Oh Mara, look what you started :>)

The comment from Mara on my last post was pretty right on, as they say.

It is indeed interesting to draw up a time line between Wheelie and myself and see where we were at particular points in time.

And yes, Mara, when I was skipping rope (I think it was 1954) Wheelie was a college student at UC Berkeley, studying courses towards a Letter and Science degree.

When I was 12 and started high school, he was in Germany in the army, working on radars and nuclear missiles. He was married, had a child. I still didn't know where babies really came from.

(yes! Really!)

And on and on. It is indeed interesting to think this through. I pulled his old resumes and this will make it much easier to actually DO that time line on paper.

:>)

After writing about my old neighborhood yesterday, I decided to "Google.nl" a little deeper into this place. I came up with the city's plans to demolish the entire frigging neighborhood.

When I was back there in February this year my sister took me to see the adjacent neighborhood, which was already gone. It was pretty weird to walk there, remembering how we all walked those streets every day. To school, to church, to the butcher, the baker. Now even those buildings, and the church too, will soon be gone.

The picture below gives you a birds eye view of my neighborhood before they started building, around 1950 or so. The three light colored strips are the spots where our buildings/streets would be. The outlined areas is where the actual building would be, the space in between them became the communal gardens/playgrounds. The small dark triangle on the right, at the end of our street, was a piece of land that wasn't built on for a long time. It stayed a mucky hilly, muddy, wonderful place to play. Especially for my brothers and their friends who used the land to "motor cross" with their bikes, catch pollywogs and frogs and stickelbacks.

The large space to the right was a farm with many canals, where we would skate during cold winters. Later on this space became soccer fields, our high school was built there, and a garden/farm run by mentally disabled folks.

The darker area above that was and still is a wonderful park, with A few old mansions, and a bunch of German bunkers.
The Park dates from the 17th century when the land was owned by some important rich people, who built a villa on it and a beautiful park around it.

I fondly remember walking through the park, around the ponds with the ducks and the swans. The autumns were always very special, when the trees would show their colors, and dropped beechnuts, acorns and chestnuts. In the winters we would skate on the ponds. And when we were old enough to roam around town by ourselves and were allowed to cross the street, we would "play" in and around the bunkers. Of course later on, it became the perfect make out spot.


There was a large colony of herons in one part of the park, and they had hundreds of huge nests in the trees. You'd be smart to walk very quickly through those parts, as not to get pooped on too much.


For those of you curious (and bored) enough to want to check this out, just go to Google.nl and do a search for Overvoorde. Just do a sears for pictures, it'll give a you a good idea of the place.




The picture below I just found this evening. I couldn't copy it for some reason, so I took a picture of the computer screen. I placed a little piece of paper with an arrow on it to show where our street is.

The entire area that is marked off by the yellow line is destined for destruction by 2010.

I simple cannot imagine that this all will be gone, with completely new areas built. It will be like our old home never existed. A weird idea indeed. And a sad one.
I am sure when my parents hear about this (if they don't already know) they will be pretty sad as well.

All in all these neighborhoods have existed only 60 years. They had to be built quickly to provide housing for the growing population after the war. Bringing these buildings up to code 20 years ago obviously didn't do much good.



So, as they say: there goes the neighborhood!!!

If you're still with me, reading this......thanks! :>)

Tomorrow I will describe my life there. I need to call Mom first for a few little tidbits of information, like....what the heck kind of floor covering did we have way back then?

SGMKJ!