via google street view
Ed. Note: We first spoke about this genius back in 2014 so we’re due for the reminder!
“Dear PoPville,
I wanted to share a quirky use of Google Maps I just discovered that I’ve lost too many hours of productive work to.
I may be very late to the game (or the last person to discover this) but I recently found that in the street view of Google Maps, a clock will sometimes pop up next to the date of the image that you can click on to see previous times Google’s Street View Car was there.
I’ve seen it go back as far as 2007, and it’s been kind of delightful using it to track the ‘before and after’ of some of DC’s most recently developed areas. I’ve been shocked to see how different some places looked only 10 years ago.
For example–I moved to the Chinatown/Mount Vernon Triangle area last year (I’ve been a DC resident since 2012 but only started paying attention to the history/development of the city recently), and was surprised to hear that the restaurant Silo had been converted to its current state from an old adult film store.
Sure enough, using the June 2008 view of Google Maps, I was able to see the current, trendy restaurant in its previous, shuttered and dilapidated state (see photo above.)
Not exactly somewhere I’d picture myself brunching with bottomless mimosas.
My whole neighborhood has undergone a huge makeover in the last 10 years, and is hardly recognizable from the 2007/2008 images the Google archive has conjured up. Same goes for the H St. NE neighborhood, and I’m sure a whole bunch of other recently built up areas (Navy Yard and the Waterfront come to mind).
Happy Google Maps browsing!”
919 5th Street, NW in June 2018