I’ll nominate Wasilla, Alaska. It’s a strip mall with a killer view. Everything that can go wrong with a place with no zoning regs and just a $5 fee for a building permit is evident on the main drag of this crappy town. Sample photo. Note the extra tires on the front porch.
Wasilla, where the blue tarp is a popular roofing material.
Oh yeah, The Nuns of Gaborone. Classic movie.
Painted?
No such luck.
Flint.
I worked in Gillette during the summer of 1980 during the oil shale boom. The sex ratio in town was about 10-1 male. We stayed in a hotel that that had a indoor pool with a tropical theme, surrounded by plastic palm trees with plastic parrots, with a huge glass outside wall overlooking a desolate prairie with tumbleweeds. It was one of them most surreal places I ever stayed in my life.
The week before we arrived, a frustrated oil worker had stolen a big D-9 bulldozer and started to dismantle downtown Gillette before he was stopped. The graffiti around town said “When D-9s are outlawed, only outlaws will have D-9s.”
My grandmother traveled extensively across much of the US during the forties and fifties. This was before people thought much about pollution abatement, and she routinely encountered such olfactory delights as the steel plants of the Midwest and the pulp mills of the South. She used to say she would like to turn her travels into a book, the title of which would be “Places I Have Smelled.”
She got as far as writing a limerick about a particular city in Iowa, only for some reason she never quite managed to finish the second line:
“There once was a girl from Dubuque
Who complained that the smell made…”
Swindon
…her rebuke the factories?
Growing up, I used to complain whenever we passed Linden, NJ due to the refinery’s smells… and yes, it is bad.
That said, I can Honestly say that I have now driven past worse.
Off of Rt 85 in Montgomery, Alabama, there is a place known as ‘The Alabama Cattlemen’s Association’. Even with your windows up and driving quickly past it, I don’t recommend that trip without 1-2 air sickness bags for each passenger.
Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.
and
Crowley took Glasgow,Aziraphale had Edinburgh (neither claimed any responsibility for Milton Keynes, but both reported it as a success).
-Pratchett/Gaiman, Good Omens
Fair question, but mixing in ironic taunts of places in the developed world which aren’t as nice as others with places in the third world full of true physical misery is kind of unseemly IMO. I’ve only a few times been outside the rich world, not counting living in a country still perhaps still officially ‘developing world’ then, but unquestionably a rich country now. Besides that a couple of visits to developing world resorts (which I didn’t like, not a sun person), and working briefly in coastal Ecuador, a poor but fairly nice place IMO. So I have no first hand idea what anywhere near the worst place in the world is. It’s not anywhere near the ‘worst place in the world’ IMO if there’s some refinery or cattle yard odor in rich world locales.
Paper mill towns in those days smelled very strongly. Residents of the town were inured to the smell, and didn’t noticed it at all. A couple that I recall in Wisconsin were Wisconsin Rapids and Kaukauna. I think also Mosinee and Nekoosa, but I’m not sure I remember rightly. Such towns were otherwise perfectly nice towns to live in.
I don’t recall Dubuque having a disagreeable smell, but the name sure lends itself to a limerick.
BTW read those names as Hell and Heaven, respectively.
I lived in San Leandro, CA which wasn’t too stinky except near the Ghirardelli factory (hasn’t been in SF for a long time). Chocolate smells good, but its production didn’t always smell so nice.
Of course it was. I grew up in the small town of Kenilworth, just outside of Coventry.
I suppose it’s the U.K.'s version of Brasilia or Abuja?
Milton Keynes appears to be best known for having big rock concerts.
The South Park kids once plotted “What’s the worst place we could send him to?” and all responded in unison “Scottsdale”.
I was once in a conversation of American ex-pats, discussing the worst city in the USA. The consensus was either Houston or Buffalo. Coincidentally, Houston’s original name was Buffalo Bayou. I voted for Atlanta.
Houston is not so bad. I haven’t been in Buffalo since the 1950s.
I was born in the early sixties, and remember car trips from before we got all anti pollution-y. I certainly do recall several small cities (Grandma was right, mostly in the South) where the stench of the pulp mills was just awful.
And growing up in Chicago we woukd sometimes go spend the day at the Indiana Dunes, which meant gagging our way for ten miles through Hammond and Gary…in AC-less station wagons with the windows rolled up on ninety degree days.
The worst smell I can remember…I was about seven, and it permeated our route through Charleston, WV. Never did find out what it was from!
Which doesn’t help settle the matter of what’s the worst city in the world, just pointing out that breathing in a lot of these places is easier today than it used to be…
Buffalo has pulled itself up out of self pity and despair over the steel mills disappearing years ago, and is apparently doing quite well. It’s my wife’s home town, and we’re going to try to visit in October.