(Huntsville, by the way, isn’t anywhere close to belonging on this list. I included it only because SnoopyFan had mentioned it.)
Baltimore leads the nation in homicide and syphilis, and was built to accomodate the now-dying shipping industry. Still, it’s got its fun points. Wonder if “Polack Johnny’s” is still in business?
Richmond, VA is another story altogether. I drove from one end of Broad Street to the other a few years ago and the only thriving storefronts I saw were for bankruptcy lawyers. It’s a company town, and the company is R.J. Reynolds tobacco. I was down there last week (my nephew goes to VCU) and saw some non-KFC chicken fast-food restaurant with a sign out front saying “DRUG FREE WORKPLACE.” Damn, that’s thoughtful! I’ll never order chicken nuggets again without thinking of that pimply kid behind the counter producing a urine sample at the start of his shift!" Hope they’re also a “CLEAN HANDS WORKPLACE.”
Washington, DC has been teetering on the edge for decades. The Army trains its trauma surgeons here because they can rely on a steady flow of gunshot victims to give green young surgeons needed practice.
I’ve only been to mayor cities (LA, Seattle, Sacramento, Denver, Chicago, Boston, New York etc…), but the very worst place I saw to stay / visit, IMHO, was most definitely Buffalo, NY.
How does Buffalo rate as a city compared to the current ‘winner’ of the title Gary, Indiana? I’m sure it’s probably considered brilliant in comparison, but I thought I’d ask.
Gary makes Buffalo seem like Prague. Seriously.
…is the worst place you can imagine! The largest growth industry here is staging phoney car accidents, most of the empty storefronts on main stree have been taken over by shyster lawyers, chiropractors, and physical therapists.
The phoney accident business is so popular, that recently a 62 year old woman (illegal immigrant) was killed in a phoney accident-she planned to “bump” the car ahead of her, but instead went off the road, and a tree fell on her car, killing her!Her nephew and two others were arrested…it seems her take was supposed to be around $6000.00
Nothing can save Lawrence…it ought to be blown up and plowed under, with all of the crooks!
But is it a city? What’s the population? How are we definining “city”?
I haven’t lived in most of the named cities. Of the ones I have lived in, I have to agree that E. St. Louis takes the cake.
St. Louis is actually rather nice once you get out of the downtown area, and its museums and tourist attractions are world-class, particularly the Botanical Gardens.
[sigh]
I miss the koi bridge.
Heh. When I worked in Boston, one of my colleagues was from Lawrence. His wife worked too–as an insurance fraud investigator.
They did very well indeed.
Like its neighbor Lowell, though, there’s some interesting parts and the old mills are cool to photograph.
East St. Louis isn’t necessarily the worst part of eastern metro St. Louis. I went on a story this summer where IDOT was holding community meetings in three cities: E. St. Louis, Venice, and Brooklyn. My boss recommended the meeting in E. St. Louis as the safest of the three. Really, most of the Illinois side of the Mississippi is bad, from south of Alton to north of Columbia, and until you get to the inland towns like Edwardsville, Belleville or Collinsville. The “villes” are okay.
Youngstown, Ohio.
Duquesne, PA
McKeesport, PA
Some of these other cities still have hope
Oakland is pretty bad…
We forgot Camden, NJ, but then again everybody has. Although the aquarium is alleged to be very nice.
Camden was mentioned in the OP, actually.
Camden was mentioned in the OP. oh, and I vote Gary, that place is god awful. it’s even worse than Flint, which is saying something.
Highland Park, Michigan
Man that’s really sad to hear. I was born there and grew up there until reaching 13, when my family headed for the Cali. But I haven’t been there in more than 20 years, I guess a lot can change.
What’s this pick on Stuffy day? 
<<<
Oakland’s has a sky rocketing murder rate right now, but otherwise isn’t that bad. Most of the bad sh$t is confined to the flat lands of East Oakland and to a lesser degree West Oakland (where the Riders operated, is that national news?). West Oakland is making a very quiet but obvious comeback, it’s a great jump off point for commuters to SF, and is one of the places in Oakland where home prices are still going up, others being my neighborhood, and the Hills of course.
As to the murder rate, I hate to sound calloused, but it’s mainly Dope dealing rivalries. Most law abiding citizens have nothing to worry about on that score.
:smack:
And Stuffy, I feel for you. The burning of the Bronx stopped a few miles south of me and my neighborhood saw one murder in the nineties–a nephew who shot his uncle over money in his apartment. Even the “bad” neighborhoods had their nicer blocks. But everybody throughout the seventies thought the whole place was Fort Apache.
I’ll vote for Baltimore.
A few years ago, a friend and I went on an imprompto road trip to Washington DC. We had the entire weekend free and neither of us had been to the DC area since we were in our teens.
We’d been correctly advised to be out of downtown DC no later than 5pm on any given day. That being said, DC was actually kind of cool. The sheer number of panhandlers and homeless took some getting used to, but overall it was a pleasant experience. We did a whirlwind tour of the Capitol, the Smithsonian, the Air & Space Museum, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the National Archives, and the Library of Congress.
After having done all that, we still amazingly had some time left before we needed to begin our journey back home (Louisville, KY).
We looked at one another and asked “Ever been to Baltimore?”. The answer was “No” for us both, so off to Baltimore we went. We were always up for new experiences.
We arrived at Baltimore a short time later and found it very easy to get off the Interstate and into Downtown. We found ourselves instantly in a horrible, filthy, and crime-ridden neighborhood. It got very scary very quickly. We figured, OK, there are areas of our city that suck as well, so we should give Baltimore the benefit of the doubt. So we kept driving (we still had a full tank of gas). Block after block after block, it was Desolation Avenue. There was nowhere where the surrounding environment and ambience didn’t suck and didn’t feel unsafe. There was also no easy way to get back onto the Interstate and get the hell away from there. We kept looking for onramps and found none, so we kept driving North. Along the way, we saw the ‘celebrated’ waterfront of Baltimore and wondered just how many drugs you had to do to ever think that the waterfront was a nice place. If you were inclined toward Depression, Baltimore would send you right over the edge. Literally an hour and a half (seemed longer) later, we finally found an onramp near the northeast suburbs.
Heaving a collective sigh of relief, we finally escaped the soul-crushing metropolis of Baltimore. Even today, we ask one another “Want to go to Baltimore?”. Answer: “Not even at gunpoint”.
East Chicago
Related: United States Geography
city (1990 pop. 33,892), Lake co., extreme NW Ind., on Lake Michigan, in the industrialized Calumet region, adjoining Gary, Hammond, and Whiting; inc. 1889. It is a large port, its Indiana Harbor on Lake Michigan connected with the Grand Calumet River by a ship and barge canal. Once busy with steelworks, oil refineries, railroad equipment shops, and chemical plants, the city has declined steadily, losing jobs and population since the 1970s.
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