Mogadishu?
+1 vote for Camden, NJ.
When I was at the Navy Yard in Philly, crack vials and needles used to wash up on the boat ramp, carried across the river from Camden. And not just a few, either. Major portions of the city looked like someone had dropped a tac-nuke. Recently, the mayor went ‘up the river’ for various crimes. When I pulled a consulting gig over in Camden, I wouldn’t step off the grounds of the hospital, as what was just over the property line was frikin’ scary.
I’ve been to some real horrific cities, but the small towns that don’t qualify as "cities I find more deplorable, throughout this corner of the universe.
Jackson, Mississippi hardly qualifies as a city, and is just as creepy as it’s Alabama counterpart, Montgomery. Pleased that some others mentioned Columbia, SC, it’s only saving grace is its proximity to Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head.
Laughlin, NV is a really crappy joint, kind of like Bakersfield, CA but with five or six casinos. Topeka, KS is still being held hostage by those Westboro Phelps inbred fascists, and ranks in my bottom ten. All American worsts would not be complete without mention of “…one week I spent a month in” Philadelphia, PA. I know it has it’s redeeming qualities, like Temple U., but when I visited the Vet for a Phillies game, there were house sized piles of garbage lining the streets. I asked my host if there was a trash workers strike, and he said “no, it’s always like this” and they had a holding cell under the stands behind home plate.:eek:
I’ve been to many foreign lands, but the most disgusting hell-hole outside of the USA has to be Texas.
Houston is definitely a sweating, diseased armpit of a city, but Crawford, Midland, Waco and El Paso are far worse. I’d rather stroll alone through ESL, Gary, Bayonne, or Tampa than ever go back to Texas.
Overseas, I’d have to rank Khartoum as one of the most forlorn places on our planet. It was like Beirut without the bomb scars. I have to agree with Paul in Qatar’s first post: Cairo, Egypt is the worst city in the universe. An earthquake had rocked the region a few weeks before I arrived, so I asked the hotel manager about the possibilities of aftershocks and what precautions were taken. I suppose he was trying to reassure me, but he said not to give it another thought, “buildings fall down all the time around here, even without earthquakes.” That should have given me a clue how the next two weeks were going to be, but I’ll spare the details.
Maybe you should just walk away.
ajdebosco, when was the last time you were in Laughlin? I can believe it sucked a long time ago but it’s a nice little mini-Vegas, sans most of the sin, now. Touristy - wouldn’t want to live there - but nothing like Bakersfield (which I’ve said many times would push me to suicide if I were ever stuck living there.)
Did you know most stadiums (and airports, for that matter) have holding cells? That’s not unique to Philadelphia.
I’ll give you El Paso, TX. There was a dust storm going on last time I was there and even though I’m not religious I was pretty convinced it was the apocalypse.
:eek::eek:
That sounds like something straight out of The Onion except more over the top but real as far as I can tell. I can only imagine what it is to live (or be dead) in Detroit proper these days but I don’t really want to know. It is called the “Motor City” for a reason. People there should take that to heart and just drive far, far away and stay there.
The Vet, though, had that little drunk tank installed in the seventies, making it the first of its kind.
From what I’ve read, Laughlin has grown considerably since I visited around 1980, but not sure if that’s for the better. That part of the Colorado River used to be rather attractive, but Nv and Az have kind of permanently ruined that. Not to mention trying to make Laughlin the family mini-vegas, especially biker families like the Hell’s Angels, Outlaws, Mongols…
Yeah. The OP wanted to go beyond poverty and crime.
For me, the most “loathsome city” is all around the U.S.–and not only do a lot of people reading this probably live in it, but it constitutes the vast majority of growth and development in the country now.
I’m talking about the surrounding “environs” of most dots on the map that are big enough to have a city hall and a police force, however small. Those areas that are differentiated by absolutely nothing but their zip code, and if you’re walking down the street of one, you might as well be walking down a street in any other. These are the places whose “main drags” are made up of nothing but 7-11s, Subways, cell phone stores, Radio Shacks and Ralphs, and whose cultural centers are shopping malls—that is, vast parking lots with a core of corporate chain stores in the middle—and for whose population cultural activity must always involve buying something. In these places, if you don’t drive or have a car, you’re not considered a human being, and any public transportation—if there even is any—is so underfunded and infrequent it takes a person an hour and a half and $5 to get to a place to buy a gallon of milk that costs less than that.
Yeah—crime, pollution, poverty are loathsome. But they’re inadvertent. There’s something really depressing about willful soullessness.
I’m the last person that would want to defend Detroit proper (I’m from the suburbs, which is probably different than what most young people consider suburbs these days). I’m currently working in the Mexico City area. Detroit is a paradise in comparison!
So, suburbs.
There are entire “cities” made of nothing more than strip malls, Wal Marts, gas stations, and fast food joints these days. I agree that they are unbelievably loathsome.
I didn’t like growing up in Marion as an “outsider” much either, but to even think it has any business in this thread is to forget that places like Mogadishu and Port-Au-Prince exist.
I can see that there wouldn’t be many votes for Mogadishu, given few Dopers probably have direct experience, but is is by all accounts a city that has almost every single negative quality mentioned above plus an ongoing civil war and no effective civil authority. That has to put it into the lead.
I very well may be the only person on this board (or maybe not?) who has been to Pyongyang. Man…I don’t know if I can even talk about it being a “loathsome city” because it’s unlike any other city on this planet. It’s like being in different world…and, Christ, I live in China, which I first thought was like a “different world” until I went to DPRK.
Nice to see some people sticking up for Vegas, my hometown. I really disagree with the perception that so many people have of it. It has really cleaned up in the 20 or 30 years and is quite a nice place to live. Actually, the only people who make it into some kind of “evil wrapped in materialism” are all you tourists who flock there looking for the stereotypical “Vegas experience.”
Laughlin, NV is a really crappy joint
Pahrump is far, far worse. It’s the absolute asshole of Nevada. Come to think of it, Sandy Valley is even worse than Pahrump.
Think of a polluted, crowded, New York City except with very little nightlife and a repressive government.
Beijing has no nightlife? Give me a break! E even did a “Wild On: Beijing” several years back.
As for the “repressive government,” how much (if any) of that did you even experience while traveling there? What’s the point of even mentioning that? Beijing is a fine place.
I second the guy who mentioned Benxi. Talk about depressing. They do have a nice water cave, though.
I’ve been to teeny-weeny towns that contain nothing but . . . A post office? No. A gas station? No. A store of any kind? No. A tanning salon? Yup. And when you pass through several such towns in a row, none having anything more than a tanning salon, it gets a little creepy.
I used to live in Woodlake, literally just down the road from Porterville. It’s bad, but there are a lot worse places to live. Your facts are pretty true, but I never felt UNSAFE anywhere in the valley like I do in parts of nearly every big city I’ve lived in. Even in Visalia, the big town (100K) near Porterville, has really rough areas.
Joe
Atlantic City, NJ is pretty horrendous. I grew up in Trenton, and AC scared me. Extreme poverty and crime literally right across the street from the big casinos. Ugly and dreary. Blecch!
Joe
faints Someone on the board actually is familiar with my town!! Even kids I went to college with (went to a Mass. State College) would be " where the hell is that?"
And yeah…I think that there’s a difference in loathsomeness. You are right…it doesn’t compare to major slum poverty at ALL…but I think it would fit right up there with Stepford loathsomeness.
Probably not the most loathsome, but Pine Bluff, Arkansas, doesn’t have much going for it. I’ve heard about Helena/West Helena, but I’ve never been.
I did see the water caves when I was there. The ridiculous dioramas in the “dry cave” and the oddball names given to the formations in the “wet cave” was mildly entertaining, but not interesting enough to go out of your way to Benxi, in my opinion.