I’ve only lived in Napa for a little less than five years, so, I know I don’t know nuthin when it comes to the changes this town has seen.

But I have lived here long enough to remember rumbling over the old, green Maxwell Bridge over the Napa River. I did my time waiting on Highway 29 for three green lights before I could inch north past the signal at Trancas/Redwood, where cars zoom along the underpass today.

I remember China Point (gone forever), the white gazebo at Veteran’s Memorial Park (perhaps to return?) and the Red Hen when it was still at the Red Hen.

Bigger changes are on the way. From where I sit in the newsroom, the gentle outline of Mt. George is visible above Napa City Hall, the hind side of which sits just across Second Street from Napa Valley Register world headquarters. Soon, Mt. George will disappear from view, as the Napa Square commercial structure rises in the foreground.

Eventually, like the exact contours of China Point or the blood-boiling sensation of watching the light cycle green-yellow-red again and again at 29 and Trancas, the fact that we at the Register ever had a view of Mt. George may fade in memory.

All this came to mind this week, when some reshuffling inside the Register building brought to the surface a box of old photos. The ones I am looking at are aerial views of Napa circa the late 1960s or early 1970s.

In the photos, the Register building is where it stands today, but the Napa Town Center doesn’t exist. Coombs, Franklin and Randolph streets punch from Old Town through to Pearl as part of a tidy downtown grid.

The Napa Yacht Club neighborhood, where canals off the Napa River now offer homeowners backyard slips for their boats, is just a big brown field.

The block where the county building and criminal courthouse now sit is empty in the photos. A solitary house surrounded by mature trees sits across Fifth Street from the library, the only sign of what previously occupied the site that is soon to be a multi-story parking garage.

The Carithers Building, which as of today hasn’t housed Carithers for years, doesn’t yet exist in the photos.

What’s next? That is both hard and easy to see.

Easy because the Westin Verasa already seems an imposing edifice at McKinstry Street and Soscol Avenue, and because those nice-looking river walls (thanks, Measure A supporters!) are up along the Hatt Building and nearly complete north of the First Street Bridge.

Hard because the changes are coming quickly these days. Five years from now, the empty hillside at Silverado Trail and First may have disappeared behind gated walls and underneath new hotel rooms. McCaulou’s may be shoulder to shoulder with a five-story hotel. People may be sleeping in their townhomes at the Napa Pipe site or strolling on the river trail from Copia to Sweetie Pies.

Every change to the landscape creates a new building, and a new memory, too.