Oddly enough, the murder rate dropped to zero after you left . . .
I’ll second that. Buckminster Fuller called E. St. Louis the Calcutta of America.
I also nominate most of Gary, Indiana.
I once fell asleep on a subway in NYC and woke up at the last stop, at about 3:00 AM and suffice it to say, the crowd milling around that station at that time of night wasn’t a pretty bunch.
Last year I took a river cruise down the Yangtze River in China while they were building the Three Gorges Dam. It was a couple of months before the river water level was going to start to rise. There were markers on the hills that showed where the water level would be when the dam was completely opperational. We stopped a numerous little towns along the river and the people there were saving bricks and board and just about anything salvagable from the buildings below the future water line that had all been demolished. Apparently the people weren’t given many options for relocation and were selling bricks to buy food and other things they needed. One town was particularly haunting because there were at least 15 men and children on the beach that had contracted polio and were missing limbs or were severly deformed, dirty, and begging for money while scooting themselves along the beach. In the background it just looked like a warzone with all the buildings torn down. Through out all my travels, this scene has affected me the most.
St. Thomas. Jamaica. In fact, most touristy Caribbean islands.
What was particularly galling and upsetting to me was the contrast mentioned by other posters: seeing kids washing in open sewers, within spitting distance of high class tourist attractions, especially casinos. Of course, there was the additional fun of doing all this with a head-cold - I’m allergic to something in the Caribbean, so, every time Uncle Sam sent me there I was not predisposed to enjoy the experience.
You want hell on earth? Try my cubicle the last couple of days.
I’m going to probably piss off Tomndebb again, but here goes…
My hometown, Cleveland, at least in the days when the Cuyahoga River caught fire (and my dad’s factory couldn’t keep windows intact in their building). It looks better now, at least in places, but it still pains me to see Dad’s factory razed and the old Warner and Swasey building in such shabby shape.
But Cleveland’s still better than much of Detroit. Or West Baltimore, Camden, East St. Louis or parts of Philly.
My international travel has been pretty limited, so I realize that none of the above can hold a candle to what’s happening in the Sudan, or what has happened throughout the years in the horn of Africa, Calcutta, etc…
Detroit. I crossed the border a couple of weeks ago to go see a concert (The Arcade Fire, if anyone cares), on the one minute walk from the car to the bar, we were stopped by no less than 5 homeless people asking for money. I was really uncomfortable, I mean I’ve been to sketchy parts of Toronto, yes there are some, and I’ve never felt so depressed from just walking around. At least for me, Detroit was the most uncomfortable setting I’ve ever been in my life, I was glad to get back across the border.
And now Muzak fills the air?
I was going to comment on how some people here say a run-down city is hell, and how some say Disneyfication is hell, and how you two groups need to work on some issues together :), but I’ll let the Pretenders reference stand as sufficient.
My worst experience was Chattanooga Tennessee. Half the city looks like it just experienced a riot or a fire (hulls of buildings, some intact buildings but whose internals had clearly been gutted, some who were merely boarded up,) which I’m told that it did (a fire, that is,) but they still haven’t repaired it several years hence.
The scary part of it is though is that these parts of the city are so close to the touristy places to make sense looking like that, in not a very large city either.
Then again, maybe it was just a fire, and they have repaired in the meantime???
Another place we passed through recently which caught my eye, not for the absolute hellishness of it, but for the unexpectedly creepy and dead feeling I got when passing through: somewhere near Carolina Sandhills NWR, South Carolina.
Now, in the South, where there is plenty of land and less regulation than other places, when a business folds it doesn’t really always make sense to tear down the building, plenty of space to build more, or tear down the sign, not harming anyone, sometimes new businesses just build their offices in a completely new building and let the old ones rot.
So as I was entering this small town it didn’t faze me to see a few rusty signs still swinging outside boarded-up businesses. But every business in town was boarded up, out of business, or closed permanently in the form of obviously being decrepit beyond repair. It was fairly ghostly looking.
Now, my mom, in the car at the time, thought it might be a seasonal town only open during the tourist season, which would be the only thing saving it from my “Hell on Earth” entry.
When were you last in Rocinha? Things there have improved a lot over the last several years, and Rio’s new Favela-Bairro project shows some promise. If you’re going to nominate a south Rio favela for the “Hell on Earth” award, I think Dona Marta would be a better candidate. But the southern favelas don’t hold a candle to the ones in the zona norte, from what I’ve heard. I met a guy who lives in one of the north Rio favelas. His favela wasn’t undergoing a civil war, but the one right next to his was. He said that he’d had 3 friends killed by bullets in the last year. He also says that the movie City of God is a pretty accurate reflection of life in a favela undergoing civil war. He told me that, if a friend or relative of yours gets shot, you don’t touch the body, not even to move it out of the street. Members of the gang that shot the first guy will shoot you, too, since you’re obviously on the side of the deceased. So people walk over and around the corpses of their neighbors, friends, and family. That’s pretty hellish.
Carlos. That was the name of the guy who told me all this. Carlos. He was maybe my age, maybe a little younger. His ambition in life was to go to one of the public universities. Tuition and fees there are free, but you have to pass a huge admissions test to get in. Passing that admissions test requires that you have a pretty solid academic background–something you may well have if you went to a private (i.e., expensive) school as a kid, but something you most probably don’t have if you relied on public (i.e., free, but totally lousy) education in your formative years. This system more or less assures that only children of the rich get to go to college. He’s been studying on his own for the exams, and this year he’ll try taking them for the third time. He failed by a measly half-point the last time he tried them. Carlos was bright, articulate, and really passionate about social injustice and learning. It’s such a pity I met him just as I was getting ready to leave Rio; otherwise, I would have tutored him for the 6 weeks I could have spent there. I’m not quite sure when his exam date is coming up, but I hope he passes this time. If anyone deserves to get in, it’s probably him. But I digress…
There are other places I’d say are Hell on Earth, too–the feudal estates, called “usinas” in the desert area of Brazil; the villages made of ramshackle huts in that same desert area; a small settlement I passed by in Israel; and some places I saw in Mexico. But right now I don’t have the energy to type out descriptions of these heavenly abodes. Maybe later, when I’m not feeling so depressed.
[Comic Book Guy]
Take that, East St. Louis!
[/CBG]
I’ve been to Hell, Michigan a couple of times. Nice place…I could probably settle down in Hell someday.
The worst place that I experienced as far as general delapidation, poverty and general bassackwardness would have to have been some areas of the former Yugoslavia (1986) approaching the Albanian border.
Catford? Plumstead? Thamesmead?
Not to dis the whole city but the most wretched people I’ve seen with my own eyes were the old beggars in Saint Petersburg. I bet whatever pass for slums there are pretty desperate.
I was going to concede your point but then noticed your location:
Milton Keynes
:eek:
Name three. 
You may have to do some explaining for Non-Brits in case they get the impression MK is an English version of a Detroit slum, it’s not quiet as bad as that 
Upper Norwood, Gipsy Hill and Crystal Palace.
And I will in no way concede that the above three are basically all different names for the same place (ie where I live). 
Fair point. This article explains it quite well. (I especially like the towns appearence in Good Omens by Terry Prachett).
The important fact to remember is that Milton Keynes has concrete cows. You can’t beat that.
Gary, Indiana is pretty terrible, but I think the worst place I have ever been is Nuweiba’, Sinai, Egypt; sad, because Sinai is an amazing place. Children running around the streets (dirt paths) barefoot, with goat shit on the ground. There used to be a little tourist trade there at least, but earlier this year terrorists exploded bombs in several Sinai hotels (including one in Nuweiba’), so that’s probably decreased by a lot.
It takes more than concrete dinosaurs to make a place tolerable. Things like the tube.
5 years time:
East London Line
A couple of years after that (possibly) :
Tube Map
Presently:
20 minutes to Victoria or London Bridge from 4 local stations.
Oh, and the dinosaurs are great:
Dinos