web Google sightseeing

Posted April 27, 2005 • Comments Off on Google sightseeing

I was just playing on a cool site (www.googlesightseeing.com) and decided to look for places I know on Google Maps. It’s been possible for years (back in my LJ days, I posted about it a few times) to look up your location in satellite photos, but Google has made it much, much easier.

This is my high school. http://tinyurl.com/8jxto

There are some interesting things about this. For one, the highway that runs alongside (I-78) is actually at the bottom of a CLIFF. You can’t tell that at all, but the school is about 300 feet above the highway. The “A” pointer is at the corner of the cafeteria. The small parking lot above and to the left of it is the teachers’ parking lot. The larger parking lot that overlooks the interstate is the students’. Obviously this photo was taken during the day on a weekday! We used to have band practice in the student lot. There’s a massive chain-link fence along the edge of the precipice.

Our graduation was on the football field, which is surrounded by an oval running track. That’s actually downhill from the school, to the east. You can’t see the hill, as we’ve established, but the high school’s central tower was the highest point in Union County. I imagine it must still be. The path that runs to the football field (and the soccer field, and the baseball fields) is about ten feet wide and paved in blacktop. Every spring, the senior class painted their names on it. You were supposed to paint over the oldest class you could find, so each graduate’s name would stay for a few years. The miscreants who did the actual painting would put their names in yellow or another color; everyone else’s would be in white. In the spring of 1991, the alphabetical path of names ended at “E. WILSON.” I have a picture of me in my cap and gown standing at the end of my class’s list of names on that path.

Across I-78, just east of the school, you’ll see a VERY wide bridge that appears to have trees and bushes and whatnot on it. It does. There were two or three of these in the area. They were—and I’m not kidding—bridges for deer. Deer were supposed to use these bridges to cross the interstate so they wouldn’t get hit by cars. Either New Jersey thought its deer were superintelligent, or there was some civil engineering I don’t know about to herd the deer who wanted to cross the road onto these foliaged bridges. It was a laughable project; I don’t think it worked at all.

If you scroll (you can click and drag, or use the arrow keys) west-southwest a bit, you come across something that looks like a massive campus. Lots of white buildings, lots of parking, lots of green space. That’s Bell Labs, which I guess has been called Lucent for a while now. I worked there once, as a participant in a computerized speech-recognition study. They paid me $11.