While perusing my old photos, I noticed this one, taken several years ago (before I had moved to Traverse City) as I drove along Grandview Parkway. This image would be a winter somewhere early 2000's and was taken while I was parked at Union and Grandview, looking west. It was a quiet morning, not a Subaru or out of state license plate in sight. There is no Hotel Indigo, and all those smaller buildings sit contentedly, not realized the bulldozer is on its way.
If you want to enter a visual time machine, using Streetview on Google Maps is the way to go. If you were to navigate to this same spot, you would see a more recent view. Hotel Indigo is there and those old building are long gone.
To go back in time, click on the "See more dates" link on the top left corner. This will open a list of years the Google-mobile has gone through Traverse City. How far back you can go depends on when the Google-mobile was there, but on this stretch, you can go back as far as October 2007.
Whoosh! You will be whisked back into the past, in this case, 2016. Hotel Indigo has been built, but several buildings still exist, awaiting their inevitable destruction.
Using Google Streetview in this way is one of my favorite time sucks. You can have your videos of dumb people hurting themselves doing stupid things, I'll be visiting times gone by in TC.