For me, it’s an area of downtown L.A., just south of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Most of the shops there are jewelry and clothing shops and have steel, roll-up doors. Anyways, after they close up their shops at dusk, the homeless people start to come out and, after dark, they are camped out all over the sidewalks. It’s amazing and sad at the same time to see all of these cardboard boxes and such up and down the streets.
Also, some of the alleys are filled with rats. We drove down one of the alleys at night, rolled down our windows, and could hear them skittering around our tires.
At night, you see alot of strange people walking the sidewalks or just hanging out. Some, of course, look like groups of gangbangers.
Then you have the hawkers, selling stolen goods. I remember seeing one guy on a bike, carrying a vacuum cleaner. He didn’t look like the type who would ever have a need for a vacuum cleaner.
Then there are the prostitutes. Several years ago, I happened to drive past a parking lot (not in the same area but in L.A.) about 2 am in the morning that was filled with obvious female prostitues and vehicles. It literally looked like a marketplace, sort of like a fast sex drive-through.
I’ll never forget visiting there as a kid… We were walking away from one of the streets with a tourist attraction on it (some kind of house involving Lincoln, I think). It was, of course, very well maintained. No litter, no vagrants, facades, doors and windows all in repair. Go a couple streets over, and the street looked like something out of warzone. Crumbling facades, lots of litter, graffiti, vagrants, miserable looking people, etc. I lived in Southern CA and got to see plenty of LA, but this was worse then anything I saw there.
Well, there are parts of Baltimore with 10 houses on a block, and 9 of them boarded up. The boards have holes in them, the brick is crumbling. There will be one house missing in the middle with weeds and trash on the “lot”.
Still, I went to Cancun, Mexico when I was 16. We asked the cab driver to get us some marijuana. We drove out of anywhere remotely touristy. The streets were dirt. There were people sleeping in the dirt, small packs of dogs just walking across the streets. The houses were, literally, made out of sticks lashed together, standing on dirt. There were trenches dug in the dirt in front of the houses, presumably for drainage. Little planks for walkways.
If there are places like that in America, I don’t know about it.
Tangier, Morrocco is quite a cool city in its own right, but it’s as grotty as you might expect. Lots of crumbling buildings, waste water in the streets, touts and trash everywhere.
The Tenderloin in San Francisco had better plumbing, but almost as much grime, fewer touts, but ten-times the beggers. I’d never regularly encountered pan-handlers before visiting San Francisco, so seeing individuals such as a filthly legless man pushing himself down the street on a skateboard was a real eye-opener.
I’ve never been to Detroit, but from what I have seen on this site. I’m not making any plans to visit anytime soon. This comes about as close to an example of hell on earth as I have seen (in pictures). IRL, I’d have to say some parts of Mexico City I went through when I was there in 1987 with some people in my Spanish class, gave me the creeps. To Mexico City’s defense, there were some nice areas, too.
Detroit is a filthy cesspool in places. I’m sure some parts of it are very nice.
I don’t drive to West Baltimore by myself. If I absolutely must go there, it’s with my husband. It’s the saddest, scariest place I can think of. I’m assuming that’s the area that Trunk is describing.
There are numerous areas of Baltimore like that. Certainly lots of it in West Baltimore, but you don’t need to get too far from JHU Hospital to the north and east to find it pretty close to that.
Another vote for parts of Baltimore—even worse, Baltimore in the 1970s. There was virtually no public transportation, and the bad parts of the city were whimsically scattered about, so you couldn’t avoid going through them.
How about places where heaven and hell coexist? I’m thinking of places like Rio de Janeiro: one one hand you have Copacabana/Ipenema . where you have scads of rich, beautiful, and very scantily-dressed women. Top notch restaurants, and shops selling all the baubles for rich people…Sterns (jewlry),boutiques, etc. Five miles away, you have th favela (slums) called Rocinha, where people are murderd every night, and kds get by on a pice of bread and a cup of coffee a day. No sewage sysem, and garbage everywhere. Drug gangs so bold that the army is afraid of them-and little girls as young as 13 working as prostitutes. Truly heaven and hell!
[Jim Pooley voice]
I’ve never been there myself, but I’ve heard it’s a very nice place.
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I haven’t travelled around the world much, so I have yet to experience hell on earth, but if something in our country should resemble it slightly then it would have to be one of those small mining towns packed in claustrophobically tiny valleys because of the feeling that the walls of the mountains will crumble down and just burry everything under themselves with no hope of escape.
Cite Soleil in Port-Au-Prince Haiti was just awful. People would wash themselves in sewage. No one should have to live like that. That being said it wasn’t my hell on earth. The culture was fascinating and there was something there worth seeing.
Hell is Orlando. Boulevard after boulevard of chain restaurants, all with lines stretching out the door. Screaming kids and loud people in unfortunate outfits everywhere. Expensive and overrated attractions. My wife and I hightailed it to Merritt Island as quickly as we could.