People who grew up mostly in one house each have their own version of this in their personal histories: The business strip/street/mall where they bought groceries, picked up a newspaper, saw a movie, shopped for clothes, filled the tank.

For me, it was Second Street in Belmont Shore, and I spent the night back in my old neck of the woods, even if it has morphed from Main Street to Bourbon Street in my lifetime.

Somebody said he wanted Mexican for dinner, and since we are about to return to a Mexican-food-free zone, we did not oppose the concept.

So, up to Ocean Boulevard and on the bus down to the edge of Second Street, in the Belmont Shore area of Long Beach, a four-lane strip about one mile in length and studded with little shops on both side.

When I was a kid, it was a far more workaday street. It boasted a grocery. A hardware store. A movie theater.

The good thing about Second Street is that it has continued to thrive even as many other Main Street areas across the country dried up and flaked away. I’m not sure it had even two empty storefronts, out of perhaps 100.

But it has gotten a bit precious, a bit too self-absorbed, too oriented toward food and drink and clothes. It’s not really a Main Street in the traditional style.

After a nice meal at Super Mex, a restaurant that has been in Long Beach for decades now (I had the chicken enchilada combinacione for $7.75), we took a walk down most of the length of the street, and appreciated as a group that Second Street now is about having a meal and then repairing to a crowded and noisy bar with big-screen TVs blaring the most pertinent sports event.

Belmont Shore once had one of everything you needed … now it has about two of everything you don’t really need. Two sushi restaurants, two Lebanese restaurants, two Mexican restaurants, two frozen-yogurt shops, two sports bars, two high-end Italian restos (Bono’s being the best known) … well, actually it has far more than two of many of those sorts of things. Pizza shops, coffee houses, burger places and the like. It also has a Jamba Juice, an Olive Oil store, a cup cake store, a BJ’s, a Banana Republic, a Gap …

But no gas stations. No groceries.

The street was jumping. Lots of young people from all over the region, as well as some of the Yuppies who live in Belmont Shore, a four-block deep strip extending down to the Pacific Ocean, long rows of remodeled little houses with all the modern conveniences (but no parking).

Everyone was eating dinner, or had bellied up to the bar. As we finished our Rite Aid (formerly Thrifty) ice cream cones, we saw a few too many falling-down drunks and impaired kids (at 10 p.m.) … and now it feels more like New Orleans than Iowa by the Sea, which was the mocking name hung on all of boring and sedate Long Beach a half-century ago.

No more than a dozen shops have survived the past 40 years. The austere and dated Tea Garden Cantonese restaurant. The Liquor Locker on Glendora and Second. Jones Bicycles and the barber shop next door. And I’m about done. The fire station.

It’s good to get back to Second Street, and more so because it’s a genuine tourist destination now. But it’s also proof positive that the Long Beach (and the California and the U.S.) that I knew as a kid, which was far more practical than indulgent, is pretty much gone.

Going by the crowds on the street, consumers seem to prefer it the way it is now.