Needle in a Haystack

Recently, in response to one of my blog posts called "Searching For Home"—about trying to find the place you used to live by scouring Google Earth—a friend of mine asked me to help her find the place she had lived when we first met each other back in the 80s. To aid in the search, she had one landmark, a hotel, that she knew she could walk to from her place, but other than that, it was a total blank. To be fair, it has been a looooong time, and it was before she could drive, which is when most people's sense of geography and navigation truly kicks in. Actually, there was one other landmark she could remember, a soccer field, but it had disappeared from the area, probably long since turned into houses or businesses. So she sent me this map, and three other pictures of herself, her sister, and a friend at their house, and then tried to describe some of the idiosyncrasies of the neighborhood.

She thought the road was an off-shoot with no official name, and that the mail carrier always had to have hand-written instructions on the envelopes to get them to her house. It was as if none of the houses on the road had working addresses or something. The pictures she had were obviously intended to capture memories of her with her sister and friend together, not to document the house or the neighborhood itself (because who would do that?). There was a lot of ground to cover in the map, especially one click-and-drag up and down Google Street View at a time, and precious little to go on.

So I put on my detective hat, and started looking at all of the details in the background of the photos, trying to find ways to narrow the search and eliminate the dozens of houses and apartment complexes in an area completely unfamiliar to me. Her place was a two-story duplex, and I could see from a sliver of background that it backed up to an apartment complex that was at least three stories, and might also have been a mauve/pink color. Across the street and up the block from her house there was another two-story place, and maybe that balcony on that place—just in the periphery of the shot—was built in an unusual architectural style? The place next door may or may not have a corner-entrance to the building? Her driveway was abrupt and sloped down, and the front entry was a double-door with an interesting inlay. It was within walking distance (for a 15 year old) of a particular landmark that still existed.

I flew over the neighborhood in Google Maps, with the 3-D feature enabled so I could see where the two and three story places were in relation to each other. I looked at the color of the buildings, old neighborhood features that she would likely have remembered had she been adjacent to them. Anything to exclude entire blocks at a time. I decided that even though she didn’t remember much, she probably would have remembered living by an ancient archeological dig. She certainly would have remembered living by a huge canal that ran out to the sea. I mean, I know I’d have had some adventures over there at that age if it was a feature in my neighborhood. I had to believe that she or her friends would have, too. Since she didn’t have any memory of those things, she probably didn’t live on that side of the main drag. So I jumped over to the neighborhood on the east side. There looked to be a new-ish school in the area. Maybe that’s where the soccer field had disappeared to?

So I dropped into Street View and roamed up and down a few streets fairly near the school, basing it on mutli-story buildings and that mauve/pink place that I thought might have stayed mauve/pink, lo these many years. That's a bold choice, and people that commit to a decision like that might be tenacious about it. Found a couple of places that seemed possible, almost but not quite. Looked almost the same, but the building behind it wasn’t three stories. Or the facing street seemed too wide. Even though the street in her pictures was barely visible in a sliver of background, and out of focus, it still seemed pretty narrow and cramped somehow. Since there was barely anything to go on, I decided to trust my gut impressions of what was and wasn’t in the photo, and kept moving if the spot I was at didn’t feel right.

I went past the real place twice before I realized I’d actually found it. I initially rejected it as similar, but not the same. Then I realized that it had probably been given a facelift in the past 30+ years. So if I mentally subtracted an awning running across the front of the building, the brick pillars supporting that awning, and altered the color in my mind’s eye from the mustard yellow it is now back to the fabulous 80’s-Mall color-motif it sported back in the day, it became clear I’d actually found it.

So I zoomed in, took some screen shots, and then did some side-by-side comparisons with my friend’s photos. For all that had changed (new paint, new doors and windows, new fence, new roof awning and brick posts), there were still enough features that were identical (placement of handrails and light fixtures, step-downs in the dividing wall between the duplex units, double-panel entry doors with that unique inlay) to eliminate any doubt. I’d for sure found it. My friend and her dad have since confirmed. And by the way, she was right. Google only records four working addresses for the dozen houses on that narrow street.

Now the kicker here is that not only have I never been to this house that she moved out of over 30 years ago, not only was their virtually zero information to go on, not only were the photos I was working with—that live in a shoebox in the attic—originally taken on an 80's instamatic that she then shot with her phone and messaged to me, not only have all the landmarks changed and the exterior been noticeably remodeled over the past three-plus decades, but it’s in… Naples, Italy!

That does it, I’m cashing it in on the whole construction racket and hanging out my shingle as a PI.