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<blockquote data-quote="donna723" data-source="post: 451956" data-attributes="member: 1883"><p>Oh Lisa, I know exactly what you mean! Sadly, you really <u>can't</u> "go home again"!</p><p></p><p>As a kid I lived in a suburb of a very large city and it was a wonderful place to grow up! It was an area settled by my grandfathers family generations ago and all my relatives lived there. Nobody there had any money but it was street after street of small, neat houses where practically everyone had an ethnic-sounding last name and it so safe that kids could roam freely as long as you showed up for meals. We moved away when I was 12 and going back now is just heartbreaking. All the relatives have moved to the more outlying areas now and the whole demographics have changed. Now it's one of those places that if you drive through, you make sure your car doors are locked. The residential streets don't look too much different but the business areas are unrecognizable. And the worst part is the church we used to go to ... one of those beautiful old churches with the stained glass windows and the pipe organ and the gorgeous carved wood alters. That congregation was over 150 years old and now that beautiful old church sits empty with a "For Sale" sign on it!</p><p></p><p>When we left there, we moved to that town in Florida that has now been taken over by "The Mouse"! When we moved there it was a wonderful, very safe place to be a kid or a young adult. There were only about 50,000 people there then, still orange groves everywhere, lakes to swim in and real estate was still very reasonable. It was big enough to have everything you needed but still small enough to be safe and easy to navigate. Parents dropped their kids off downtown to go to a movie and picked them up afterwards and never worried. We lived in an outlying area with several miles of undeveloped land between us and the "big city". This is where we lived as teenagers and in our young adult "running around" years, it's where my kids were born, where I worked for many, many years. And NOW...it's pretty much ruined! I can't even find my way around now. Most of it is unrecognizable compared to what it was like when we moved there. There's virtually no undeveloped land there at all now, the orange groves are all gone, the old landmarks have all been bulldozed, it's nothing but office buildings and expensive condos and trendy shopping malls now. They truely "paved paradise and put in a parking lot"! It's now completely tourist-oriented and nothing like it was before. We've had a very active Facebook group for quite a while for people who lived there back then and remember how it was when we were young, pre-"Mouse". There's over 4,000 members of the group, all talking about the places we used to go and the things we did that are gone now, and there's hundreds of pictures of all these restaurants and stores and movie theaters and the schools we went to that are long gone now too and lots of pictures of how the streets and neighborhoods looked back then when it was such a nice place to live. It just makes me sad.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="donna723, post: 451956, member: 1883"] Oh Lisa, I know exactly what you mean! Sadly, you really [U]can't[/U] "go home again"! As a kid I lived in a suburb of a very large city and it was a wonderful place to grow up! It was an area settled by my grandfathers family generations ago and all my relatives lived there. Nobody there had any money but it was street after street of small, neat houses where practically everyone had an ethnic-sounding last name and it so safe that kids could roam freely as long as you showed up for meals. We moved away when I was 12 and going back now is just heartbreaking. All the relatives have moved to the more outlying areas now and the whole demographics have changed. Now it's one of those places that if you drive through, you make sure your car doors are locked. The residential streets don't look too much different but the business areas are unrecognizable. And the worst part is the church we used to go to ... one of those beautiful old churches with the stained glass windows and the pipe organ and the gorgeous carved wood alters. That congregation was over 150 years old and now that beautiful old church sits empty with a "For Sale" sign on it! When we left there, we moved to that town in Florida that has now been taken over by "The Mouse"! When we moved there it was a wonderful, very safe place to be a kid or a young adult. There were only about 50,000 people there then, still orange groves everywhere, lakes to swim in and real estate was still very reasonable. It was big enough to have everything you needed but still small enough to be safe and easy to navigate. Parents dropped their kids off downtown to go to a movie and picked them up afterwards and never worried. We lived in an outlying area with several miles of undeveloped land between us and the "big city". This is where we lived as teenagers and in our young adult "running around" years, it's where my kids were born, where I worked for many, many years. And NOW...it's pretty much ruined! I can't even find my way around now. Most of it is unrecognizable compared to what it was like when we moved there. There's virtually no undeveloped land there at all now, the orange groves are all gone, the old landmarks have all been bulldozed, it's nothing but office buildings and expensive condos and trendy shopping malls now. They truely "paved paradise and put in a parking lot"! It's now completely tourist-oriented and nothing like it was before. We've had a very active Facebook group for quite a while for people who lived there back then and remember how it was when we were young, pre-"Mouse". There's over 4,000 members of the group, all talking about the places we used to go and the things we did that are gone now, and there's hundreds of pictures of all these restaurants and stores and movie theaters and the schools we went to that are long gone now too and lots of pictures of how the streets and neighborhoods looked back then when it was such a nice place to live. It just makes me sad. [/QUOTE]
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