class from what I remember of it. Now, a lot of the fencing and houses look uncared for, there are electric fences strung on most of the fences/walls (looks like no one has really replaced the old lower walls/fencing with higher ones, just added electric) and it looks like a lot of the houses have added structures (probably unregulated judging by some of the roofs I can see from google) - whether to house family or rent out, I don’t know. The town was largely based on mining - mainly platinum - I’m not sure if the mines have been depleted because demand for Pt has only increased since then or something else but it definitely looks down at heel at the moment. Kind of sad.
The park I mentioned in second city seems to have lost the actual children’s playground that was in it, which seems odd, but still remains a nice big green space there. What used to be an old drive in across a main road a couple of roads away is now a townhouse complex. The ice rink (which was Olympic sized) was apparently reduced at some stage to make space for another cinema (there was a huge one next to it) and then closed down during Covid and seems to have never reopened. The apartment buildings all look much the same other than they now have security gates to get through to get in which they didn’t before. The beach looks as gorgeous as ever… tropical vegetation on the shore and I can almost feel that warm Indian Ocean current
My childhood house looks almost the same other than new garage doors and the trees are more mature.
My parents bought the house for $70K in 1973. Zillow estimates it’s now worth $1.2 million, about double what my parents sold it for in 2004.
I didn’t mention in my first post our back yard. I loved it as a kid! It was a three tiered situation on a hill and we had a swing set on the first tier, a big granite boulder from the ice age that we used to graffiti with crayons on the second tier, and then big climbing trees on the third. When the leaves were down, you could see the water if you climbed up one of the big trees. I spent a lot of time hiding out there.
I just visited my childhood home in Ohio, and the owner let us walk through. I had done the same in 2017 - the last time I had been to the city since the mid 90s. In 2017, I thought it looked beautiful. A small porch was added over the front door, but otherwise outside looked the same. The inside was completely renovated, but the layout was generally the same.
Today? The new owner COMPLETELY gutted the house and started over. The layout is different. The stairs to the basement are even in a different place. They added on to a couple of places in the back. The only thing that looks the same is the fireplace. The inside looks phenomenal. I am not crazy that they painted the brick outside, but maybe that’s a trend. I see maintenance $$$ when I see people do that. The current owners lived just a street over, but wanted to downsize.
My parents bought it for $25K in 1972, and sold it for $100K in 1983. Zillow has it listed for $685K now, though the pictures show the house before the reno. The neighborhood is very trendy and desirable now, mostly due to the proximity to downtown and the good schools.
My parents bought their house in suburban NJ in 1961 for something like $20,000. We sold it after my mother died in 2012 for around $550,000. Zillow now lists it for $1.1 million. Still 3 br/1.5 baths just under 1500 sq ft.
The house I lived in until I was seven (816 sq. ft) is in a neighborhood that is now a drug-infested hellhole of a place, but was decent enough while we lived there, just as Dutch Elm disease was killing all the trees. It looks like maples replaced them. Zillow says the house last sold in 2008 for $20K. Today, this is not a neighborhood you’d venture near at night.
When my dad got his first bank job (but was still driving a bread truck and working nights at the drive-in), he bought a brand new brick house in a brand new sub a few towns over for $18K in ‘66 (1,351 sq. ft, 3 beds, 1 bath, the garage was added later). I related the story of how my dad got his first suit for that job here.
I lived in this house until I went off to college at 19. I drive by the house every time I’m in Michigan. It looks pretty much the same from the front, minus my dad’s meticulously manicured, short boxwood hedging along the front and two, large shady Japanese maples that were on either side of the driveway. After my parents divorced, my dad kept the house and lived there until 2000 when he moved to AZ. He spent 23 years building an oasis of a backyard that eventually featured towering mature trees and beautiful flower beds. It became the nicest house on the block. What the buyers did to his beautiful landscaping is a tragedy – within a year of moving in, they tore EVERYTHING out(!), including the maples in the front, and completely leveled the back yard. I could understand if they had a better landscaping plan but, as you can see, they did absolutely nothing with it. Just nothing. It looks almost as bare as the day we moved in. The neighbors were appalled.
Dad sold the house in 2000 for $159K. Zillow estimates it now at $263K, still a very middle class neighborhood.
You can see that every surrounding property has mature trees, but this one doesn’t even have a stick front or back. It breaks my heart, but it devastated my dad. He says if he could have known, he never would have sold it to those people. He also kept a perfect lawn, not a weed or yellow blade. He’s sad about that, too, as he doesn’t understand people who don’t value perfect grass.
That is definitely awful, though a shade better that what a couple of people did in H’s parents’ old neighborhood! H’ grew up on the backside of this property.
My dad, step mom and three half sisters lived in a very small maybe 1300 sq ft three bedroom house with one bathroom, on a 1/4 acre lot. One of my sisters still lives in the house (was deeded to her by the parents…the rest of us agreed). It’s in a nice suburban neighborhood of similar size houses. Many folks have done an addition to enlarge the kitchen and add at least a 1/2 bath if not a full bath. Our old house is the same footprint, but it’s the right size now…with only one person living there!
I lived in that house with everyone else for about a year during breaks last year of college, and for about 9 months after I graduated. With four girls and one bathroom, we had a very strict schedule in the mornings!
It really is the perfect size for my one sister…or even two people could live there. We sure got along well when there were six of us living in that house.
Every single house in the neighborhood had kids our ages living there, and we sure made great friends.
It was quite the contrast to the apartment I lived in with my mother.
Here’s a pic I created in Illustrator I think for my mom, and then my sisters wanted one too. That what my second house behind all the trees looked like from my perspective 20 years ago. My dad was always planting a fast growing but weak structured tree in the front yard that ended up having to be cut down every ten years or so. The rest were preexisting hardy oaks and a few hickory’s and there were a lot more than I included bc I was lazy.
The pic included us kids and our families at the time. I was kind to most of us in my rendering of us in the pic lol. The El Camino was my dad’s pride and joy and that’s where he parked it - maybe a little closer to the house. I think I was spot on for my mom and dad.
Just for fun, went to see Google street view of the old house and the entire street for half a mile total is closed off for a full roadway rehabilitation and resurfacing, all the way to my old elementary school. And the neighbor’s house is greyed out; don’t know if I’ve seen that before. Their back yard was the low point of the block and easily flooded; I think they swam in the summer and ice skated in the winter. And they had a beagle named Gingko because the dad was a Professor of Geology, Botany, Paleobotany and Palynology.
I’ve found old real estate listings long after my parents moved away. Someone opened up several walls on the first floor. And closed in the screened porch off the kitchen, at the time to create a workout room. Not much change to the exterior except paint.
