Remember the Southtown Theatre? Above is how it looked in Jan 1949 and below in Nov 2005.
A great new site on the Web is Springfield Rewind, which offers visual tours of our town now and then. The fun part is interactive: place your cursor on a picture of Myers Brothers from 1967, and you see how it looks today.
Sometimes the results are happy, sometimes not. The Illinois State Journal building looks better today as the Historic Preservation Agency, while at 11th and South Grand, the old H. N. Blalock & Son store makes a sad "Beauty Supply" company now.
Author of the site is Russ Friedewald, a history and architecture buff who works with picture collections at the Sangamon Valley Collection at Lincoln Library to document changing Springfield.
So far Russ has compiled pictures of Downtown and Southtown. He is looking for folks who have old photos; if you do and want to share, his e-mail is on the Rewind site.
3 comments:
Brilliant site! Thanks for sharing, Will! OMG the memories!
Lee
This site of "old" and "new" is so neat. I really enjoyed looking at all the different offerings. I had read about in in our local paper and about how it was put together and all the time it takes to make each picture and its counter part match just right. Quite an undertaking, for sure.
Judy Vicars Van Hagen
Hi Judy and Springfield friends,
I found it facinating, as part of my business is commemorating corporate anniversaries and we are always searching for such photos to produce timelines for documentaries, historical books, etc. We usually have to touch-up old photos, which I'm sure they had to do also. I have saved the photos; you never know when you might need something like this.
Linda Niccolls Surbeck
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