Nostalgia for a time or place before you were alive?

Not sure if it can be called nostalgia since you didn't actually experience the time or place, but I can definitely see someone wishing they were around during a certain period or wish they lived somewhere during a certain time frame.

I wasn't around in the 60s, but I would have loved to have been around then and experienced all the great music that was around at the time.

As far as a certain place, I'm a fan of a lot of 1970s shows that were located in Los Angeles. For some reason late 1970s Los Angeles seemed such a cool place to be. I could be totally wrong about it, but I would have liked to be able to see for myself.

I'm sure the personal experiences of many will vary, and there's no denying that, like any period, there were plenty of aspects to the late-'70s that were unpleasant (mortgage rates approaching 13%; car loans over 16%; spending your entire lunch hour in a line of dozens of cars just to fill your gas tank; L.A. air quality was terrible), but being in my mid-late 20s at the time, I can easily say that living in Los Angeles during that period represented the busiest, most adventurous, fascinating and fun time of my life. There seemed to be sort of a party atmosphere about everything (even those gas lines; we were all in the same boat and made the best of it).

So, from my point of view, you are absolutely not "totally wrong about it."         

I find myself curious what it would be like to travel back in time to when I was born 1970 and walk around places, while knowing things about the future. Obviously this is encouraged by watching old movies and tv.

I don't necessarily think it would be better, but one tends to feel safer with the past because it is assumed that with knowledge of future events one would be safer, or more appreciative of things.

Ironic about the nostalgia for 1970s Los Angeles because Vincent Price was feeling nostalgic for 1940s Los Angeles when speaking in 1970 in London:

"Los Angeles was then about 850 000 people. It's now 3 million.... It is a very sinister city now. ..The thing that affects you is that it's not a nice place to live. It's lost its charm. You all, I don't know whether you can understand that, but you live in probably the most exciting city in the world. London is still a place where you can walk down the street. You can't walk down the street in Los Angeles or New York or Chicago. It's very sinister. Don't let it happen to you. Be kind, be generous, be tolerant."

I'm sure that for the great Vinnie, and anyone else living there in 1940, Los Angeles held more charm than it did 30 or so years later. There were still vast undeveloped areas, and acres and acres of vacant land could be seen even on Wilshire Blvd. But Mr. Price's recollection was a bit off, population-wise: in 1940, it was already over 1.5 million, and the influx of defense workers during the war years and growing families thereafter had brought it to just under 2 million by 1950. It hadn't been under a million since the '20s.

For my part, I can say that in my 54 years of living there from the early '50s, I never found it "sinister," and felt very much as Margaret O'Brien as "Tootie" in Meet Me In St. Louis did: "Wasn't I lucky to have been born in my favorite city?"     

What a delicious experience and story!

As the years went by, however, Price was certainly no slouch in the "mesmerize with a look" department. I wonder if he ever sent anyone into the vapors asking for directions.  

Oh, I love that. A mischievous sense of humor fits so well into the sort of person I like to imagine him having been. 

That's the premise of Midnight in Paris.