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Google Street View Keeps Memories Alive

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Richard Rodgers 2016

Google Street View is a very useful tool for drivers looking to navigate to a new place. You can research a destination, and get an idea of what a house or business looks like before getting in the car. It has also offered a very interesting view into human life, especially when it catches people doing weird things. You can even use Google Street View to see the US National Parks from your desktop computer. A relatively new functionality on the Google Street View, though, is almost as good as a time machine.

In the upper left-hand corner of the Google Street View screen, in the shaded box showing the address is a small clock with a date to tell you when the picture was taken. If you click on that date, a menu will open with a timeline to allow you to see the other times a particular place has been caught on Google Street View. Clicking the image will bring it to the full-screen view. You can see below how we used it to see the transformation of Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theater in New York City from the home of a Robin Williams play, to the Idina Menzel musical If/Then, and finally to the present day when it is home to Hamilton.

Hamilton Lotto

Some Google users are very happy to have this option to travel into the past to see people, places, and pets that might have since passed on. I used it today to see my childhood home as it was before the new owners tore it up. Families fortunate enough to have loved ones captured by the Google Street View cars look back to see how they have changed, or to remember those lost.

In 2016, Google Street View might be the closest thing we have to time travel, but I’ll take it.

News Source: Mashable