We’ve picked up a few Wstern sites since this comment, but it should be noted that nearly the entire industrial revolution and its successor manufacturing period occurred in the Northeast. Air conditioning and the loss of industry has led to the abandoment of many of those towns by a substantial number of citizens and corporations, taking infrastructre supporting revenue with them. In addition, the Interstate Highway system (with the concurrent development of intra-city limited access highways), encouraged their abandonment by people looking for the dream of a house in the suburbs on larger grassy lots, so even when the metropolitan area is doing OK, the core cities are left destitute and crumbling.
This comment on a community resulted in a town hall meeting followed by a nasty email from a lawyer to me:
I removed it from my web page, for it kept popping up first on google searches on that community’s name, much to the affront of the tourist camp operators in that area.
But then everyone would have to go to Butte.
Why do you hate your fellow Dopers?
Laurel, Mississippi. There was a local singer once who wrote a song called “Laurel: A dirty filthy stinking place.” and boy is he right.
West St. Louisian checking in.
Mark me down for E. St. Louis. As someone who has taken a wrong turn and ended up driving through it At the wrong time of night. If I had to describe the place in two words “Shockingly decrepit” wouldn’t do it justice.
Slight nitpick Most of the “Gentlemen” clubs that East St. Louis is famous for are actually in the towns of Sauget and Centreville.
Yup. Perhaps less elegantly: the SouthWest and the West are simply newer, for the most part. (Please… no lectures about the age of Santa Fe…) If/when places like Las Vegas and Phoenix become unsustainable due to energy costs and/or water issues, they could be our next Detroits. In the meantime, Compton, CA, or Oakland for that matter, could already be in the running.
I’m not sure the government could streamline proportionately to the population loss, simply because the geography and infrastructure are still the same size. It’s easy to determine when one has entered Detroit’s city limits… you can usually tell by what rotten shape the pavement is usually in.
FWIW, I’ve never minded Jackson MI all that much… my liberal, literate college roommate and his family live there (and no they’re not natives) and they’ve never voiced these complaints.
For me: another vote for Gary.
Fayettsville N.C., IIRC… Is a horrible place.
My family was robbed there while we passed through on vacation when I was young (broke into our hotel room while we were out and tore apart the place) and every once in a while I hear something on the news about gangs or murders there…
But it might just be that its a city of a good sized population without many cultural events going on… making murders and gangs the only news to come out of the place, even though the rest of the city is public parks and puppy dogs.
I don’t know. Either way I’ll just never stop there for lunch if I’m on the interstate.
The proximity of Fort Bragg accounts for some of the lawlessnees there, I suspect. I’ve heard horror stories, too.
I was born there (at Fort Bragg) and left with my folks to Alabama (their home before all the WWII travels) never to return until 1983. I was in Greensboro on business and decided to drive down to see what it looked like. The base hospital where I was born had been razed and the driving I did around town didn’t do much to stir any neonate memories.
I can’t think of any reason to go back there, but to rise to the level of “worst” it would have to move ahead of other places already mentioned in this thread. Sounds like Gary has a good leg up on the rest.
Yes, to the best of my knowledge, Berks County, PA (that would be the county that Reading is the seat of) is known as the outlet capital of the world.
But, you know, most of the outlet stores I encountered were not actually in Reading, which is actually not that big, but in outlying areas. A friend of mine who is unfortunate enough to still live there tells me that it’s actually West Reading that has most of the outlets, not Reading itself.
See, I don’t get this either. Battle Mountain IS in the middle of nowhere and has nothing of interest (to the best of my knowledge there’s like a Burger King and a 7-11 and that’s it in the way of commodities), but it’s not a bad town. I don’t get the “Armpit of America” designation.
You know, my aforementioned friend who is still unlucky enough to live in Reading, PA - well, one time we went on a trip to see a friend of ours in Yorktown Heights, NY, and we stopped in East Orange for smokes and gas. That was a mistake. Two innocent-looking white girls asking for directions on how to get back to the Garden State Parkway? Yeah, right. I’m amazed we didn’t get raped or murdered. We were lucky to encounter a very nice old black man who worked at an Auto Zone who told us how to get there - and gave us the warning to not stop anywhere until we got there.
So, yeah - East Orange IS worse than Reading in crime rate, but I think Reading still tops it in terms of general suck.
~Tasha
Yeah. I grew up pretty much a town away from Camden (Cherry Hill, which is charmingly named after a shopping mall).
They keep claiming it’s getting better, but Camden has no redeeming qualities. None.
Here’s a brilliant little article from a little over five years ago by the great Gene Weingarten on searching for the Armpit of America.
He says it’s Battle Mountain, Nevada.
Lumpy, Kauffman Stadium is too close to Independence to allow Independence entry into a “worst cities” list. (The baseball team may suck, but the stadium is a thing of beauty.)
I just drove down US 1 into Baltimore, and until I got to where I picked up I-83 into the Inner Harbor, I was thinking that few places could be worse. So many boarded-up, run-down houses…I passed a boarded up building that must have once been grand…some sort of “Education Building” (Board of Ed HQ?) totally abandoned. Baltimore has its better neighborhoods as well, but its slums rank unfavorably with what slums I’ve seen in other cities, including the infamous South Bronx.
In the mid-sized category, I nominate Oklahoma City. While numerous rustbelt cities outrank it in the more concrete terms of pollution, economic malaise, crime, and hopelessness, OKC is on top when it comes to the less tangible aspects of misery. I used to think that most people’s complaints about the USA were exaggerated or unfounded, then I came here. This city is a near-perfect distillation of all the bad parts of American culture, a warped microcosm, if you will. “Highbrow” culture is nearly non-existent. “Lowbrow” culture is either of the Wayne Newton/Riverdance variety, or restricted to a small number of venues and generally on weeknights (the worthwhile bands are just stopping over between real gigs). The food is so appallingly bad it deserves a pitting. The roads are in horrible condition, which is especially distressing considering that the climate isn’t terribly hard on pavement. Most overpasses are literally falling apart and many shudder palpably as traffic passes under them. It’s a minimum 5 hour drive to anywhere good. The schools are terrible, the cost of living is middling, and the taxes are high (not like New York, but ridiculous considering how little service the taxpayers get). The biggest tourist attraction is the federal building bombing memorial. The locals are fat, intolerant, lazy, willfully ignorant, poorly educated, sentimental, crass, self-deluding, fat, provincial, big talkers, wasteful, puerile, dishonest, materialistic, fat, and bad drivers. The most depressing thing is the phoniness of it all: fake cowboys, fake punks, fake moral outrage, fake Hummers, fake hairdos, fake breasts, fake piety. If you like anything besides college sports and country music, save yourself the trouble and go someplace else.
I’d say many, if not all, large cities have some good neighborhoods and some terrible ones. L.A. has always been called “fifty suburbs in search of a city”, and there are many neighborhoods that that describes pretty well. I hate those places and consider them among the worst places to live.
But then there are other places that are vibrant and pedestrian friendly–they’re a whole other animal.
My vote is for New York City.
I think he is truly underestimating the suck-ness of some of Nevada’s towns. Ely, Wells, Jackpot, and Pahrump are all, IMO, a lot worse than Battle Mountain. And then there’s Winnemucca, home of the yearly bedstead races (they literally race beds minus their mattresses and box springs down a hill in the center of town).
If you REALLY want podunk, go to Doyle, Calif. They have one store. It sells only booze and lettuce. They have to drive in to Reno to get toothpaste; hence, many of them do not have many teeth left. The storeowner stared at my sister and I. We couldn’t figure out why until we realized that we were the only still-fertile females in a 50-mile radius.
As you drive into the town there is a sign that says “HOME OF THE WORLD FAMOUS LIZARD RACES.” I was also accosted by an unusually large woman in a brightly-colored muumuu and no shoes, with two teeth, carrying a tomato worm. Her exact words were “Wanna see sumthin’ purty?”
I’d love to say I’m making this shit up, but I’m not.
~Tasha
And we have a winner!
Intrigued, I did some Googling. If this site is any indication, Doyle is one classy town.
The history page is also pretty entertaining. 
One surprising entry (for me at least) is Asbury Park, New Jersey. Nice Jersey coast setting, but the town is a total cesspool. One of the more depressingly empty cities I’ve visited (close to Gary and Camden).
The Wikipedia page have some pictures of the empty town, but I also recommend the links on the bottom of that page.
Some towns in Western Kansas, Western Nebraska, and Eastern Colorado have gone from nice to horrid in just the last 20 years or so. The small farmers and ranchers have been driven off by the corporates, and these towns have sold out to the huge conglomerates to stay alive.
Once busy downtowns are now boarded up, and the towns smell of feedlots. The schools are full of the kids of illegal immigrants, and everyone lives in trailers strewn about randomly. Property values are miniscule. Driving through these places is pretty sad. Garden City, KS is one of the larger examples, and while still OK, is clearly on a downward slide.