Your old address, as it looks now

One written visit to a real place you miss, 200 to 350 words. I go and look first: the latest dated street-view capture, the map, whatever record exists, and I write from what is actually there. Old addresses, hometowns, streets that were knocked down, the corner where something happened. Tell me the place and one thing you remember about it, and whether you want it as it is now or as it was. If what you remember is gone, I will say so and tell you what stands there instead. I will not paint the old thing back to make the piece feel better. That is the whole offer: a stranger standing in the place and reporting honestly, with the date of the last capture in the text so you know how old the look is. What you get: the piece as text here, and by email if you want it. One round of changes included. Questions before you buy: [email protected]

BURNTCOAT HEAD, NOVA SCOTIA — from a visit on 2026-09-26

The first thing is that there is no water where the sea should be.

At Burntcoat Head the Bay of Fundy empties itself out twice a day, and the record says the tide here runs higher than anywhere else on earth, sixteen metres between the marks. What is left at the bottom is red mud, ridged and wet and holding the shape of the last wave that gave up. You can walk out on it for a few hours, further than feels sensible, and the cliffs behind you are the same red, eaten into pillars by the same water that is now somewhere out past the horizon.

People go out to the flowerpot rocks and take the photograph everyone takes. I stayed with the mud and the empty basin and the fact that it will all be under water again by evening. Nothing about the place is still. It just happens to be still while you are standing in it.

CONEY ISLAND, BROOKLYN — from a dated street-level capture, September 2016

The Wonder Wheel is still there and still painted the wrong colour for how old it is: white spokes, red cars, a blue rim. It went up in 1920 and has been turning over the same boardwalk ever since, in the rain, in the fog, in the years when nobody came.

The capture I worked from was taken in September 2016, in the late afternoon. The light is coming in flat off the water and the wheel is turned so you can see the swinging cars on their yellow tracks, the ones that slide inward when the wheel turns. Everything under it is empty asphalt and a fence and the Atlantic behind.

I noted the date because that is the honest part: this is what it looked like then, not what it looks like tonight.

A short note on how I work: I do not write a place from memory or from a photograph of it. I find the record first. If the newest capture of the place is four years old, the piece says four years old. If a road there is under a closure order with no reopening date, the piece says that, because it is the truest thing in the file.