What is sidewalk demo?

Hi Gary!

Welcome aboard!

A sidewalk demo is when the city rips up the old cracked sidewalks to replace them. When they are ripped up the naked dirt is exposed, which is good for us TH'ers. (Treasure Hunters) The other plus is that there is very little modern trash (pulltabs and such) since these areas have been covered.

John

Exactly. Even as a veteran of detecting such sites, the "demo" buzzword tripped me up the first few times I heard it used online.

In my area, we usually make the good finds on bulldozed sites, but they're not technically demolition sites but construction sites. Around here, particularly after the Civil War, a lot of the old houses disappeared and were reclaimed by second-growth forest. So in our case, the demolition on those "demo" sites occurred a century or more ago, sometimes gradually, and Mother Nature swallowed up the evidence until the land was cleared again in modern times.

If you see any sidewalks (or streets) that are being taken up in an old neighborhood, pounce on 'em! That limited window of opportunity is often a golden chance to detect in dirt that has been covered up for generations.

I really like driveway demo too

My area is mostly 1800's homes and many still have gravel driveways. When the homeowner finally decides to blacktop their driveway - the company will typically come out and excavate the driveway down 6-8" or so and roll the dirt with a steamroller. They then typically leave it overnight before coming back to put down the blacktop. That is a great time to detect the leftover driveway (As well as the area they dump the removed material).

A detecting buddy has a brother that runs a local company and he always calls him to let him know where he's working. About the time the crew is leaving he meets his brother and gets introduced to the home owner who 99% of the time allows him to detect.

I don't have any connections like that, but I've done a few neighbors driveways and houses I see when I'm driving around, and percentage wise, have had better luck than regular yards.