Chicago has always been known as Gangland U.S.A. Clark Street, and the garage where the St. Valentine’s Massacre occured, are a particularly gruesome piece of local history. However, you can get one of the greatest pizzas evah at a joint right across the street from the site (Chicago Pizza & Oven Grinder).
We also have John Gacy. 'nuf said.
I ran thru Hell. I have the T-Shirt. So does my wife.
Let me tell you, it is not your typical 4.8 or 10 mile run… 
Columbine, Colorado.
The people who placed those markers would probably disagree with you about it being a shameful place. To them those markers are memorials to a victory of equality over racism.
But when I lived in Greensboro NC, I was taught about the Woolworths lunch counter downtown. This is where one of the first (if not THE first) “Sit-in” occurred in the the equal rights movement.
Gatopescado writes:
???
1.) Salt Lake City would’ve been known all on its own – there’s plenty of history there (plus it’s the only really big city for 8 hours car travel in any direction)
2.) Exactly what bad thing that happened there were you thinking of? The only thing I can even remotely think of is Joe Hill’s trial, which I’ll bet most people don’t even know about. (things like the Hoffman bombings were so local, I’ll bet they’re off the radar altogether)
3.) Lately, most people probably think of SLC as where the winter olympics were.
I am surprised nobody mentioned New York (9-11).
Camden, New Jersey (my hometown, super high crime rating).
New Orleans, it used to be known just for Mardi Gras, but is now infamous for what some see as lack of government reaction in helping the poor/Katrina.
Almost every place that was a death camp during WW2.
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Abu Ghraib.
I used to walk by the St Valentine’s day Massacre site often. The “Everybody know about it, there’s nothing there now” factor was pretty big there and elsewhere in Chicago:
The site of the Murder Castle was an ordinary urban street. The alley where John Dillinger was shot while running in an “infantryman’s-crouch” so as to make a smaller target (the bullet entered by his kindney, rattled around and popped out his eye) had no marker when I lived there (1990), but its Mexican-restaurant side across from the Biograph Theater was painted a garish canary yellow. (I took a piss there out of revenge for my grandmother, who, carrying my dad in vitro, had to run for cover when Dillinger’s gang shot up Mason City Iowa’s downtown).
Something that, of course, wouldn’t have a plaque; namely the import-export store on Clark & Belmont where Tokyo Rose worked had a “yea, she’s in there, so what?” non-mystique.
I really got the impression that Chicago’s attitude was about getting on with things and, although such events were bound to occur, it was kind of stupid to make much of it. Anybody who took too much interest was just a sucker for the hucksters who made money off suburbanite tourists. And the worst sin a Chicagoan can commit is to be is a sucker.
Los Angeles, which has always had such a cultural inferiority complex that that itself is an ingrained part of its culture, is much better at this sort of awareness.
Once while on the bum, I camped out in Ed Gein’s town in Wisconsin. It was a beautiful place: surrounded by little toadstool-hills that had been pushed up by pockets of melting subterranean ice, on a wide, sandy river beach. Even if Ed hadn’t once dug up ladies like dog bones there, I’d always remember the place.
What? Not the Gary Indiana Conservatory of Music, Class of 1908?
If anyone knows about Pestigo Wisconsin, it’s for a very horrible event. Even worse: few know about it.
I think I win the thread: Sarasota, Florida:
– Home of “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” – since demolished.
– One of those kidnap/murders
– Those Ray brothers with AIDS back in the 80s
– And the worst-- U.S. Representative Catherine Harris’s district.
Another one from the UK:
Aberfan, Wales. (A huge slag heap from a mine collapsed in heavy rains and engulfed the village, in particular the primary school, killing every child in the village.)
I once went there in a handbasket.
That Aberfan example is a good one, it surprises me that although 144 people were killed, the vast majority of children attedning the school that was engulfed, I wonder why the Universal pit disaster at Senghenydd is not much more widely known, since it killed more people.
Palatine. Brown’s Chicken. Who would have EVER thought that this town would be “news”. 
Cleveland, Ohio is well known as the poorest big city in America.
Another from the UK: I was born in Hyde, which, if it’s known for anything at all (it’s still pretty obscure, I guess), it’s for having three serial killers living there at various times. Both the Moors murderers, and Dr. Harold Shipman.
It’s not exactly, uh, treated as a tourist attraction, though.
East St. Louis & East Palo Alto (crime)
How can you mention Chicago and forget about the fuss created by a cow?
Other towns that remind us of infamous events:
Love Canal, NY (dioxin dumped by, appropriately enough, Hooker Chemicals)
Harrisburg, PA (Three Mile Island)
New Madrid, MO (major earthquakes)
Nuremburg (war crime trials)
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (‘nuff said)
A nitpick here.
The shootings were at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO.
How about Granby, CO ?
That’s true, although a Taswegian friend of mine said that whenever he visited Port Athur prior to 1996, he still got a heavy dose of the heebie-jeebies. The things that happened to the convicts there in the 19th century weren’t much removed from the atrocities of Bryant, in terms of severity. Apparently, in the modern era, it’s always been a dark kinda place.
Clearwater, Florida- Church of Scientology headquarters