photos, new and old

Google Maps just updated their aerial photos for the D.C. area today with images taken some time in late August. We may be in a recession, but there's no shortage of stuff going on across the region and in East County. Here are some of the highlights:


Here's Veterans Plaza in downtown Silver Spring, which of course opened a month earlier in July.


A few blocks away, you can see construction beginning on what will be the multi-story bus turnaround at the Silver Spring Transit Center.


Here's the InterCounty Connector being built at Route 29 and ICC. The entire route across the county is now visible (just follow the cleared trees).


And construction's just beginning on Poplar Run, a new development at the former Indian Spring Country Club on Layhill Road.

For some reason, Flickr won't let me embed a slideshow right now, so click here to see the rest of the photos or, you know, just go to Google Maps and look for yourself.

Also: GGW pointed us to this stunning set of photos taken in D.C. during the late 1980's and early 1990's. It's hard to believe that within my lifetime, huge chunks of downtown were still bombed out, Chinatown was still Chinatown and Logan Circle didn't have a Whole Foods. But some things, like Morris Miller Liquor at Georgia and Alaska avenues NW, haven't changed at all.

My favorite photo, however, would have to be this one (at right) of Posin's Bakery near Georgia and Missouri avenues NW, likely a familiar sight to Silver Spring residents who go downtown that way. I remember getting a cake there for my ninth birthday. I went to school in Rockville then, and my teachers were horrified that my mother had gone into the city to get me a cake.

If you get off on aerial photos, here's some that Evan Glass, president of the South Silver Spring Neighborhood Association, took from a plane last fall.