I went back to Ohio, but my city was gone.

[mulberryfields]

Driving through south Jersey on Saturday on the way to see my mom, I glanced to the left to see that the neighborhood I grew up in was gone. It wasn’t very big; we didn’t even call it a town, but a village (“The Village,” to be exact

Comments

[executrix]

Actually right around now Hoover Road sounds eerily prescient.

In The French Lieutenant's Woman there's a flash-forward to the London architect who loves his weekend cottage that used to house a farm laborer's family of ten.

[mulberryfields]

Actually right around now Hoover Road sounds eerily prescient.

Oh, ouch.

I have a sudden urge for chicken. and some pot.

[amelia_eve]

Leave the chicken; take the pot.

What a fascinating (and sad) story. Where I work in a very fancy part of Bergen County you can quickly pick out the new and shoddy "affordable housing." It's all built directly on Route 17. There's a reason that property was undeveloped, so now it's infill of ticky-tacky "townhomes" on the fringes of the McMansions.

My hometown in California has gentrified without much demolition. People keep tarting up the lower-middle-class tract homes from the 1970s and driving up the prices but keeping the floor plans. They are comfortable enough houses, really, just built rather hastily and finished roughly. My mom just plods away and has no idea what's really going on around her.

[mulberryfields]

In an interesting twist of fate, today I was in the hallway at work and smelled pot (this has never happened before). An engineering firm moved into the suite next door, but what I didn't realize was that we got the fun guys department - the guys who do acoustics and sound engineering and all double as musicians.

Anyway - yeah - it's amazing how fast housing can be thrown together. I hate how wasteful demolition and rebuilding can sometimes be, but just driving up prices on existing housing isn't too great either.

[lolaraincoat]

Wow. That's just - wow.

Did you ever read any of Margaret Drabble's novels from the 1970s? She wrote a couple with protagonists who grew up in the Midlands, in the UK, but ended up as London intelligentsia; this is almost a transposed chapter from one of those stories.

(And I got your email! and I will respond at some point when I'm not ridiculously busy and it isn't ridiculously late!)

[mulberryfields]

Huh - no, oddly I don't think I've read any Margaret Drabble. And she did all that in 100 words? (*g* couldn't resist).

(And regarding the email - thanks! Don't worry if you don't get around to answering/looking. It was just a shot in the dark). Hope your ridiculously busy schedule either eases up soon or at least is a good, interesting busy. (I'm sure it is).

[bowdlerized]

Wow. Really good post.

[mulberryfields]

Thanks, bow.