Girl using google maps app on a smartphone against blue background, close up view

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Don’t Google 324 Front St Barnum Iowa (wink)

Google Street Views continues to provide free entertainment.

 

Lindsey Weedston

Memes

324 Front St, Barnum, Iowa is an address that outputs an image of a woman flashing the Google car when typed into Google Maps. The photo was discovered in late June of 2024 and the address at which she can be found soon became a meme, as well as inspired a search for more Google Maps results with flashers.

The company has blurred out the NSFW part of the photo (but not the man in the background mimicking the woman) since its discovery, but not before internet users spread the word and captured the uncensored photo.

What’s at 324 Front St Barnum Iowa?

Originally, it showed a woman standing in the parking lot of The Junkyard Bar and Grill with her shirt pulled up to expose her bare chest. A man in the background is doing the same, though his chest has remained uncensored. Google caught wind of the locations’ screenshot and censored it.

The image was captured and uploaded in June 2021, according to Google Maps.

Google Maps screenshot of 324 Front St Barnum Iowa
Google Maps

If you do a Google Maps search for this address today, you will find that the woman’s entire form is heavily blurred. According to reports, they originally only blurred out her face, which was not what most people were interested in when looking up the spot in Iowa.

Google Maps screenshot of 324 Front St Barnum Iowa
Google Maps

No one has been able to discover the identity of the woman in the photo since it was spotted early in the summer.

How did 324 Front St Barnum Iowa become a meme?

The first known alert about the photo at this address appeared on a Facebook group called “Google Earth, Structures and Anomalies” on June 22, 2024. The post has since been deleted, and the identity of the Facebook user who found the image is unknown.

324 Front St Barnum Iowa meme with a flashing warning light.
@advisors_team/X

Once word of the photo spread, it became a “don’t Google” trend, in which social media users post warnings to others not to Google a specific term. This, of course, has the intended effect of encouraging people to do the opposite, which in this case resulted in a lot of people seeing the photo of the woman flashing the Google Street View car camera.

In addition to telling people not to look up the address, people Photoshopped other funny images into the Google Maps result and referenced it in other meme formats.

Why did the lady flash the Google Street View camera?

The photo at 324 Front St Barnum Iowa is just one of many eye-catching images or videos captured by Google Street View cars. The trend of messing with the cars or doing something weird for the cameras has been going on for many years, or pretty much since people found out about what Google was doing to make Maps better.

Google Street View photobomb with a man in a towel on his roof.
@meanian99/X

In 2023, a man named Gavin from Washington State ran out to pose in his driveway without shoes on for one of these cars and became a TikTok hero. In 2010, a couple of Norwegians chased a Google car in scuba gear with pitchforks as a prank. That wasn’t long after two Germans gave the camera a shot of their bare behinds.

Meme examples

In Body Image
@meanian99/X
324 Front St Barnum Iowa meme in the 'distracted boyfriend' format.
@pureguava10300/X
324 Front St Barnum Iowa meme warning people not to look up the address.
@pureguava10300/X
324 Front St Barnum Iowa meme asking 'is this you?'
@pureguava10300/X
324 Front St Barnum Iowa meme telling people to look up the address.
@HollidaysStache/X

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