It took you 15 fucking years to let us know?!
Probably any city of zombies!
Yes, where does Walking Dead take place?
Five years.
I have been to Gary, about 30 years ago. It was horrible then and cannot have gotten any better. Also, Scranton PA, most of New Jersey, and all of India.
Thank you. There are parts of Oakland and Richmond that are just too depressing to visit. I’m still boggled by the fact that SF Bay area is so expensive to live, yet we have all these shitholes around.
Well, it’s not as bad as India. All of India. Or Scranton, Pennsylvania, or Marcus Hook, New jersey.
http://www.epa.gov/reg3wcmd/ca/pa/otherdocs/Sunoco_MarcusHook.JPG
Atlanta. Certainly qualifies for this thread even without the zombies.
Flint, MI? I haven’t been there for a while, so not sure how it compares.
East St. Louis is REALLY a hole, though. It is tough to imagine anything (in this country) being worse. I have been through Gary, IN plenty of times, and East St Louis is much much worse.
Rural Tennessee can be pretty terrible as well, but I don’t think you’d call it a “city”.
Anyone ever heard of Karachi, Pakistan? About 4300 sectarian murders in 2013 alone. Regular bomb explosions, Taliban kidnappings, beheadings, torture camps for kidnapped innocents at evey shady street corner, immense poverty, a population of 23.5 million… A base for just about every criminal gang in existance in Pakistan, and a playground for powerful intelligence agencies of every description. Sounds like hell to me.
Indeed it was. I saw the sign on the way back from a conference at Austin Peay and thought it would be an interesting little stop. Not one soul in the little town I pulled off at (whose name I forget - could be Oak Grove) had the vaguest idea what I was talking about. A 350-foot-tall obelisk 15 miles up the road and they had no idea what the hell it was. Damnedest thing. To this day I debate as to whether I was confronting alarming cluelessness or some post-Confederate wall of silence.
Ah, zombie thread! I revel in your cold, clammy flesh!
Can you send your kid to torture camp? It sound like a useful skill.
I posted in this thread before, and I can’t believe I didn’t mention Chongqing, China.
Chongqing is a festering pit of stained and crumbling concrete, bathed in a miasma thick and fragrant smog, and run through with poisonous sludge filled rivers. It sprawls for miles and miles, a maze like post-apocalyptic landscape of dreary, often abandon, concrete high rises lined up like dominos to the hazy horizon. From above, it resembles an infested, oozing sore on the planet. The streets are dirty, the hawkers aggressive, the taxi lines long, the food is laced with chilies to the point of pain, and the liquor burns like rocket fuel.
Christmas is actually a big deal in Chongqing. On Christmas Eve, tens of thousands of young people flock downtown in a seething crush of humanity. They fill the soulless, manufactured consumer district and the streets on all sides. Police stand in right circles, impassive to the spectacle that is about to begin. As night falls, everyone proceeds to pull out flashing devil horns, Santa Clause hats, and giant human-sized inflatable baseball bats, and the they go about beating the shit out of each other is a massive frenzy. It’s the most surreal thing I’ve ever experienced.
Okay, fine, I’ve had some good times in Chongqing, and the food is pretty good once you’ve stopped crying. But it’s still an aggressively unpleasant place.
Cities don’t change that much in five years…still a relevant thread.
Wonderful topic, with many interesting points!
However, I really believe that even the worst U.S. city, would certainly qualify as paradise, when compared to some really mean places, such as Mogadishu and Khartoum, (mentioned earlier).
Probably, the title of the most loathsome city is yet to remain unclaimed, since anyone who visited didn’t make it back alive…
Probably is within the African continent, or, the former Soviet Union…I’ve seen some really mean-looking places on this side!
Heh, I was there, many years ago. I was most impressed by the thick smog. You go out for a day, you come back and your skin was black with soot - sort of like Dickensian London, only on steriods. 
Also home to the most horrifying toilet I ever saw, at the Chongqing Academy of Fine Arts. The men’s toilet was a long concrete trench in the floor about 10’ deep, the bottom filled with a thick sludge of decomposing feces covered with a squirming mat of maggots, apparently several more feet deep. Over this, there was a rusty iron pole running the length of the trench and sagging slightly in the middle on which, I assume, one was intended to sit - there was no handholds, so getting on or off that pole would have been a feat of circus-like dexterity (I did not attempt it!). The punishment for failure to mount or dismount properly was all too obvious - a plunge into that revolting mass, probably head-first.
Ah, the 'ol hole & pole. That is seriously disturbing.
Academy of Fine Arts indeed. 