A few observations I’ve made while exploring around my new neighborhood:
You can buy alcohol in almost any store, no matter what else they sell.
A free-standing department store, where there used to be an entire mall.
You’re near a stadium.
Your neighborhood is the first candidate for any sort of “eminent domain” situation, e.g. a highway, train tracks, “urban renewal,” etc.
Your neighbors all have bars on their windows.
One word: Checkers.
Payday loan huts and Rent-a-Centers
As in guys sitting around, playing? Or am I missing something?
Massive predominance of 22 and 40 oz. malt liquors.(Colt .45, Old English 800, Mickey’s, etc)
Checkers. They build them on the cheapest possible lots, so you only ever see them around crappy neighborhoods.
Landover?
I think that you are right about Checkers. The one near me is closing because the land has become more valuable. A few years ago, a few of those applied to my neighborhood, but things have changed.
Low-end fast food chain.
When you can see someone just dropping litter on the street - like, not even pretending to find a trash can - simply by watching the street for about 90 second, you know it’s a crappy neighborhood.
Very good! Close: Hyattsville, between Kenilworth and 295. Technically neither Bladensburg nor Riverdale Park, but could be probably be considered either.
I guess you’re familiar with the free-standing Sears in the big empty lot that used to be Landover Mall, across from FedEx Field?
I have to go past all that crap to get to the “good” shopping center, you know, the one with Wegman’s and Costco.
I sincerely hope it isn’t a reference to the restaurant…because their food is fucking great and I live in a smaller sized City. Checkers is nowhere near the ghetto.
I think you must frequent fancier ghettos…
Signs you’re in tougher crunchier more depressed grittier ghetto:
Every “convenience store” sells large quantities of weird, druggie-specific merchandise (single stem fake roses with crackpipe “vases”, brillo pads - one at a time, ziploc bags (also one at a time), etc).
There are no malls…or department stores. If there’s a grocery store, its an off-brand (and likely what my mother-in-law calls a “used food store” featuring soon-to-expire stock from other stores).
Small businesses fall into three categories: 1. Hair/nail salons; 2. Wireless phone resellers; 3. “urban style” stores (aka gangbanger clothes) - mostly white t-shirts and counterfeit sneakers. Oh, I forgot #4: out-of-business.
“Restaurants” fall into only two categories: national chain fast food and the ubiquitous “Wings and (something else)”. There are no sit-down places. If a pizza place still exists in these neighborhoods (and not of the Little Ceasars abomination), they are probably pick-up only (delivery is too dangerous for the drivers)
Your local liquor store is in a modular building (the last one burned down and the outcry was so great when the owner said they couldn’t afford to rebuild that the city gave them a temporary variance - some years ago…)
No one would build a stadium in this neighborhood - none of the suburban folks would come… even during the day.
Every block has 1-4 vacant lots (+/- a couple that will probably be vacant lots in the next year or two if the city can get enough money to tear more down).
Most businesses no longer have bars on the windows - they either have replaced all the glass with Plexiglas or everyone knows they don’t have anything worth stealing.
P.S. Checkers is a “ghetto thing”? Seriously? Wow, you do have nicer ghettos…
We like to do urban exploring and photographing old ruined and abandoned buildings. Two things we notice in blighted areas in addition to those previously listed:
car washes. Always.
small storefront churches. Im talking tiny ramshackle ones with the pastor’s name always prominently displayed.
Lotto tix in the gutters; people clearly using bus stop trash cans as the receptacle for all their households trash (like bags and bags of trash around the bus stop can); and lots of people around during the day who clearly have nothing going on like a job, or schoo.
Street named after MLK nearby.
For reference, I live in London:
Dog turds on the street. Lots and lots of dog turds.
Fast food places that do EVERYTHING; burgers, pizza, chicken, fish & chips, kebabs…
At least one of the following on a street corner: mattress (preferrably piss-stained), TV, sofa without cushions
Small convenience stores consist of a small corridor, all goods are behind perspex walls so you have to ask for what you want and pay throigh a small serving hatch (there was one like this where I lived in Stockwell, south London)
Puddles have a pretty rainbow-effect chemical slick on top of them
Feeling of unease
On the second and third floors!
Wig shops. Don’t ask me why, but every time I see a street in Detroit with closed down businesses, there’s always an open wig shop.
Spray paint on the buildings. Not graffiti, just random spray paint, like the person who did it was too tough or angry to form pictures, shapes, or letters.
Anthony Bourdain filming a segment in a local eatery.
When I had to drive through this one ghetto area for a while, I noticed that every store was demarcated not by a permanent sign but a vinyl banner strung over the previous tenant’s permanent sign.
Cash-For-Gold places. You know that most of the jewelery was probably stolen during a burglary a day or two ago. But as long as it gets melted down before the rightful owner spots it…
A hungry little boy with a runny nose plays in the street as the cold wind blows.