About Me

I am often asked how I chose the name for this site. As has been the story for most of my life, I have my mother to thank.

I was at my mom’s house one day in late 2004, probably to mooch some food and complain about my life. She handed me a photo she had printed from the internet and said, “Here…this is you.” I looked down at a black and white image of two steam locomotives that had crashed head-on. The coal boxes were sticking up in the air and several men were standing around with their hands on their hips gaping at the mess around them. And then we both laughed.

She wasn’t wrong. I was a trainwreck and I stayed that way for a few more years. On that day, I was 29 and had been divorced nearly 3 years. I was in a lightbulb (off and on) relationship with an alcoholic who was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder. My anxiety was off the Richter scale and I wasn’t handling things well. I had moved back home to Kansas and was living in my grandmother’s rental house in a terrible neighborhood. I hated my job and myself for moving back to my hometown and basically failing at life.

20+ years later, we still laugh about that photo and that moment. Now my mom tells me I should write a book because there are some things which could only happen to me. Once again, she’s not wrong. Writing a book about my experiences seems a bit extreme but I have reached a distance sufficient for me to see them through a very humorous lens. It’s on the list.

What this site has become

What started as a personal project eventually turned into something I did not entirely expect: a serious, ongoing record of the built history of two American cities.

Since 2022, I have been researching and writing “Then and Now” features that trace the lives of buildings, blocks, businesses, and neighborhoods from their earliest documented days through whatever they are today — occupied, vacant, demolished, or transformed. I do this through historic newspapers, Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, city directories, archival photographs, plat maps, and whatever else I can get my hands on. The research is genuine. The stories are real. And the buildings, it turns out, have a great deal to say if you are willing to sit with them long enough.

I began in Dodge City, Kansas, where I was born and raised and where the history is deep, largely undocumented in any accessible public form, and endlessly surprising. In 2026, I relocated to Reno, Nevada, and the site has expanded to include Reno’s own remarkable built history — from mid-century motor lodges and downtown landmarks to schools, temples, and hotels that the city has largely forgotten it had.

I normally publish weekly, alternating between Dodge City and Reno, and the archive continues to grow.

Beyond the blog

The work here has opened doors I did not anticipate when I started.

In Topeka, Kansas, I appeared as a panelist at the Kansas Preservation Conference, speaking alongside preservation professionals about the role that social media plays in documenting and protecting historic places. It remains one of the experiences I am most proud of, not least because I walked in as a blogger and walked out feeling like I actually belonged in the room.

I have led guided walking tours that bring archival research to life on the streets where the history happened — the same blocks, the same corners, the stories matched to the actual buildings still standing (or the empty lots where they no longer are). There is something different about hearing a building’s story while you are standing in front of it.

I have also conducted custom historical research for clients who needed a documented history of a property, a building, a business, or a family — the kind of deep-source, cited work that goes into a grant application, a preservation nomination, a property listing, or simply a record worth keeping.

And I have written for local publications on topics in local history, place, and community memory.

If any of that sounds like something useful to you, I have a full services page. You are welcome to take a look and reach out.

A note on who reads this

The comments on this site mean more to me than I expected. People find posts through a Google search for a building they used to walk past, or a street they grew up on, or a business their family owned. They leave a note. Sometimes they share a photograph or a memory that sends me back into the archive.

That is the part of this I did not plan for and cannot imagine doing without. If a post brought you here and you have something to add — a correction, a memory, a photograph, a name — please leave a comment or reach out through the contact page. This is not a closed record. It is an ongoing one.

Here…this is you. is published by Anna King and is a project of Six Bees, Inc.
Reno, Nevada