The other day I was feeling a bit nostalgic, and did a web search for “harvey, Illinois”. I wasn’t happy about what I found. I knew the place had become a dangerous slum, I just didn’t know how bad.
Let’s not forget incompetent (or possibly corrupt) cops. One morning my dad saw a body being removed from the alley immediately next to his yard. He came out and found out his neighbor had been shot to death, no suspects in custody. The police never asked him or the other neighbors a single question. They just scooped up the body, collected some samples, made a few notes, and left.
It wasn’t so bad when I grew up there as a kid (the statistics are from the year 2000, and I lived there from 1958-76), but my parents lived out their lives and died there. And I watched it literally crumble starting in my teen years and later as I visited them. A lot of old heavy industry industry closed and threw thousands out of work. In the late sixties the racial tensions led to a lot of white flight, with a nasty twist – arson. Apparently many homeowners weren’t satisfied with what they could get on the market, or were just unwilling to sell to black buyers, and so torched their homes to collect the insurance and get out. Once I re-walked the two miles between my old house and my grade school, and 2-3 lots on every block had a burned out shell or was empty because the building had been demolished. After my father’s death we sold the house. The appraiser told us, “Just about anywhere else in America this is a 200k house. Here it’s worth 60”. We sold it for a bit over 50.
I wonder if I will ever again have an occasion to go there. I have no more connections.
Anybody want to make me feel better by telling me about their even worse old stomping grounds?
We once drove by to see a home I’d lived in as a toddler in Flint, MI. It was about 10-12 years later. The house was now occupied by a motorcycle gang.
The hometown in the movie *Muriel’s Wedding * was called Porpoise Spit, and seemed like a real winner. If you haven’t seen the movie perhaps renting it will cheer you up–it was hilarious.
The, um, “crappiest” town I was ever in was San Antonio, NM–just a couple of buildings near the intersection of I-25 and US 380. There were three places with bathrooms, and all three of them were clogged up–at the most of inopportune times.:eek: :o
Left the rest out, you may not want to know about it - if you do read the interview linked above.
Is Xenia, Ohio a real place? I saw the disturbing movie, “Gummo” about life in the most depressing, disgusting town you could imagine. I wanted to stop the film, but was simultaneously captivated. The thing is, it looked like a collage of real stuff from this town, not a story. If it was not, then the acting was extraordinary.
Does this place really exist? Is it as bad as what is shown on the movie?
There is certainly a Xenia, Ohio. It’s about 10 or 15 miles east of where I live (in a Dayton suburb).
Xenia is a pretty scummy place, but it gets wiped out by tornadoes every quarter century or so, so there’s a fair amount of new depressing shit to go along with the old depressing shit.
It’s acutally very reminiscent of the dumpy little town I grew up in: Fairmont, West Virginia. A town of just over 20,000 with no good jobs which seems to serve as a black hole for its residents—i.e. no chance of escaping. I never realized it when I lived there, but when I go back to visit the family, I’m appalled by how run-down and depressing it is.
No, I haven’t seen it. But I’m curious now, and will have to watch it.
It’s a crappy plac,e like I said…but i wouldn’t say it’s the worst town I’ve ever seen. Being from West Virginia (one of the more sophisticated regions of the state), and seeing the condition of some of that state’s off-the-beaten-track towns, I’d say it would take a lot to shock me.
Xenia seems to be a typical economically-depressed town with little infrastructure and no future. The Southeast is also full of places like that.
Born in San Francisco, moved to Oakland at age five to a typically working class neighborhood. About five years later my folks moved us to the Oakland hills and life was good in the big safe pretty house. In the meantime, the original Oakland flatlands became drug infested and dangerous. I drove through the area about twenty years later and couldn’t believe what I saw - our little bungalow was totally run down and bullet-riddled.
Now the area is going through a revival and upon last inspection the little bungalow has been restored and looks even better than my Dad intended it to be. The area is peopled by African-Americans who display pride of ownership (these nasty places cost well over 300K, the cost of living in the Bay Area).
I want to go up to the door and tell the owner. “I used to live here! Let me show you the additions that my Dad made and how it was before you moved in!” I won’t do that, of course.
I’ve met people who, when asked where they’re from, say “The East Bay.” This is code for Oakland. Anyone else actually mentions East Bay cities.
My high school friends are now inheriting their parents’ homes as the old folks die off. The older generation stayed despite the chaos around them and for the most part were uncomfortable and unhappy, but they stayed. Some of my friends have moved back to these homes and are totally satisfied with the improvements that have been made over the past ten years or so.
As has often been discussed on the SDMB, this is one of the reasons why I love California so much and see it as a State of Mind.
I grew up in Buffalo’s Kensington neighborhood, a collection of 1920s era bungalows on narrow lots, populated by what was then a diverse group of people; working class and middle class, white collar and blue collar, students and professors, white, black and Asian. It was an “All in the Family” kind of place.
However, the neighborhood experienced quite a shock in the late 1980s. The economic recession hit the city hard, and sent many of the neighborhood’s residents packing to North Carolina and Georgia. The neighborhood’s large population of elderly residents, many of which were the original homeowners, died off in drives. Property values plummeted. Kensington was literally across the tracks from Fillmore-Leroy, a poor, predominantly black neighborhood. Plunging property values and generius loan programs meant that poor black families could afford to buy houses in Kensington for a song; a few hundred down, a few hundred bucks a month for a mortgage payment.
With the massive influx of poor black residents, and an increase in absentee landlord-owned property, middle-class white and black residents fled. It wasn’t so much white flight was it was a culture clash; middle-class blacks have lived in Kensington since the 1960s, but they were well-assimilated and welcomed. We’re talking boom cars, drug dealers, Pit Bulls, rapidly increasing crime, and clothing stores, banks and nice restaurants on Bailey Avenue replaced with pager stores, storefront churches and very Afrocentric clothing stores almost overnight. Most old-time residents felt like strangers in their own neighborhood, so they left.
The burning stolen car in the middle of out street was probably the last straw for my parents. Mom and Dad moved out in 1992, settling down in Amherst, a diverse upper middle-class suburb. They sold their old house in Kensington for $35,000, after it was on the market for a year.