Last year I took a train to New York City and we made a brief stop in North Philadelphia. I’ve never been so scared of being in a place in my life, and I was on a TRAIN! The conditions of the buildings and houses along the tracks are indescribable. And there was a SMELL. One that can only be recognized as a cross between something burning, sewage, rotten garbage, and the stench of POVERTY.
Lima, Ohio. I don’t know if it’s still like this, but at the time I was working there (summer of '91?) it was depressing. Maybe moreso because it’s a small town. You expect drugs and crime in Baltimore, etc, but not in a small town in “America’s heartland”. Drive through the “downtown” area at dusk and I swear you saw wraithes*. I was told that Lima was a convenient stopover for people running drugs between Florida and Detroit, and this was the result.
Alexandria, LA also fit this bill, not so much for drugs and crime (although it may have those) but because it was boring, always too hot or cold (when I was there) and always smelled like a musty papermill. It’s hard to enjoy a town that smells bad.
*I think that they were crack-addicted prostitutes, but I never stopped to check.
I’ll second fruitbat’s Cite Soleil in Port-Au-Prince Haiti as being brutally filthy. I too saw a guy just squat in the street and wash himself from a tiny, nasty bit of liquid in a gutter.
Juarez across from ElPaso was pretty bleak too. I’ve seen lots of poor Mexico but parts of Juarez are simply devoid of hope.
Oy, watch what you say about my manor. 
Actually I live in Upper Norwood which I admit is a bit nicer than Penge, but I certainly think SE London’s got it’s plus points.
And I believe Gyrate from this neck of the woods too so we might just gang up on you. (We’re good at that in Sarf London).
For true hell-on-earth I nominate southern Harare - especially in the last few years.
Christmas shopping with my wife in Chicago a few years ago was a special kind of hell for me. The insane traffic on Michigan Avenue, the jammed sidewalks with adults elbowing children into the gutter to get somewhere first, the cabs in the streets actually trying to hit you, screaming kids, angry parents, icy sidewalks, a 70 mile an hour bitter wind, every store with a new twist on evil smelling potpourri, frenzied consumerism run amok; I wanted to throw myself under a bus, but I had the kids to think about.
Another kind of hell I was in Montgomery Alabama, where, after getting lost stopping for coffee one morning, a friendly police officer spotted us, did a lightning fast U-turn drove on the wrong side of a street to get to us, scolded us for being stupid tourists, and then escorted us back to the highway. It was a pretty scary neighborhood; just by the way people on the street looked at us…
Well I lived in Karachi for a while as a child and it’s not a place that I ever want to return to for a visit.
And being stranded in San Pedro Sula for 48 hours wasn’t much fun either.
When I was young, I was visiting my stepmother’s family in the Dominican Republic (can’t remember which town). There are a few things that I remember that seem hellish to me. First, there were stray dogs everywhere, fighting over garbage (I believe that we were there during a garbage workers strike). Second, I recall walking through a park and seeing a woman with festering sores on her legs that were covered with flies. Third, I remember that we were taken to a movie and there was this public service short before the movie (with images) on how to recognize leprosy.
What was strange is that amidst all of this horrible squalor, my stepmother’s family was fairly affluent and they kept taking us to these beach resorts and the like. I could not wrap my head around the whole thing.
I forgot to add that getting lost in East St. Louis was extremely scary.
Looked like a bombed out city-bars or boards on all the windows that weren’t broken,empty shells of buildings, burning garbage cans on every street corner, trash all over the streets and little kids running around at 2 AM.
DC is pretty bad. I saw hookers peeing and vomiting in the street (next to MY car!) when I was there. But Manila in The Philippines is the worst place I’ve been to.
Another vote for parts of Detroit, specifically the neighborhood where my grandmother lived. When I was a kid in the late sixties it was a decent, working-class neighborhood populated with retirees and a few young families. There was a nice German meat market around the corner where we kids would be sent with the money to buy handmade hotdogs and Vernor’s gingerale. Kids played all up and down the front sidewalks and my grandmother grew roses and raspberries in the back. But starting in the late '70s it went downhill fast. It got so bad that, one year, my grandmother came to visit my folks in San Diego and just never went back. After she died a few years later, her house sold for practically nothing. When my dad and brother went to clean it out, they discovered that a woman my grandmother’s age a few houses down had been murdered by a burglar.
Not nearly as bad as some of the places mentioned here, but sad because we had to watch it die.
Depends on where you go in both cities, although the squalor in parts of Manilla is far worse than anything in DC. I saw people living in a concrete culvert in one of the Manila slums.
Still, for me hell on Earth would have to be New Delhi. Filthy, unbreathable air that reeks of shit, perfume, and auto exhaust, combined with poverty so gross that people wash themselves in the same water they drink.
Finally! A game I can play.
Spencer Mountain, Grundy County Tennessee You’ve heard of appalacian poverty? Well, Spencer never even had any coal. The county seat has a population of like 2,500. You’re going up a winding mountain road and turn yet another blind corner and suddenly you’re in the middle of a town of rundown buildings from the depression era. Notoriously brutal cops watching over a population that seems to consist solely of meth freaks or inbred snake-handling Klansmen. The “Grudy County Howdy” is a pre-lingual grunt that’s something like “Hee-yaaw”.
Slidell, Louisiana The poster who mentioned New Orleans ain’t seen nothing yet. Someone once told me that when they lived in Slidell, everyone would leave their car windows rolled down so they wouldn’t get broken when the stereo got stolen.
An urban studies professor once described East St. Louis as “the lowest a former industrial city can sink”.
But the winner and still champion is West Memphis, Arkansas. I did the 2000 Census in some of the worst sections of south Memphis (Orange Mound and the Foote Homes, for those who know Memphis), and West Memphis scares the shit out of me. I literally saw people living in tar paper shacks inside the city limits when I was unwise enough to accept a flower delivery assignment there. The town’s claim to fame is the brutal child murders and the subsequent framing (or at the very least highly questionable prosecution) of three heavy-metal-loving teenagers on the grounds they were Satanists. Oh, and it’s basically the world’s biggest truck stop. Do Not Go There!
Jeepers, where to start?
I guess I’ll start with places in the USA that I know best. PA: North Philly is pretty horrible, all right, but IMO, Chester is even worse. Various creepy, semi-abandoned coal-mining villages in Western PA. Much of DC. Never been around Baltimore, so can’t say. Pretty much every bit of Louisiana I’ve ever seen, and yeah, I know that may be unfair. LA and much of SoCal in general.
Although I know Houston well, and people often say how much they hate it, I don’t quite get the sense of complete dissolution and despair there that permeates the places mentioned above. I’ll confess there may be a rose tint to my glasses where that’s concerned.
Elsewhere, a lengthy walk through the northern suburbs of Paris, from Le Blanc Mesnil to La Villette, on a night when all the buses and trains went on strike, was enough to drive me to the edge of suicide. Rome. Fucking Cairo; I once was forced by work to spend two weeks there and will never go back if I can help it. Luanda, Angola. The townships outside Harare, Zimbabwe.
Well I ws born in Slough
But for the fact that I expected much better Naples in Italy was horrible, rats and garbage all over the streets. I had planned to spend a few days there before going on to Rome, instead I left as soon as possible, which since Rome was fantastic wasn’t a bad thing to do.
Haitian slums, already mentioned. Gaza, pretty close.
My worst experience was six days spent in Ceaucescu’s Romania, late 87.
It wasn’t just the dirt, decay and lack of food. It was the fear, hopelessness and the hollow look of hunger and despair in people’s eyes. People completely ground down by a demented and cruel ruler, afraid to speak to foreigners, just going through the motions of their lives.
When Ceaucescu fell just over two years later, I watched it all on the news, and wished I could be there to share the people’s joy with them.
I realise that historically there are many places that score far higher on the hell-on-earth-meter. If there is one place I would refuse to go to now, it would be Iraq, or possibly Chechnya.
For me, Hell on Earth was Branson, Mo. while towing a 24’ trailer behind a extended bed super-cab. And driving around was the best part!
I’ve been to quite a few dirt-road towns in South America. But the worst I saw was Rio. Filty, dirty, scary. And they rip off tourists on the booze in the live sex shows.
Unbeliveable place. Oppulant mansion with a cardboard-box slum propped up against the outside of the stone wall surrounding it.
Was that you?
If you are going with speculation and not personal experience, I gotta sayright now the Sudan. I know plenty of people you are now or were recently in Iraq. They tell me that despite what you see on the news, it’s not as bad as you might think. Still horrible in parts of the country but not on the level of the Sudan or Rwanda at its worst.
You’re that Eve?
Asolute worst place? Hmm, so many to choose from. I’d probably vote for the town of Yuzhno in Sakhalin (Eastern Russia). When I was there, there were 37 murders in the first month and 42 the second. The population is only 150,000. We weren’t allowed outside at night.