My closest city is actually filled with 100+ year old buildings that have old pictures of the building in various points in history. Someone went through a lot of trouble about a decade ago to get everyone on board with displaying historical stuff.

There's a road that follows one of the old canals, and a tunnel still technically accessible beneath the main downtown road where deliveries were hauled in order to keep the road up top for PEOPLE to walk on, and carriages were rare until the 1900s.

Then everything changed in the early-mid 1900s and no hint of canals even exists today in the city, other than one road named "canal" and one named "water". But without knowing the history, they're just names.