I finished school at Maryland this month, and I've been feeling more than a bit nostalgic about leaving what's now my alma mater.
Maryland's undergone a phase of lots of building over the past few years, and really stretching back as far as the construction of the Comcast (now Xfinity) Center, which opened in 2002. I lived with construction on campus for four years, and the students who are still there are going to live with a lot of it, too. (No one's complaining, really.)
So, I got to thinking: How much different does Maryland look now than it used to look?
The answer: not that much different, in a lot of ways.
This image slider here shows that most of Maryland's major campus landmarks today -- or, a year ago, as we're waiting on updated satellite imagery -- aren't a lot different than they were in the past.
The new basketball arena at the northern edge of campus sticks out as one thing that's there now that wasn't in 1989, as do a few other sports complexes: Ludwig Field (soccer) and the Field Hockey and Lacrosse Complex in particular. The engineering fields just to the east of Route 1 used to be more softball-centric, it appears, and Byrd Stadium wasn't nearly as big as the newly renamed Maryland Stadium is now.
But it's sort of fun to see how much is exactly the same, isn't it?
The triangle-shaped intersection at the far west end of campus between Campus Drive, Adelphi Road and University Boulevard looks like it was just as vexing in 1989 as it is today. McKeldin Mall in the center of campus is just the same as it always was, except the ODK Fountain in the middle of it clearly wasn't there in 1989.
There's no shocking revelation here about how Maryland's changed over the years, or anything like that. Rather, there's a reminder that even as Maryland's changed significantly as an institution in the past few decades, the general layout of its campus and some of its most famous spots hasn't changed at all, and that's a pretty cool thing.