Many years ago I found an old grocery store ad, wondered what the building looked like today, called up the address on Google and found myself prowling up and down the streets of some vacant small town. I grew up in one of these places, so I know the attachments people have to the old buildings, the names on the cornices, the recollection of the days when every storefront was filled. The time before the town emptied out or Sam’s lads built a store a few miles down the road.

There's some good news in here, I hope. There's bits and pieces of the renovations that changed storefrots in the 50s and 60s. There's lots of OUMBs - Obligatory Ugly Modern Bank - and lots of Buckaroo Revival, which was one urban critic's name for the awful rural shingled awnings of the 70s. But there's lots of failure and abandonment. I don’t go looking for places that look abandoned, but I keep finding them.

Weekly additions can be found every Thursday, at the Bleat.

Note: entire site (whew) overhauled in 2023. There will still be some typos and busted links, I'm sure. But I've scoured all the annual redesigns and given it a unified look.

-- Lileks

01.02.25