Those wooden playgrounds. There was one I went to all the time as a kid. It was so much fun and had all kinds of rooms and nooks and crannies to play in. It got replaced with a generic plastic playground at some point, I think for safety reasons.

Hard part about being an immigrant. I am permanently detached from all the places from my childhood

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

The Texas from my childhood, most Texans dont give a shit about identity politics, you would think there are a bunch of brown hating cowboys - that was not the case Texas was incredibly tolerant.

I graduated high school in 2000. we where the last free range generation, the next year high spiked security fences started going up around schools.

I couldn’t imagine going to school behind a locked gate, man fuck that shit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

Our drive-in theatre.