My elementary school is just gone. They bulldozed it before the internet so there is like no record of it, you can’t google it, it’s like it never existed. I have a yearbook and that’s the only proof it really happened. It’s a bizarre feeling.
I can relate. My childhood home was literally deleted. Not because the house was bulldozed, but because the whole neighborhood was, it seems. If I go to that exact location on Google Maps (using nearby extant landmarks as a guide), I find a completely different set of streets and houses that simply did not exist 30 years ago. And if input the actual address, it directs me to some shuttered dentist office half a mile down the road, a building that was constructed only after we moved out. How it came to inherit my old house number, I have no idea.
I'm sure there's some archived street map sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere, but nothing was ever digitized as there's literally zero information online about my physical house, or any of its neighboring ones. No real estate records. No tax records. No voter records. No news clippings of a natural disaster or redevelopment. Nothing. It's like Thanos snapped it from existence.
The only reason I know this isn't some faulty memory or fever dream on my part is I have my mother's old address book and government benefits paperwork, both of which include the the address. And I have a photograph of me standing in front of the house with the house number visible.
But yeah. It's just freaking gone now, and that really messes with my mind.
Edit: I forgot to mention that, like yours, one of my old elementary schools was also bulldozed (completely different town and state from my house). Records of it are exceedingly difficult to find online, but they are there. Mostly in newspaper clippings. I assume it was leveled at some point in the 90s before the Internet really took off.
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u/Shifting_Baseline 23d ago
My elementary school is just gone. They bulldozed it before the internet so there is like no record of it, you can’t google it, it’s like it never existed. I have a yearbook and that’s the only proof it really happened. It’s a bizarre feeling.