Go to google NEWS. Once there, do key word searches with combinations of words like "historic" and "demolish" (so that both words have to appear in the text). Or "streetscape" and "sidewalks" (so you can know when downtown districts might be getting their sidewalks torn out), or "park" and "renovation" (so you can know when they might be dozing up an old park to make way for artificial turf, or in some way tearing into old turf for new basketball courts of something.)
And once you do this, you will of course get meaningless hits with nothing to do with what you wanted. Example: "49'rs
demolish Giants in
historic game". So you'll have to learn to be fast with the delete button scanning for the type stories you wanted
Once you done variations of key words, you'll get hundreds of hits from all over the world, going back several weeks. Obviously more than you can sleuth through, and obviously from places you can never get to. So NEXT what you do is go to the bottom of the page, and select "advanced search". Once there, select that you only want hits from newspapers in your state. Then select that you want the "alerts" from such hits to be sent to your email. At that point, you might only get a few hits a day. A lot of them will be meaningless random word coincidences, that you'll learn to quickly delete upon reading headlines. But sometimes, a gem will come up, for a city near you, that you'd have never have been driving through to chance on some form of old-town demolition, or park scrape, etc...
I was doing such a thing back in 2005/2006, and came across an item from a newspaper in SF, talking about how one of the parks was going to be getting artificial turf installed. I pulled out a map, and could see that it was in a neighborhood dating to the 1880s. A rather blighted neighborhood that, buried in residential off-streets that ..... odds are ..... if you didn't know, you'd have never have happened to chance by it. Because of the article, a few friends and I kept a close eye on the starting date. Then once the tractors arrived, and started peeling off the grass, it was Christmas-come-early for us each day after 5pm, for a week or two
Here was the totals, that were primarily from only 6 hunters:
266 silver, of which 14 were seateds, 57 were barbers, 99 mercs, 1 silver dollar, etc....
Over 1000 wheaties
35 Indian Cents
34 buffalo nickels
62 V nickels,
24 trade tokens (not inc. junk tokens)
