PS, when I lived in the Philadelphia metro area, the north side was the worst, west Philly was pretty bad too. The Fresh Prince song talks about this on tv. It is true.
Sqrl
Ed- for Uncle Cecil:
PHILADELPHIA- I’m from Philly. There is a section just north of Center City (downtown) that is so bad cops call it the “Badlands”.
South Philly is tough, but is a predominantly Italian-American neighborhood controlled by the Mob, and I would say a good deal of the crime is Mafia related; if you are an innocent tourist, you are more likely to get punked in North Philly than South.
This in should no way be meant to confuse North Philly with Northeast or Northwest Philly. NE and NW are both . . OK this gets confusing . . geogrpahically NORTH of what most Philadelphians would call NORTH Philadelphia when you look at a map of the city.
NE has neighborhoods such as Frankford and Tacony, and a relatively safe for a city, while NW has Roxborough, Manayunk and Andorra and Germantown, and are in fact in many ways considered safer than many of the suburbs!
West Philadelphia actually can be pretty scary too.
CLEVELAND- I was hanging out at the Flats last month and was definitely told by the denizens there that EAST Cleveland is the part of the city to stay away from.
BOSTON- South Boston just below downtown is known as the “Combat Zone”. That tells you all you need to know there.
BTW, why are most Greyhound Bus stations in the “bad” part of town? Cheap land? Was it “good” when they moved in and “bad” later?
Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana
D.C. - SE is the bad side (temped at a United Way in SE between two projects)
Portland, Oregon - NE is the bad side o’ town (ain’t nothing compared to DC though)
I’ll second (third? fourth?) the claim that Houston has no bad sides. If you went back 30-40 years though, you would probably find that the East Side (and the wards, mostly north and south of downtown) was (were) the less preferable place to live. The Port of Houston ends just east of downtown, and the warehouses continue north of downtown and south of Buffalo Bayou (which passes for Houston’s river.)
Strangely, the southern half of the Heights, which is the Near West Side, has been working class for as long as I can remember (25 years) with yuppies moving in here and there throughout that time. The homes there look like old middle class homes, though, and at least they’re still standing. We went to the East Side once to find my father’s boyhood home and found a coffee plant where he thought it was.
Cleveland- Definitely the East side up to (but not including) Cleveland Heights.
As a current resident of the DC area (yeah I move around a lot) the southeast side is by far the scariest. I would not want to go into Anacostia during the day time much less at night. I got lost when I first moved up here and drove around in Anacostia for about 15 minutes (it seemed like hours). Every time I slowed down at corners, crack whores, drug dealers, and various gang members would run after the car. I was even shot at a couple of times in the car. I am not exxagerating. This really happened. It was very scary. With this said, there are a couple of decent pockets in the southeast. Waterfront is very nice in fact. The other neighborhoods outside of Anacostia are ok, I would not want to live there though. I guess comparing it to Anacostia makes anything seem better.
Sqrl
What’s the deal, I sent three responses, saw them temporarily and now they are gone?
Sqrl
I have to make something clear. I said that the north side of Dallas was “dry”. There are clubs, restaurants and bars where one can buy liquor by the drink. But to pick up a six-pack (or case) of brew or a bottle of the hard stuff, you have to cross the Trinity into the “bad” part of town.
Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana
Sqrl -
Waterfront is NICE!!! ::shudder:: Um, gotta disagree. I consult for EPA and have to go down to Waterside Mall a lot. I have never been more afraid in my life. I hate driving down there, I hate Metroing, I hate the fact that the EPA publishes warnings on getting mugged while being there… Ick.
Overall, I agree with you - SE is by FAR the scariest area. New York Avenue and Florida Ave. NE aren’t too shabby either, though.
I know Detroit wasn’t on the list, but it’s southwest side is definitely the bad part. That’s where most of the crack houses, drive-bys, etc. occur. Northern Detroit is the better part, except that Highland Park (a small city surrounded by north-central Detroit) is a study in post-industrial blight. It used to have Chrysler’s World HQ. Now it has nothing. I wouldn’t go there in broad daylight, much less at night.
“I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms.” -The Secret of Monkey Island
Here’s a related question. Cecil got to pondering whether there were any generalizations one might make about north vs. south on a REGIONAL or GLOBAL level. I piped up that I recalled one of those futurist type of guys, such as John Naisbitt or Alvin Toffler, commenting that in the years to come the major conflicts will not be between EAST and WEST (that is, between the free world and Iron Curtain countries) but between the affluent NORTH (chiefly example northern Europe and North America) and the less developed SOUTH. However, I am unable to track down the source of this observation. Does anyone recall who made it and in what book or article? Thanks.
I know DC isn’t in the OP but this is in response to SqrlCub & Falcon. IN GENERAL, the whole South side of DC is bad- South not meaning all of SE & SW but primarily the parts south of Capitol Hill/395. Go two blocks over from either the Arena theatre or the waterfront and you’re in a bad part of town. The only reason SW isn’t considered so bad is because a) there’s not very much of it, and b) most of what is there is the military base and industrial sectors.
I would say that for Tucson, Phoenix, and DC, the bad parts are the south of town.
LOS ANGELES:
The only clear cut “direction” that is either good or bad is the west side, which is very good. LA is so damn big that good and bad flow in and out of each other, but the earlier poster had it right when he talked about east LA and South Central LA having bad reputations. They are certainly the lowest income areas (generally) and they have alot of gangs. South Central is populated largely by low-income blacks and East LA by low-income Hispanics. But it is a sore point with many middle-low income blacks who live in South Central that it is not entirely bad, and they get touchy when you suggest that it is.
Washington DC is divided into quadrants, but the neighborhoods don’t divide along those lines.
Capitol Hill is ground zero. Reasonably safe until about 15th St. in both NE & SE. NW is the opposite - neighborhoods get better the further you go out (yes, yes, I know about downtown gentrification - I’m generalizing.)
NE has a bad reputation, but that comes from an eek! It’s a black quadrant attitude. Yes, there are crack houses there, there are also upper-middle class neighborhoods.
Anacostia (SE section divided from the rest of SE DC by the Anacostia River) is a byword for crime.
What’s always amused me is that because the area is so small, there’s no gradual deterioration, just a change from one street to the next. I always picture a city meeting that divided up the territory: OK, crack houses here and here, porn shops here, this side of 14th St. will be one race, the other side another, yuppies over here,…
I haven’t lived in Indy very long, about 3 years, but I have lived in areas pretty much central to mainly north. I did notice, though, that everything outside the loop (I-465) has cheaper car insurance rates. Once you get inside 465, the rates are based on whether you live north or south of 38th St., with south being the higher rates. Apparently the car insurance companies think the ‘south’ side is the ‘bad’ side.
OK, let’s try this again:
In the following cities, the SOUTH side of town is considered the bad (or at least less affluent) side. Of course we’re generalizing here; I realize none of these “sides” is uniformly bad:
Atlanta
Baltimore
Boston
Buffalo (southwest)
Chicago (south and west)
Dallas
Detroit (southwest)
Indianapolis
Los Angeles (south and east)
Phoenix
San Antonio
Washington, D.C. (southeast)
In the following, the NORTH side of town is the bad side:
Philadelphia (everything I read suggests that North Philly is the rough side of town these days)
In the following, the EAST side of town is the bad side:
Cleveland
In the following, the WEST side of town is the bad side:
Salt Lake City
Comments?
In San Francisco the worst parts of town are in the south (apart from the Fillmore and the Tenderloin districts, which are sort of north-central and north-east respectively).
Re: the observation about north vs. south and east vs. west, I think I might have seen Chomsky write something about that, but I could be wrong.
And oh yeah. SE DC is the scariest place I’ve ever been in my life.
Ed, I know Springfield, IL, is probably too small to care about, but in case you do: The East side of town is the bad side; the West side of town is where all the new, expensive homes are. And, of course, the state house and senate buildings are where the worst thievery in the state occurs.
Philly? Goodness. North Philly IS a large, and depressed area. It is by and large the most dangerous area within the city, and as for the usual sprinkling of “bad” neighborhoods outside of the city? North Philly dwarfs them all. It is square mile after mile of either badly maintained rowhouses, burned and damaged- OR industry belly up against gang turf. It is very sad, I grew up in Philly. West Oak Lane, then Cheltenham. North Philly for me was a scary, but also lovely place. It was obviously, at one time, an area that was VERY popular, and well-maintained. I dare not enter the realm of why that changed. Suffice to say, it is as Cecil has read.
Typer 
" If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel "