(Pics) Out of the past ....

Interesting. Thanks.

I love that type of photography - before/after of same subject.  Thanks Mike!!

You are welcome, Tony ! It can be real "back to the future" type stuff, created by photography. It is a bit eerie to go the the same spot where something was in that very place many decades before.

those buildings have been remarkably well preserved, well done to those involved. Interesting post thanks Mike

Thanks, Geoff ! Riverside, IL is a national landmark, so things generally don't change a lot in town. The guy who designed the town in about 1870, Fredrick Law Olmstead is also the same guy who designed Central Park in New York and many things at the World's Fair/Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The town was a sort of refuge in 1871 when much of Chicago, 12 miles to the east, burned to the ground.

The suburban town was built with crowned paved roads and a street gutter system to help keep the roads suitable for carriages and motor-cars.

Love the pictures Mike. While growing up in a suburb of St. Louis in the fifties, I worked in a drug store that was built in the thirties. I was back in town for a class reunion and decided to go see how the building looked only to find it had been torn down and replaced by a pizza franchise. It broke my heart to know that I am so old that a building I grew up with had served it's purpose and was destroyed.

That is a sad event, Bob ! It is remarkable to be able to stand in a spot, and simply by pointing your gaze in different directions, see essentially the same view and identical structures as were right there in the past and many decades and years before. 

Sitting down in the same vehicle that was in existence 40 or 80 years before can have a similar effect. I remember a collector bringing a restored automobile to the exact same person who had driven in the very same car in high school some 70 years before. It had a similar, almost eerie effect. The man joked, wondering if the back seat of that automobile was especially worn !