Friday morning, as I sat on a street barricade and observed the preparations for the Project BOOM ribbon cutting, I tried to visualize what the street looked like a century ago.

As I looked west on Eighth Street and south on National Street, I thought of my family’s activities in the area.

Before 1930 my grandparents called four houses in that part of town “home.” Their first house in that section was near the intersection of Eighth and North Park. In more recent times it was removed to make way for the construction of the current bridge over Lost Creek.

In the 1920s, home was the...