Pittsburgh, 1977 & 2016

The Pittsburgh skyline, 1977 and 2016, from atop Mount Washington. 

Las Vegas, 1993 (part 2: nighttime)

Part 2 of my January 1993 trip to Vegas, my first. I was there over Super Bowl weekend. Part 1 shows my ride up the Strip to downtown and back, during the daytime; this is the nighttime stuff. I arrived the day after the Dunes casino closed, spent one night at the new Excalibur, then spent one day driving out to the Grand Canyon (seeing the Hoover Dam and getting in after sunset) and one day at the Canyon itself, leaving after dark for the drive back to Vegas where I checked in to the Lady Luck downtown (part of a package) on Friday night for 3 nights. I had all day Saturday and most of Sunday to spend, then watched the Super Bowl in a giant event room at the Sahara, flying home on Monday.

Unfortunately the video isn't that great, this is an 8mm video tape converted to VHS converted to digital. I did some screen captures of the video, and below you can see them matched up with what it looks like in 2018 through the magic of Google Maps.

Las Vegas, 1993 (part 1: daytime)

In late 1992, I booked a trip to Las Vegas for the upcoming 1993 Super Bowl weekend because I had a free ticket on Continental that I had to use by the end of February, and I had never been to Vegas before. I had my travel agent book me a package deal for flight and hotel, and that's how I ended up at the Lady Luck downtown that weekend. I had borrowed a friend's VCR camera and filmed a ride up the Las Vegas Strip into downtown, then recently transferred it to digital (though unfortunately still at bad VHS quality). I did some screen captures of the video, and below you can see them matched up with what it looks like in 2018 through the magic of Google Maps.

Statue of Liberty, 1974 & 2006

Living in New Jersey in the 1970s, we got to travel a lot in the Northeast, and from time to time we'd take in the sights of New York City. In summer 1974 we took the boat trip out to the Statue of Liberty, and of course my dad took a number of slides. He and I went up to the crown's observation deck (you can see the spike from the crown in the 6th row of pictures), while my sister and mother hung back. We took the typical family tourist pictures.

Flash forward to Sept. 2006, I took a trip to New York after my sister's wedding, and not having seen the Statue of Liberty since that 1974 trip, I went back and took my own pictures. What I didn't realize at the time was that views of the Statue are so iconic, I ended up taking many similar or nearly identical photos that my dad had taken. There had been some changes in the meantime, including remaking the field at Liberty's back into a paved walkway with a security tent, and of course the loss of the World Trade Center buildings on the Manhattan skyline. In 2006, the statue itself had not been reopened, and we were only allowed up to the top of the base, whereas in 1974 we could go up to the crown.

Here are side-by-side images of the Statue of Liberty 32 years apart (1974 on the left, 2006 on the right).