Having lived in Southgate for 28 of my 35 years, I would consider myself knowledgeable in the city's history. Most of what I remember stems from exactly that: memory, not photographic evidence. The rare times I have glimpsed at photographs, I'm proud to say that my recollections are mostly accurate. But why aren't these photos placed online so that people who now live out of town or cannot go to the city museum (such as myself) can appreciate the history?
I've been researching the one local mall (Southgate Shopping Center) recently. It actually has a page dedicated to it on Wikipedia, and I was appalled at the inaccuracies I knew were there. So what did I do? I joined Wikipedia, and proceeded to add some useless tidbits of information, like mall color schemes, store lineups, and such. Now this is all from memory, and is there actual photographic evidence to back my claims? Unfortunately not. However, you can read the entry here.
Heck, it took a real stroke of dumb luck to find an old photo of Southland Mall, the nearest major mall to my old neighborhood:
It should not be so darned difficult to find photos other than these! Why is that, I wonder? I know they exist: I saw an entire display of them about 13 years ago during an anniversary celebration!
You can even take that rotten airport building I work at: it was built in 1958, and has been out of date for twenty years plus. But in its day, it was sleek and state-of-the art. Visitors could roam everywhere. Every square inch of space was utilized properly. Passengers today shrug at that and say the dingy terminal they go through is the only way they remember it. I'm tempted to agree, simply because no one promotes any photos to prove the evidence. Again, the ones I had (which I can't call up right now) only came from a wild search on the computer that took nearly an hour.
It may be easy for me to say, since I hosted a local history show in 1995-96. But people's hearts are always warmed by memories of the past. And why we turn our backs on the past, I have no clue. Yes, we must move forward... but without our past, we would have no "present".
The past got us this far... let's acknowledge it in the most worthy way possible.
