Sadly, my parents still live there, and I probably will have to return at some point, but it’s literally an armpit of a town. Its primary raison d’etre is, it’s located at the junction where I-57 meets I-70. Hence, it’s become a mecca for fast-food restaurants, truck stops, and gas stations.
However, the town itself tops out at 10,000 residents. There’s very little in the way of local industry – Fedders Air Conditioning, World Color Press, and Roadmaster Bicycles are among companies that have come and gone – so the town languishes in depression. If you aren’t willing to flip burgers or deliver pizzas, it’s extremely difficult to find work.
It doesn’t help that the town has very little in new architecture. Everything is very old and dirty-looking, and basically a stone’s throw away from complete ruination.
Interesting side-note: As a teen, my friends and I looked in the phone book to determine how many bars operated in the town. We counted – no lie – 38 separate drinking establishments within a 15 mile radius. Speaks volumes about the culture of the city, don’t it? :dubious:
I lived in a time warp town from 1983 to 1996, Pennington, New Jersey, just 10 miles from Princeton and up the road from Trenton.
Pennington was time warped in the good sense. (I think it still is.) Everyone knew everyone else. We had our little scandals that everyone knew but no one did anything about. You could leave your door unlocked, and nothing happened. The police ticketed speeders from out of town - if you got caught, and lived in town, they would apologize for stopping you. (Happened to me once.) The garbagemen were town employees who did other things too, and would take anything. The elementary school was good, with lots of parents wanting to get involved. We had a big supermarket, locally owned, that would stock anything you asked for and give special service. No fast food stores,. no chain stores, just locally owned and operated shops. We had a Fourth of July parade that the kids got to ride in with their decorated bikes, and which the fire department rode in. There was an annual street fair that got started to support the local private school when a building there burned down, and which continued every year, raising money for whichever local organization needed it. All school bonds passed by big margins in our town, since we all really cared about education. And there was even a very active Welcome Wagon that kicked in for a couple of years whenever you moved or had a baby.
To quote SJ Pereleman, it was like the Garden of Eden but not so crowded.
It is always 1969 in Boulder. There are still headshops, student radicals, and anything else you can think of that is typical of 1969. Now that they’ve got a new war to protest, the college students are in heaven.
Boulder is the classic example of “grow or die”. It’s refused to grow, so it’s dying, but it will do it in 1969.
True, it doesn’t star anyone of not, but in the first scene the person who escapes the mansion and instantly dies of old age is none other than an uncredited old-geezer-at-large Burt Mustin.
Guess they don’t drink much in Effingham. I’m in a residential area of Chicago, and there’s probably that many bars within a one mile radius of where I live.
Sigh. If I had said that Chicago had more than 38 bars, you’d have a point. Obviously, it’s not surprising that a big city has more bars than a glorified village.
But I didn’t say that, did I?
You said that Effingham had 38 bars in a 15 mile radius. 38 / (15)(15)(3.14) = 38/486.7 = .0780768 bars per square mile. In other words, less than one bar for every ten square miles.
I said that there are more than 38 bars within a mile of my house in a residential Chicago neighborhood. 38 / (1)(1)(3.14) = 38/3.14 = 12.101911 bars per square mile. By my math, 155 times the bar density. (Hint: Chicago is bigger than one square mile.)
Or let’s do it another way. According to this site, Effingham County is 479 square miles, or just slightly less than the 486 square miles in your 15 mile radius circle. In that area, there are 34,264 people. 38/34264 = .0011 = 1.1 bars per thousand people.
In copmparison, Chicago is 228 square miles in area, with a population of 2,896,016. If there are 38 bars per square mile in Chicago (I suspect there are more, if you figure in destination areas like the Loop, Rush Street, River North, and Lincoln Park), that leave us with (228)(38)/2896016 = .00299 = just under 3 bars per thousand.
Tadcaster has three very large breweries and only five schools along with 18 pubs and 5 hotels with drink licences, I doubt that any more than 8000 live there now as it was around 6000 only 6 years ago.
All this in a space of maybe a mile across from one end to the other.
Where I live now Castleford, you go into the pubs and you might be fooled into thinking the place is bang up to 1980’s style, but go into the working mens clubs and the place reeks of early 1970’s attitudes and decor (yes they are still called working mens clubs, sexual equality has not hit us yet)
The statistics on Castleford hark right back to those time too, we have nearly half the population that left school with no qualifications whatsoever, against the national figure of 30%, and educated to degree level or higher is less than 8% against a national average of 20%.
70% of our population are in the lowest grades of employment and something less than 1%(against a national average of around 9%) are from non-white backgrounds, I’d hazard a guess and say that almost all of them, myself excepted, are tied into the takeaway food trade, either employed directly or family of those employed.
For any UK dopers out there takes a look at this webby, you can enter your post code and see how your town stacks up.
No, he thought that 38 drinking establishments within a 15 mile radius was no big deal, just as I did. I probably have 38 bars within a half mile of my home also.