The Lost World of the coastside in 1972

If you haven’t pored over Kenneth Adelman’s beautiful photos of the California coastline yet, there’s a new reason to do it. He’s added an amazing trove of 5,000 coastal photos from 1972 and taken on the staggering labor of fixing decrepit old slides and matching them to current photos taken from different perspectives of the same places. The result is miraculous and seemingly what the Web was designed to do. I thank the HMB Review for bringing this update to my attention.

The changes are remarkable. The 1972 photos show a world where half of Montara is empty lots, Princeton has no industrial zone, the McMansion estates at Miramar is empty fields, Half Moon Bay has only begun to sprawl across Highway 1, and there is no Ritz surrounded by its own Ritzy gated community.