I always thought of your stomping grounds as where you grew up...
I was born and raised in St. Louis, MO. And when I say in St. Louis, I don't mean some outlying county or suburb, I was in the city; South 18th street, 18 streets away from the river, 7 minute walk from Union Station. I lived in a great, historic neighborhood called
Lafayette Square. My house was about 98 years old and was bought by my dad in 1979 for $12,000. He could have bought three houses in a row across the street for $14,000, but decided it was too much work to fix them up. My house had actually recently been burned down by, quite literally, crackheads. So after my dad rebuilt and restored the house (and pryed the bullets out of the front door), we moved in. Well, that's not true because we moved in when we bought it and it was still under work when I was born ('85). I called my brother to see if he had any pictures of our house on his computer (he moved back to St. Louis a couple years ago for school), sadly he didn't, but I did some searching on the net and was hit with a wave of nostalgia:
That'll give you a pretty good idea of the rareity that was my neighborhood. So lush and yet
in the city. If that picture had been rotated to the right, you'd actually be able to see my old house. And I even found a picture of the backyard of the house across the alley from mine:
I was shocked when I saw this picture because my stomping grounds can quite literally be seen in the background there. Hell, 10 feet on the other side of the left corner of that picture is my house. Godbless the internet.
I spent my days hanging out with the neighborhood kids. The Whites, Ben and Nathan, lived across the street and the Anderson's, Eli, Ben and Joey (twins), lived around the corner on LaSalle. And my best friend Adam Boyd lived on the other side of the park. I went to Mullanphy elementary school and then Compton Drew, which was a magnet school for science and math. That was the school that turned me into a nerd because it had 8 computers in every room (which was HUGE back then). But schooling isn't what mattered, it was all about after school. It was all about summer.
The neighborhood has been cleaned up drastically since I lived there. My house was one street away from the projects, but it didn't stop us kids having our fun. We roamed the streets during the summer. Spent a TON of time in the gorgeous park up the street. There was a private pool a 5 minute walk away which was often the place to be if it was warm enough (which is May to September). If I had the money, I'd walk to Union Station and get a strawberry daqauri to start off my day. After the 4th of July we'd go to the riverbank and collect thousands of misfired fireworks and set them off. We'd race around the outside sidewalk of the park on our bikes. We'd play hockey on hickory street for about 6 hours a day, every day. We'd hop on the metro and catch Cardinal games in a matter of minutes. Us neighborhood kids would have epic shaving cream wars. I'm not too sure what the point was, but we'd just take all the shaving cream in our houses, go walk to a gas station and buy some, make teams and then run around spraying everyone (and everything) with shaving cream. Oh, youth....
I was a city kid. I loved it. Sure, I had my altercations. I even once had a gun pointed at me right in front of my house, but was too young (7?) and too stupid to realize it was a real gun and walked back in my house and told my mom some kids pointed a squirt gun at me. My brother, Ben and Eli would walk home from their middle school which was at least a mile away, through rough streets and were actually almost kidnapped once. A van skid in front of them and the door slid open, a guy jumped out with a gun and told them to get in so they took off running. Yah, our parents made sure they didn't walk that route anymore.
Union Station also had a movie theater, though it went out of business for a few years, but came back just before I moved (1998), so we'd walk own there and just buy a ticket for the first showing of whatever we could get into (which was usually anything) and stay and watch movies all day long.
I spent many days wandering Forest Park and the St. Louis Zoo (which is just AMAZING and if you ever visit the city and don't go to the Zoo, you're doing yourself a disfavor). My elementary school was sponsored by the St. Louis Botanical Gardens (and was right down the street from), so I was there weekly. My middle school was built right next door to the Science Center, so I was there all the time. Checking out the IMAX, or just running around doing the crazy things inside.
I had a great childhood.
I could tell stories til I'm blue in the face, but I'll leave you with some more pictures:

I love this freeking city!

Where all my money was spent.

Mullanphy Elementary School. Picture doesn't show the highway directly behind it or the ghetto surrounding it, makes it look like a boarding school, hehe.

The corner of Park St. right up the way from my house. Spent many a summer hours in the shops on that street.