Moving to: m/AskMbin!

I'm in San Diego, and grew up here. Open space. Yeah, we are really good about keeping some open spaces (typically national/state parks) but just random open space is all filled with urban sprawl now.

When I was a kid, there was an area of San Diego county that was a GIANT piece of private property. There was one dirt road that ran through it (likely an easement/eminent domain thing), connecting the east and west part of the county.

Decades ago, when I was in high school, we used to party, and do all kinds of dumb shit out there. It had been the same for so long that my parents also partied back there too many, many decades before. I know there were at least 2 cars buried out there. I had gotten a car stuck in the mud once myself (had to dig it out in the dark. that was super fun) It's all but gone now.

If this water park is “across the street” (freeway) from an amusement park I think I know what you’re talking about. If not, then my answer is the same. Water park that my family went to and it closed in 2020. I miss not having worries and playing in the water. And also how Dippin dots was the ice cream of the future (for decades now)

I used to go on holiday every year in a cottage on the cliffs near East Yorkshire, UK. In about 1998 it was condemned so we moved to holiday park just up the coast.in about 2014 some big storms happened and we came back and all the homes on the whole seaward side of the road were gone and the old inlandside were now clifftop with a new road behind

K Mart, It is now a Walmart.
And the forest reclaims the land.

The Kindergarten I went to doesn't exist any more.

There was a roller skating rink called "Sweet Feet" that I had two birthday parties in but it collapsed sometime in middle school and was never rebuilt.

My elementary school closed down a few years back. They had a small reunion with any students that attended before they closed for good. It was a definite blast from the past as there were a few teachers that still worked there and many of my old classmates attended. Unfortunately, I didn’t receive the news until after they already shut down but I was able to see pictures on Facebook.

This may be a weird answer, but I played Celtic music with the family band as a teenager and our favorite place to play was Santa Rosa Brewing Company in Santa Rosa, CA. Great vibe, good food—I of course was too young to partake of the brew 😉—but it was a lot of fun and we had a crowd of regulars who'd come to see us perform every time. When they eventually closed down, it felt like the end of an era…

My elementary school closed down. Good riddance, honestly.

Would this happen to be Breakers waterpark? If not, I guess it's just a common story lol

Gone but not forgotten is Gameworks. I still have a card with $7 on it that I'll never get to use

Abu’s in Milwaukee, where I had my first solid food

Soviet Union. Not necessarily a bad thing, but there is some nostalgia...

Hastings’s stores. They sold books, CDs, DVDs, tabletop game supplies, video games etc. It was always exciting to go and look even if my parents were not going to buy me anything.

There used to be a very janky waterslides on a hilltop that closed down. The place was notorious for giving kids scrapes and bruises and other injuries for years, my parents were surprised it hadn't closed earlier.

My elementary school was heavily renovated the year after I "graduated" sixth grade. It's not the same place anymore, and I have a lot of memories and nostalgia tied up with that old building — among other things, it's where I met the woman who'd become my wife.

Zellers

A skatepark near me. Don't know the story behind it being closed.

MY HOUSE
Had to get demolished to make way for a lightrail
kinda cool to have the key to a place that no longer exists at least

There's no grave marker for the old mall in my home town. Just a new, totally different mall.

An elementary school was torn down and a replacement built right next to it, on the same grounds. The old school I attended is now the new parking lot.

The church I attended as a child is gone. Luckily my belief was torn down years before that happened.

In essence my high school doesn't exist, at least not as it did. It was dramatically reconstructed and hardly resembles the school I went to.

Of course these were things that were old when I knew them, and only continued to age to the point they needed replacing. The oldest stuff in my home town though, will outlast me.

I'm getting old enough now where this is true for multiple things, but the ones that come to mind would be my schools - 2 of the 3 schools I attended have since been demolished. My high school is still standing, but the elementary and Junior High schools are gone now.

You perfectly described a water park in my home town, although mine closed down in the 1990s. It had a "silver bullet" slide, a bunch of conventional slides and a tube slide, a lazy river, a wave pool, a pretty decent arcade and a go-kart track, and probably a bunch of other stuff I don't remember from spending big chunks of my childhood summers there. Birthday parties and school trips, too.

After it closed down, some of the slides were moved to a golf course across town that wanted to expand, but it wasn't as good and it was way too far to go by bus. The original park is the loading dock for a Home Depot now.

Very specific, but folks in the DMV of a certain age will remember this.

Story Book Land

A roundabout in my home city was turned into an elevated 4-way intersection. It wasn't an improvement. When I visualize the city I always see the roundabout. It was there all my life.

Wet and Wild

A chain of restaurants called Happy Chef. They were all around the Iowa/ Minnesota area. Used to stop at them when going to visit family.

Fantasy Glades, Port Macquarie, NSW

A child-size theme park owned, built and operated by a family of Little People. The site is still there with several new owners and attempts to redevelop it over the years.

My grandparents house. Burnt down, now someone lives in a trailer (caravan) there.

I grew up in the middle of Miami, with developed streets and houses in every directions for at least 5 or 6 miles. But I lived in the corner of this dead end that ended at a path There was this huge area of woods like two or three city blocks worth, about 10 feet lower than the rest of the neighbor. There was a steep path down, by far the only stretch of mountain bike - worthy riding anywhere around, and all kinds of trails and huge boulders to climb. It wasn't wilderness--I think it was a coral rock quarry, and all of the trees were an invasive species that meant the original pines had been taken down. But it was just a beautiful place, and all the neighborhood kids hung out there for hours and hours. We could cut through there to get to school, and there was also a big covered basketball court. We could literally play basketball rain or shine, in this huge pavilion. The soccer fields were there so we could cut through those words for our games. There was a pool, too.

Hurricane Andrew came through when I was 14 and destroyed that forest, since those invasive trees couldn't handle the winds. The court and pool made it longer, but it's all gone now. Oddly enough, especially for Miami, it became a park and soccer fields, instead of more houses. My kids and my brothers' kids all still go there to play when they're visiting my parents, but that beautiful magical place from my elementary school years, where I could be wild and free in the middle of the city, is so gone.

Happiness

Our drive-in theatre.