In hope that this information can help someone out the way it did me:

Many people seem to have been disappointed by the recent changes to Nautilus - particularly, when it comes to the Places sidebar. I, for one, need custom locations because most of my files are on an external drive - and bookmarks just won't do.

This is a quick fix that will allow you to customize the Places:

1.  Using Nano (or your editor of choice) edit the user-dirs file.

nano ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

2. The changes from the previous step will disappear upon reboot. To make them permanent, echo the following to the file

echo "enabled=false" > ~/.config/user-dirs.conf

And there you go - your "Places" are Yours again!