Looks like they ripped out my old apartment building in Columbus and replaced it with something bigger and better. Good thing, too, since it burned down at least once, while I was living there (hmm, now there’s an old Usenet post I should resurrect here; I used to use it as a great counter-example to the “ban guns because they make domestic squabbles fatal” argument).

The concrete canyon Brian and I lived in before that is still there, though, and probably unchanged. Trigger-happy towing, unsafe parking, and next door to a neighborhood pool; a bunch of kids once broke into my car just to steal the change from my ashtray so they could get in. Cute girls running around, though, and our storage closet was big enough to hide a dozen illegal immigrants in. Two dozen if they were close friends.

America’s Largest Community Of Brick Homes hasn’t changed a bit. Nearly 50,000 houses based on four floorplans, so you always knew where the bathrooms were at your friend’s houses. Not the easiest neighborhood to deliver pizza in, especially in Dominos’ 30-minutes-or-free days, but the tips were always good.

As for the first home I remember, Old Powell Road is almost unrecognizable. They got rid of the sharp curves that used to send cars into the abandoned gravel pit (that, along with date-rape attempts, was the most common reason someone would knock on our front door after dark), the formerly-toxic landfill appears to be capped and made pretty, but it’s still sparsely developed. The house is long-gone, but I knew that already.

These days home looks like this: