As Dinsdale noted, though, it’s pretty standard usage in modern-day America. But it does seem that “inner-city neighborhood” and similar phrases are starting to replace it.
Which close in DC suburbs? Some of them aren’t the greatest areas to be in by day or by night, but I’ve never thought of them as particularly dangerous.
The worst part of DC to be in is Anacostia, but I have no fears about driving through there by day or even by night.
IIRC it was right around that time that the montage of NYC scenes and vignettes shown every week at the beginning of SNL included one bit where a woman dashes to her car and opens the door AS FAST AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE!!! and I was sure that this was a reference to the the then-current idea that NYC=crime and danger. Similar ideas were current in most large cities, and, what with media sensationalism, many people really were afraid to go out at night no matter what neighborhood they lived in. My father still thinks nobody walks in L.A. because they’re “afraid of being killed”.
You are incorrect. Mugging is less likely in a nice rich neighborhood because there is generally a greater police presence there and a would-be mugger would likely stand out as not being from the area.
The concept of “street danger” is that in many poor neighborhoods, there tend to be a lot more angry, often jobless people hanging out doing nothing. There may be gangs or other criminal elements or just bored teenagers or locals who just don’t want strangers coming around their “turf”. You could get mugged, jumped, or have your car broken into.
I’ll give you an example. We were driving around Bridgeport, CT one time looking for some bar or something. As we drove around looking for it, we wandered into some shady neighborhood got stuck in back of some black dude talking to a guy in a car parked in the middle of the street. Being a wise-ass, my buddy exclaims that the guy is probably packing (presumably because he’s black). Well, as luck would have it the guy was, in fact, packing an automatic pistol that he proceeded to wave around throughout his conversation.
Anyhow, I don’t know what was going on there but it probably wasn’t legitimate. We were just happy to get the hell away from there.
I can give other examples of various crimes I’ve witnessed in bad neighborhoods, but I think you get the point.
As a general rule, you don’t need the 20 point checklist like tomndebb’s expedition, but it helps to follow some general common sense:
-Don’t draw attention to yourself - ie being loud and obnoxious, wearing a lot of bling, dressing in colorful expensive clothing, flashing your wallet or cellphone
-Know where you’re going - you don’t want to be wandering aimlessly
-Don’t roll up with a posse of ten guys. Groups of strangers look like their looking for trouble
-Avoid gang colors, college gear or sports team logos (ie don’t wear your Yankees hat in Southie or your Sox hat in the Bronx)
-Have a guide from the neighborhood with you (I assume you have a legit purpose for being there)
As for “black ghettos”, what you generally see these days are old “housing projects”. These are usually high rise developments, often subsidized, usually occupied by poor blacks or other minorities.
Bladensburg, Cheverly, parts of Hyattsville, Landover, Riverdale, Colmar Manor, Seat Pleasant and District Heights are all areas where interesting things happen.
You beat me to it.
I will confess to not being intimate with the details of what goes on, as I’m not in not-great areas of DC without my husband unless I’ve taken a wrong turn coming back from the Mall. Which happens to me with great frequency; I’m stupid when driving in that city.
On the other hand, the reason that such neighborhoods were originally called ghettoes was because they met the classic definition of a ghetto. They tended to be neighborhoods where people were compelled to live, based on their ethnic identity. This was particularly true in the North up until the late 1960s. There were no laws that said “Negroes must live East of Alpha Ave and South of Sigma St.”, but there were “point” systems and redlining and intimidation that ensured that blacks did not live outside certain narrowly circumscribed neighborhoods in Northern cities. (The 1943 Detroit riot was sparked when the Federal government, trying to find housing for black workers from the war production plants tried to let some of them live in a “white” housing project, leading to a white-on-black riot that was only matched for violence 24 years later in the 1967 disturbance, leaving 43 people dead.)
Anyone willing/able to look up when and in what context the word first evolved?
Were there not Irish/German/Polish/etc ghettoes in the 1800s US?
Read Sundown Towns by James W. Loewen to discover just how recently informal agreements to keep blacks from living in many, many American towns (located all over the U.S.) finally began to disappear.
Random House Word Maven on ghetto. Although the word appears to have arisen spontaneously in reference to a nickname for the district to which Jews were confined in Venice, it got its strongest impetus when Pope Paul IV used the word in describing the area to which Jews were restricted in Rome in 1555. (That pope did not invent the idea, borrowing the idea from a few cities which had already implemented their own restrictions, but he seized on it with such enthusiasm that the practice spread rapidly throughout Europe, even infecting some Protestant nations.) The Word Maven article follows its later development.
In that link it states that Household income averages $56,000 and Housing Value also averages $56,000. Does Housing Value refer to the price of the house?
They’re pretty nice looking houses. Something like that where I live would cost around $1,000,000.
I did not know that.
Thank you for dispelling a drop of my oceans-wide ignorance!
I stopped at a couple of the homes on 43rd St (right in the heart of Sherman Park and where the nicest and largest homes are) to grab the leaflets out of the For Sale boxes on the front lawns and some of those homes are going for 275,000 plus. The problem is is that the homes right on the ‘strip’ are very nice and well maintained but the rest of the houses a few blocks in on either side are rentals, conversions (to multiple families), drug homes, run down, etc. The pics in the link are of the nicest homes and not typical of most homes in that area.
The homes on the strip bring up the value of the lesser ones and I think that’s where the 56,000 comes from. The dumpy homes a couple blocks from the strip are probably fetching 30 - 50 K. These dumpy homes used to be very nice houses, smaller lots, but nice homes. That was 30+ years ago.
I believe that Sherman Park used to be a mostly Jewish neighborhood back in the day.