November 15, 2010

Missing Our Urban Pasts

I feel bad for the 10 year old's of the western world that will never know what its like to push a VHS tape into a VCR. The way that the machine slightly rejected the video cassette at first but then vacuumed it up.

Before there was skipping discs, it was the lucky few who had tracking mode on their machines to help get them through that part of the tape they had watched thousands of times.

This then got back too me thinking about my childhood. I thought about the social housing neighborhood where I grew up, my elementary school, teachers and old friends.

I sighed as I paid a friend to drive me back too that area to give it a little checking out.

This enormous field behind the surveys had been taken out completely. Looking at the new highway they built there, you would never tell it was a creek sprawling with life at one time.

Forever destroyed is a passage way that Native Americans probably used for century's.

The basketball court where my babysitter would take me and my friends to sit in a circle every morning too play games is long gone, all the areas where there was playground equipment are now gone, empty patches of grass.

In order to live in this community you need to have kids, so I was really thinking: where are all the kids playing?

Without the playground equipment, huge field, and creeks/ravines, there really is nowhere to play. I dont expect them to play in the Red Hill Expressway. The whole Mcqueenston community has really changed for the worst. It must be pathetic to be a kid living in there nowadays i thought.

Until I realized they were just like me. Inside on their computers and xbox's.

There is no difference between us in class either now that ive moved. It's just easier for them because their rent is throttled and adjusted to their means of work.

The whole area around Lang Street, Hamilton Ontario, looks nothing like it did back in 1998...and its not for the better either.

They are destroying everything one lot at a time. Even Roxborough Park Elementary can't get new grade 1's enrolled in the school because the whole Mcqueenston area is filled with people on welfare and disability with kids who are 19, 20 still going to highschool not yet evicted for the next generation of people to move in.

Its truly flawed.

For anybody who has ever lived in there, lets put it this way:

I was there when the boiler rooms on the side of the townhouses had steel storm doors before these concrete slabs.

11 comments:

  1. I feel yeah. tons of things changed here.

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  2. Those were good days... sights...

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  3. I blame Japanese influence/technology and diet sodas for the decline in Western Civilization's youth.

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  4. the diet sodas and their aspartame alright

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  5. oh. that was really sad :( It made me think of all my childhood memories :*(

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  6. I get nostalgic when thinking about the VCR thing (I know you hit on other things, but I keep going back to this). It reminds me of older people saying "those were the good ol' days). I usually think to myself, that's just the way things go. The way we get sad about thinking future generations won't even know what a VHS tape is, their future generations will eventually look at dvds the same. It's just the way it goes.

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