Yeah, but most of North St. Louis would count as the “bad” part of town as well. South St. Louis is not posh, but it’s not crime-ridden either.
Madison seems to have bad pockets everywhere. The south side is the “bad” part of town, but the southwest side of the city seems to go from good to bad on a block-by-block basis. The east and north sides are working-class, except for the few very mice areas (Maple Bluff) and the few bad blocks. It’s really not easy to classify the “good” and “bad” parts of Madison.
I used to volunteer to watch the cameras at the Northwest District police station in Baltimore. I went about once a month, about 4 hours at a time. I never saw anything while I was watching the cameras, but I learned a lot about what went on in the northwest area. (“See that bench on camera 4? Remember reading about the drug dealer murdered last week in the paper? That’s where it happened.”) I learned how to move the cameras, zoom in and out and coordinate how the cameras moved automatically so I could see up and down a street. Cool stuff.
But Westminster wasn’t part of London. Note the times I’m talking about - over a thousand years ago. Brick Lane is called Brick Lane because that’s where the bricks were burnt - it was no rural idyll even back then. Hackney certainly was until only a couple of centuries ago, but I didn’t mention Hackney or any of the wider East End (the areas in the map in your first cite).
The second cite you give contradicts pretty much everything I’ve read about the area in its conclusions and even contradicts itself. (It says there were no medieval settlements outside the green and then goes on to cite numerous medieval settlements). And the problem is that, well, there was never an actual Bethnal Green as in a central green space known by that name, so that’s an odd thing to say in the first place.
But, TBF, this is GQ and I’m too tired to go and find online cites to back up the ones in my hardcopy books, so there’s a limit to how far this can go. And, of course, it doesn’t have much to do with the OP’s question anyway, interesting as it is.
The scruffy parts of Toronto are in the northeast and northwest, in the outer ring of 1960’s style suburbs just inside the boundary of the expanded city. These areas are relatively-far from the centre and not well served by transit. There are a few older neighbourhoods closer in that are somewhat sacruffy though; these are east and west of the downtown core, and have gone through almost a whole cycle of rich -> poor -> rich; they are starting to gentrify again.
I read the wind does play a role. Rich people lived upwind of the factories that had a bad smell. If winds come from the South the rich lived in the south. If wind is from the North they live in the North part of town.
I thought St. Louis was basicly a hell hole? And I’ve heard about how bad East St. Louis is all of my life, but exactly HOW bad is it? Like is it basicly a very inner city slum in a city?
St. Louis is the most racially divided city I’ve ever seen. The north half is practically all black, the south half is practically all white, and only a narrow band across the middle is integrated (where St. Louis University is situated). Or at any rate that was the situation when I went to college there in the 1970s. So charges that the north is a bad place are inextricable from America’s long heritage of racism. I dated a north St. Louis girl when I was in college. The only people I was afraid of there were the cops, who were white, racist as hell, and would pull over anybody white who dared to be there at night.
East St. Louis makes northern St. Louis look pretty good by comparison. Their main problem seems to be no functioning municipal government and no municipal services (including law enforcement). North St. Louis gave us Chuck Berry and Dick Gregory. East St. Louis gave us Josephine Baker, Katherine Dunham, Miles Davis, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee.
The bad parts of Barcelona (both the city itself and its metropolitan area) change periodically thanks to “urban renewal”, generational change and whatnot: one of the big discussions pre-Olympic games was which area to “renew”, Poble Sec or Poble Nou, both being areas that got settled in the XIX and XX centuries and in an unplanned way. The very-large area called the Eixample, settled in the XIX and XX centuries but in a planned fashion, used to have a vertical classification: as you went higher within a building, not only did you have to climb more stairs, but the ceilings got lower and less decorated, there might be more apartments per floor… so it was a good area (wide streets, parks, clean, professional services nearby) but one where you also got a mixture from all socioeconomical classes.
A factor in many European cities is that, some 200 years ago, the space being occupied by the city now would have been occupied by what’s now the city’s “old area”, fields, and villages.
St. Louis is a very nice city, with a vibrant art and culture scene, beautiful and diverse neighborhoods, and great restaurants. It’s had its ups and downs, but like many US cities it’s going through a (very slow) gentrification process. The north part is basically one big ghetto. The south part is mixed, from working-class white neighborhoods to rich white areas to ghettoes. However, all throughout the city there are pockets of gentrification, so even saying that “the north is one big ghetto” is really an overstatement.
In S.F., the two ‘bad’ parts are in the South East part of the City and are known as the Bayview and Hunter’s Point. The HP is where the navy had a large shipyard and Pacific Gas & Electric has a large power plant. Parts of the HP are now a Superfund site (i.e. very polluted). The Bayview is the hill overlooking the HP.
These two areas are significantly poorer than the rest of the city and contain the largest concentration of African-Americans in San Francisco (which is, after all, an expensive, pretty white city…). They are being slowly gentrified and there have been recent improvements in public transit (including a new light rail line right into the heart of Bayview), but the crime rates are still pretty high.
Very near the S.F. downtown, there is the area known as the Tenderloin, which is also slightly seedy, but not really ‘bad’ as such - a fair number of drug addicts, public intoxication, prostitution etc., but very little violent crime. The 'Loin is also being gentrified, and its proximity to the touristy downtown areas mean that its reputation is no longer really deserved…
When I was living in ATL (1997-2000), The southwest part of the city proper in Fulton County was considered bad, with the area around Bankhead hwy particularly so. Gentrification was taking over areas during the real estate boom, so places like, College Park, Eastpoint (Located in the southwest of ATL), Grant Park and Cabbage town were cleaning up. No idea what they are like today.
The nice parts were the northern suburbs, mostly in Cobb and Gwinett counties.
Athens, GA was bad a for a few blocks east of Hancock, near the University, but South of Lumpkin, can’t recall what the southern border was. Again, gentrification was starting to creep in there too.
Are universities often bordering bad neighborhoods? I know the scales of the cities, and severities of the crimes might be different, but in the 90’s the are around Marquette in Milwaukee was bad, the area around GA Tech in Atlanta never looked very good, and the area near UGA was not so good.
Or is it the low rents to attract students end up attracting others of low income, some of whom will take advantage of suburban kid who doesn’t know how to secure doors and windows from B&E theft?
Eh - this is partly correct, but requires some elaboration. The District of Columbia is divided into four quadrants, centered on the Capitol - Northwest, Southwest, Northeast, Southeast. Not all are the same size - SW is relatively tiny, because much of the area that would make up the “full” quadrant was retroceded to Virginia about twenty years before the Civil War.
The Northwest quadrant is normally viewed as the most desirable. It’s the highest-income quadrant, and it includes a lot of very well-regarded and expensive neighborhoods: Georgetown, Glover Park, Foggy Bottom, Cleveland Park, Dupont Circle, and so on. It’s the safest quadrant, and I’d say that “Upper” Northwest - Tenleytown, AU Park, Spring Valley, Chevy Chase, etc - is safe enough that anyone could walk the streets at any time of day or night without fear. That’s pretty damn safe.
Even Northwest, though, has some moderately dangerous areas. People get shot in Columbia Heights and Mt. Pleasant. The U Street nightlife corridor has its share of crime, and my favorite Ethiopian place in Adams Morgan had a botched muder/successful suicide happen at one of its tables a couple years ago. I still eat there. And Shaw/Petworth can be very dodggy.
Southwest is poorer than Northwest, and much smaller, but not all that dangerous.
Northeast is a thoroughly mixed bag - the H Street corridor is gentrifying fast, and a fun place to visit, but I’d be very reluctant to live there. The bit of Northeast on Capitol Hill is fun and safe. Once you get out to the Rhode Island Avenue metro, you’re in a bit of a slum - my friends who live there have shootings and dealers in their neighborhood. Further in, you get to the Trinidad neighborhood, which was so plagues with drive-by shootings that the MPD tried to lock-down the whole neighborhood with checkpoints a couple years ago. Keep heading northeast on the Red Line, though, and you’ll end up in Takoma - right on the border wtih Takoma Park, a perfectly pleasant Maryland suburb.
As for Southeast - well, much of it is fine. The bit on and near Capitol Hill is fine - you needn’t panic at seeing “SE” on a street sign. Eastern Market is in Southeast, near the Hill, and a genuinely great place to live - good restaurants, a charmingly cluttered used bookshop, and a weekly farmer’s market that’s tremendous fun.
When most people think of Southeast, though, they’re thinking of Anacostia - the bit of DC east of the Anacostia River. That’s … a bad place. I keep meaning to visit, because there are things worth seeing there - Frederick Douglas’ old house, some good architecture, a Smithsonian. But the level of crime and violence there is such that it’s hard to find friends who’ll go with me - and I’m reluctant to go by myself.
DC might give St. Louis a run for its money - there are black people living in the rich areas, but the worst-off poor neighborhoods are almost exclusively black. So are the DC public schools, for that matter - mostly black, some hispanics, a very few white kids.
Agreed. I’ve lived in the Tenderloin, and would cheerfully do so again. Cheap curry + Dottie’s True Blue Cafe (best pancakes ever!) would make it worthwhile in itself.
Good rule of thumb for DC: If you’re west of Rock Creek Park, you’re almost certainly reasonably safe. If you’re west of the Anacostia River, you’re probably fine, but you might need to follow the standard sort of common-sense rules you need in any large city. If you’re east of the Anacostia … head West.
Milwaukee segregated itself in the opposite way as Chicago just down the way. The south side was the “white” side of the town while the north side was the “black” side of town. To this day the South Side (of Milwaukee proper) has a much nicer reputation as a whole.
And Shaw/Petworth can be very dodggy.