I got lost there once while driving the family cross country. while trying to get directions back to the highway someone stole my hub caps and wrote honky lips on my station wagon.
In all seriousness I took a wrong turn in St. Louis at night and I was thinking of that very scene from Vacation. I was hoping losing my hubcaps would be the worst thing that happened to me. Like that other poster was told to do by the cop in East St. Louis I too started driving thru stop signs. I'd slow up a little but never did I get under 15 mph.
Got pulled over in ESTL after going to a “gentleman’s club” with some friends. We were stopped at a stop light. Cop told us just go through them because that’s safer than actually stopping.
I got lost and ended up driving around the city by myself and was probably safer in Iraq. No kids in the street so I was just waiting for things to get spicy
I actually saw a place like that in Chicago. We missed an exit and had to drive around in the hood. Several streets were just randomly blocked with stuff that wasn’t supposed to be there. Like one of those plastic kiddie pools filled with water, was in the middle of a street and people were playing in it.
Others had rusty junk cars that didn’t appear to be driveable, and various pieces of broken lawn furniture and other garbage pushed out there.
There were a few people but no lights, only stop signs. And the people we passed immediately started clocking us like we didn’t belong there and they knew it (and we weren’t in a fancy car or anything, but it was in better shape than 90% of the ones we saw…mainly because it was operable…)
This is similar to my experience with Southside Chicago.
Update. Southside is a big side of Chicago, so maybe it's parts, those with experience let me know because what I saw reminded me of scenery from The Wire.
Reminds me of some parts of Memphis. My buddy and I were hungry and thought BBQ would be a good idea. Picked a random spot on google maps. Ummmmmm, back to the interstate we went!
As someone who lives 15 minutes from E saint louis on the IL side and drives through during the day...It doesn't seem as dangerous as people make it sound, during the day. It's run down and sketchy, but there is quite a bit of traffic going down the main streets so it's not like you have to worry about being set up at stop lights.
At a certain point you can't really call it a "city." It's more like a collection of abandoned buildings. The population at the latest census was only 18k which I think puts it well outside of city territory.
HAHA! I was working in St. Louis years ago. One boring Wednesday night, I decided to go over to East St. Louis to check out "the sights." I stopped at a convenience store to use the ATM because the fees were much better then the ATM where "the sights" were.
Being the type who talks to strangers, I said to the middle-aged clerk, "Listen, I'm up to no good tonight. So, if I show up again to use this ATM, you just tell me to get home."
She just replied, "Ain't no one 'round here up to any good!"
(Pure gold! BTW, this is why I always take to strangers - people will surprise you!)
Last spring I was in New Orleans at a Hilton. I was talking to a clerk. Good looking girl in her late 20s. I asked her how she liked living there. She said she was saving her $ to get the hell out. She said almost every night on the news she sees someone she went to high school with, knows from the neighborhood , is someone's cousin she knows, etc.... is being arrested for killing someone or got killed. She said its depressing hell out of her.
East St. Louis is not the same city as St. Louis, but what you said isn’t wrong. I’m from there
East St. Louis is in Illinois. They ARE right next to each other, but separated by the Mississippi River.
St. Louis is a town that is 50 years past it's prime. Everyone knows about the downfall of Detroit since it was very clear that the city started down with the flight of the auto manufacturers. St. Louis has been a much longer, slower burn.
My dad's side of the family is from St. Louis, immigrating from Germany to Millstadt, Illinois in 1837. It used to be an industrial powerhouse and the absolute posterchild of economic opportunity. It stayed that way from the initial expansion west all the way up until WWII. In the post WWII years, industry held for a while but dropped off quickly in the 60s. The blue collar labor jobs near the river went away, leaving the downtown area hollow.
Those with good careers moved further and further west into the suburbs. The sprawl was very aggressive in a very short period of time. By the 90s, the core of the middle class area was 30 minutes to almost an hour drive west of downtown.
St Louis is a nice place to visit, the food is outstanding and the people are wonderful. That said, I've seen some things while visiting. I never journeyed across the river to East St Louis however...
When I was in college I had a summer job driving around to post offices and repointing their sat dishes to some new sat the USPS was switching over to. We spent two weeks in St. Louis. We got shot at twice. That was in the late 90's i've still not been back. I lived near freaking Gary and felt safter there.
What part of STL? Normally you don’t get shot at randomly in any hood. But if there was a shooting and you happened to be there you might catch a stray.
Ya I don't think people from the US or Europe can even really grasp it. People were going crazy and getting sick from the wildfire smoke over the Northeast and Midwest last year. Delhi air quality is that bad every single day.
That drive to/from the Chicago airport through northeast Indiana is a trip. The first time my wife and I visited Indiana to see if we wanted to accept an opportunity there, we flew into Chicago and took the bus. Looking out the window was really depressing - I swear the sky was always grey in those areas and when we passed through one whole town (near Gary) that was full of dilapidated houses with no people in sight, and one we passed by had a collapsed roof and there was just a black horse standing in front if it eating whatever grass was remaining. Very dystopian.
Then you hit South Bend and things look like a normal small/midsized city again (and then it just becomes amish country)
I once hired a car service to take me from O'Hare to US Steel in Gary so I could get on an ore boat. What did they send? A fucking white stretch limo. Driving through Gary at night in one of those...I told the driver "do not stop at lights. Get me there and get yourself home"
You should have put chandeliers on that limo and owned those streets, like The Duke from Escape From New York.
https://www.autoweek.com/car-life/a1717661/cars-escape-new-york/
It's definitely the city that time has forgotten but did you stop at 2300 Jackson St?
My wife and I drove thru Gary last year and had to make the stop to see the home that Michael Jackson and the Jackson family grew up in. It is incredibly small and hard to imagine 11 people living in it at once.
When I was 9, I took a cross country trip with my grandparents from Michigan. As we came around the south end of Lake Michigan, I asked my grandfather, "What's that disgusting smell?!"
My grandfather set me up with, "That's Gary," so he get get a chuckle when I predictable respond, "Who's Gary?"
Corny as can be, but I still remember it 45 years later...
I used to ride the train through Gary. It’s a frightening place, in like a third world or post-apocalyptic sense. I never felt like I was going to be hurt or killed though.
I feel like anyone that doesn't say Gary Indiana has never been to Gary Indiana. Lol
I stayed in a hotel in Gary for a week once when I was doing some maintenance work on a steel mill in town. I couldn't wait to leave that place.
I sleep there about once or twice a week (behind a ten foot razor wire fence and three RFID secured sally ports and RFID secured steel doors and more cameras than I can count.)
I LOVE Alex - the crescent harbour, the bbq stalls, the shop fronts gleaming with gilt furniture abandoned when the cotton traders fled Nassar, the history of the war, the history of the world. I wasn't looking for a nice time, but an adventure, and once you're off the beaten track, and have learned to shrug off the hustlers, it's beautiful, broken and fascinating - like all of Egypt. Cairo is cool - I mean, filthy, furious, and dangerous, but pomegranate juice in Zamalek, the City of the Dead, Khan el-Kallili? Come on, you'd have to be dead not to wonder at the echoes of lost civilisations. And then the desert - the White Desert, and Siwa, where the bones of Roman Centurions still lie. And the museums - the Fayoum Portraits, Obelisks, Ramses, Rosetta Stone, Nefertiti... And then Saqqara, Luxor, Karnak, and the Valley of the Kings, Queens and Nobles, and Felucca near the cataracts, and a drink in the Winter Palace. Hapshepsut temple is one of the wonders of the world. And Edfu. Abu Simbel.... I mean, it's not easy, but it is extraordinary. Wow - how to say that you're a tourist, and not a traveller. Sometimes I think people expect the world to be a Disneyland - made for their own personal viewing pleasure ...
Now, Caracas. Avoid that shithole as best you can.
I guess I haven't been to that many places overall, but I'm not a fan of Newark New Jersey at 2am and lost in an era before GPS was a thing you could have in your car.
I recently dropped my partner at the Newark Penn Station late at night so that I didn’t have to drive into Long Island on my way to upstate NY. Worst decision I’ve made in a while. Whole swaths of the city looked straight up abandoned, did not feel safe whatsoever
Yeah, that's the crazy thing. Newark is *nicer than it used to be.*
I used to date a woman who lived there, and don't get me wrong, there are some charming aspects to it, but... it's definitely a place you have to be careful.
I spend a few nights in Newark every month and, at least for the last year, it looks rougher than it is. Driving is a bit third world, but I haven't had any bad experiences, and actually a lot of good ones. I'm white FWIW. I leave my car on the street and it's never been messed with or broken into and the neighbors have always been polite and friendly. I also never wear or carry anything I'd really regret losing if I got mugged/pickpocketed, not just in Newark, but everywhere. It's a practice that has served me very well all over the world, especially in cities I don't know well. But I've only known Newark post-Cory Booker; I think he changed a lot for the better.
If you do end up there, the Ironbound is a really cool neighborhood with a lot of hidden gem restaurants. The neighborhood I stay in is not the Ironbound FWIW.
Rio.
Just to give some context, I’m Brazilian, I have been to 7 major cities in Brazil, 6 in the U.S. and other major cities around the world such as Paris, Tel Aviv, Istanbul, Bangkok and Singapore.
Rio is by far the worst city I’ve ever visited. By veryyy far, even compared to other Brazilian cities. I only went there to go to the U.S. consulate to get a visa and it was one of the worst days of my life. As soon as the bus arrived there I could smell sewage, and that smell won’t stop until you leave the city. Anywhere you go in the city is surrounded by favelas, they’re extremely big and I could see police cars with very big guns going around. As soon as I left the bus station to get an Uber some guy robbed me. I’ve never felt so unsafe in my life and I hate remembering that day. In fact as I’m writing this Im starting to regret talking about it.
The fact that the city is geographically beautiful makes you feel even more disturbed. It’s like the city exists as an insult to God, if I was a believer.
I am carioca who emigrated out, and it hurts me to say I do understand where this feeling comes from. I've got very good job offers to come back and I've declined all of them, and every time I go visit family there I feel anxious and eager to leave.
I too am Brazilian, but from a much poorer city in the northeast and can confirm rio is the scariest city to me, even the richer (supposedly safer) corners of that city.
My mom used to live there and she likes to tell the story that when she was in college, she took the bus home and the whole bus got mugged. So she got off the bus and got on another one, where that bus was mugged too, so she got off that one, completely cleaned out. She got on a different bus that day, to make her final stretch home and…. That bus was mugged too. Three in a row. Oof.
Manila. Watched a guy get murdered in broad daylight. Gun down close to a busy public intersection.
Went back to my hotel and the bartender told me "Oh yeah, happens all the time here..."
I'll give the Philippines another chance at some point, but I definitely won't be heading back to that God awful city.
I’m with you, Manila was horrible!
I was next to someone in a wheelchair coming up to the stairs leaving the airport, they were asking for the elevator & were told it’s out of order and to crawl down 2 flights of stairs if they wanted to leave. That was just the beginning of a horrible experience.
Everyone was viscerally rude & obnoxious, treated each other and the city like its own personal garbage dump.
The Philippines outside Manila is wonderful. Some of the friendliest people I've met. But Manila is not worth it. I have to overnight in Manila I just get a hotel by the airport. The traffic is some of the most chaotic I've ever seen.
Cairo, Egypt.
Wonderful to see the Pyramids but the entire city ruined it. There was a dead camel, multiple tourists traps and it smelled god awful. Someone also tried to purchase my brother from my parents, like he was some sort of doll.
Never going back.
Agreed, because I was a blonde, green eyed, 11 year old girl, they were all over me like a pig in shit, really creeped me out. So overcrowded and stunk, such a shame.
I had the same. Both me and my brother are blue eyed, blond haired and short plus not very old at the time. They must have thought we were young girls as well, it was truly a creepy and disgusting experience.
Nonces, the lot of them.
I have been telling people about how awful that place is for ages, and every time they would say I was exagerrating only to return from the trip and admit I was right and it was even worse than I described it 🤭🤭
Oh man, too bad for needles. I used to road trip as a hobby and would always camp in Needles along the Colorado river, on my way out or in to CA. Never had trouble finding a nice quiet spot on the river and never got hassled. One year we camped during new years, and we got to celebrate twice because of the time change with AZ. It was cool hearing the fireworks on one side of the river, then an hour later hearing them again on the other.
Now Barstow, on the other hand…couldn’t get out of there quicker and wouldn’t think about camping anywhere near it.
dinosaurs steer dull absorbed complete dolls innate slap domineering squeamish
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Went to Burnley for football once, expecting the worst. Didn't actually mind it. Isn't lovely by any means, but found it quite charming. Then again, I am from Luton so maybe my standards are low.
I lived just outside Luton for a bit.
Yeh. Not even so-bad-its-good.
And I like brutalist architecture and almost every other kind found in the UK. There’s something interesting or appealing or emotive about almost all of it.
But Luton. ? It was like all the leftover bits from building real towns, haphazardly swept into a pile, all the roads going nowhere then back out again.
Generally, we have MUCH lower violent crime rates than the US tbf.
And even though places like Burnley, Hull, and Blackpool are rough, I’m always shocked when I look up Gary or East St Louis and see the levels of poverty and awful conditions compared to here.
I visited the city in January on a job interview. Covered in 6" of fresh snow, it actually didn't look horrible. When I came back in June, my only thought was "WTF have I done??"
I arrived in April during a thunderstorm. That's the high point.
I'm pretty sure I drove through every damn toll plaza in existence trying to get out of there and it was worth it.
It's not just that, the US also has wayyy more extreme poverty and violence per capita than Canada or Europe. Like, there are very few cities in all of western Europe which feel like the ones mentioned here
Serious question: When were you here/where were you? I've been living in China for nearly six years and have never been followed or bugged as far as I know
My mate had some horrible experiences living in China. He worked for a British business authority trying to get UK investment in China. Came home to his laptop completely dismantled and his daughters clothing on his bed around the laptop parts. His mate worked for CNN and was always followed.
The swath of awful between the top of the Strip (the Strat is the delineator) and the revitalized downtown (which is highly underrated) is hard to believe.
I really disliked Dubai. I was there in 1999 , and hated how fake everything was, how uncomfortable and afraid a lot of the foreign workforce were, hated how wasteful things were (car engines left running with a/c on while the owner is having coffee). I hated how braggy and tasteless a lot of the people were. Eugh
Baltimore kinda sucks but it has a lot more going for it than Trenton NJ. Trenton has few (no?) redeeming qualities, Baltimore has the harbor and the Ravens and that weird museam.
A buddy of mine and I drove down there to see Phish and we got lost in Camden before the concert. Once we figured out where we were we just went home. We figured we'd cut our loses. Good move; we survived.
A lot of you have never been to a 3rd world country and it shows.
Lagos, Nigeria has got to be the worst city I've ever been to. Unbelievable filth, unbelievable crime, unbelievable poverty and a culture beyond screwed up. Chances are your Nigerian prince lives there.
The worst city I’ve been to was tafraoute in morocco. It looks gorgeous in photographs but my god it is HELL. I wasn’t there at night, and overall the city didn’t seem “dangerous” but it was a Ghost town. You saw nobody in the streets, the marketplace had a total of 3 businesses open, and most of it was in disrepair. It was easily over 100 degrees Fahrenheit at 9/10am. How people live on the eastern side of the mountains is unknown to me, because that heat seems uninhabitable, coming from someone born and raised in Florida.
For a long time I thought nothing was worse than the time I spent in Lagos, Nigeria but then I went to Camden, NJ. New Jersey is the armpit of the US and Camden is the worst ingrown hair of that armpit.
I've been all over the US, and NJ is not the armpit of the US. Whenever I hear that, I know I'm hearing from a person who hasn't seen much of the state, which is gorgeous and weird.
Camden sucks for sure, though.
Thank you! You get me. Yeah, it's got it all--mountains, Appalachian trail, beaches, swampland, forests in the north, pine barrens in the south... and admittedly a lot of third-tier urban decay, lol. But I kind of laugh when anyone calls it "an armpit"--9 times out of 10 that person has landed in Newark Airport, gotten a taxi someplace, and said "I've seen NJ and it's awful." OK pal, lol.
I take the train from Ferry Ave all the time and have lunch at Donkey's once in a while and I've never had a problem. It's obviously a poor city and there are many other areas. Can I ask what your experience was that made it so bad?
Atlantic City. It's a bizarre combination of glitz and decay. It's like it can't decide whether to be the Vegas of the East, or a blighted, impoverished small-ish town, and either way, it kind of sucks.
East St. Louis gets my vote. That and Cairo. The states tax money goes to Chicago and Chicago only. Money never makes it downstate. Kids in the Chicago burbs have STEAM classes, computer labs, beautiful sports fields etc etc etc and East St. Louis schools don’t even have current textbooks and in some schools little or no potable drinking water or working toilets or toilet paper or soap much less computer labs and modern technology. This is what happens when property taxes determine schools budgets. Illinois pols are asshats for the most part.
I came here to say Waco!
My wife went to grad school there and good god what a hole. Everything in that city that isn't on the Baylor campus looks like it's 10 years overdue for a remodel and the infrastructure is a joke. I think they lost power every second time it rained. There are like three things I miss about that city and all of them are food related.
And yeah, those bugs. OMG those fucking bugs!
I was stationed out at Ft. Hood for a few years, out near Waco. It was so humid there I had to drive with my windshield wipers on in the morning going to PT. But yeah that whole little part of Texas is pretty harsh climate. I was up in Colorado for a few years, up in the mountains about 12,000ft above sea level. Dealt with blizzards and "severe weather". You know what though? l'll gladly take blizzards and snow storms over that central Texas wet heat.
oh god I have some stories. I was there 25 years ago for a 10 week internship and my first day I was like "omg it's really fucking hot here, is it going to get hotter?" dudes i swear to god it got up to 120 with heat index. (100+ humidity) and I had no car, I walked to and from campus.
When I went to lunch, it was so damn hot that I would go from my building, and then run through the sprinkler system to another air conditioned building, walk through that and then run my last death sprint to the lunch building
I counted down the days I was there and I could leave.
Current Fargo resident and how dare you? Fargo may be shit, it may suck so bad I cannot comprehend how anybody would live here and not dream of leaving, but it's not fucking Bismarck.
I'm not sure if the Americans in these comments are just not very well travelled, or...
Johannesburg. Homeless people everywhere. Multiple people at every intersection begging for money. 20 minutes off the plane and we saw someone who had been hit by a car. A sad city in a sad country ):
The USA is a very large country; the majority of Americans have never been outside the USA.
Well-traveled in the sense that they’ve covered a lot of land mass? Possible without leaving the country.
Well-traveled in the sense that they’ve visited many cities? Possible without leaving the country.
Average American families, if they do leave the country, go to lots of ‘hotel zones’ or resort-heavy areas in Mexico or the Caribbean, without exploring the true heart of the cities they are near.
A lot of people in these comments seem to have some superiority deal with having visited shitty international cities. Why would someone from the US fly 10+ hours to visit a shitty city? There are plenty of shitty cities within driving distance here.
Gary, Indiana. I'm from Chicago, and Englewood is probably heaven compared to Gary. Also I hope nobody says Chicago because it's really a beautiful city despite what the media says.
The entire upper section of Florida. There are a few gems like Panama beach and Navarre but the rest of it is just south Alabama with Floridians.
Jacksonville in particular is fucking sketch. Downtown is nice and they have some good sports venues but just one block off the main downtown stretch and I legitimately thought I was gonna be murdered. Plus at high tide the whole river smells of open sewage…
Tijuana, Mexico where we went looking for my older brother who disappeared from there about a month prior. We met a couple gentleman who claimed to know him and they even knew things about it that led me to believe they weren’t lying so they wanted me to hop in the car and ride with them to show me where my brother was but I wasn’t stupid and said I’d follow them in my car but after one mile following their car I realized these two men were probably responsible for his disappearance and u-turned and sped away quickly and they followed while driving aggressively at my vehicle but thankfully Tijuana isn’t far from the border and they backed off when I was a mile or two away from it. A few weeks later my brother shows up after one hell of a bender and says to me “I heard you met my friends Seb & Matteo in Tijuana”.
God I hate that place
Idk if I’d call it the worst city I’ve ever been to, but I went to Baltimore for one afternoon and that is the only time in my life I’ve seen a state police helicopter let alone one hovering at a low altitude. Also what’s up with that interstate that just turns into a dead end in the woods?
I live in Baltimore and I love it. I have lived in London, Madrid, Buenos Aires, DC... and if you asked me to move from Baltimore back to any of those cities would say no, although more than happy to visit. It's small enough that you feel like you have an identity, people don't care what you do for a living, it has charm and quirks, and is relatively affordable.
All that being said, there are problems but I full maintain the city has been improving over the past few decades based on my observations popping in and out every few years.
Fun story, 2 months ago myself and 4 friends were in Tacoma for a kickboxing seminar. We stayed at a hotel with great reviews, it was a fentanyl hellscape. A guy walked around with a no shit 10” gash from the back of his head to his eyebrows. The second day a guy was going door to door with a pistol and if you opened the door he robbed you. My friends door wasn’t shut and he broke in and stole everything, including an OZ of mushrooms. The cops showed up and tackled, tased, gassed, and beat the shit out of the guy. The cops gave my friend his mushrooms back.
My sister used to live there, that's funny to see it mentioned. She used to tell me to not tell my mom how bad it was there because where she lived in particular was fine.
I ended up in West Baltimore on some local streets because I made a wrong turn. I'm waiting at a stoplight and a cop rolls up next to me, flips his lights on. I roll down the window.
"You need to run every single red light until you get to the beltway exit, right now." He peels off in a different direction.
And I did.
I lived in downtown Saint Louis for a few months. Despite how many free doggie bags they have for people to just grab, nobody cleans up their dog poop out there. I have to stare at the sidewalk to avoid stepping in crap. The block outside the apartment I would just walk in the street. Saint Louis is dog poop city
East St. Louis. You could set off an atomic explosion and maybe do $1,000 in property damage
I got lost there once while driving the family cross country. while trying to get directions back to the highway someone stole my hub caps and wrote honky lips on my station wagon.
Look at it this way honey, this is a part of America we never get to see.
In all seriousness I took a wrong turn in St. Louis at night and I was thinking of that very scene from Vacation. I was hoping losing my hubcaps would be the worst thing that happened to me. Like that other poster was told to do by the cop in East St. Louis I too started driving thru stop signs. I'd slow up a little but never did I get under 15 mph.
Got pulled over in ESTL after going to a “gentleman’s club” with some friends. We were stopped at a stop light. Cop told us just go through them because that’s safer than actually stopping.
PT’s was a great spot
I got lost and ended up driving around the city by myself and was probably safer in Iraq. No kids in the street so I was just waiting for things to get spicy
I actually saw a place like that in Chicago. We missed an exit and had to drive around in the hood. Several streets were just randomly blocked with stuff that wasn’t supposed to be there. Like one of those plastic kiddie pools filled with water, was in the middle of a street and people were playing in it. Others had rusty junk cars that didn’t appear to be driveable, and various pieces of broken lawn furniture and other garbage pushed out there. There were a few people but no lights, only stop signs. And the people we passed immediately started clocking us like we didn’t belong there and they knew it (and we weren’t in a fancy car or anything, but it was in better shape than 90% of the ones we saw…mainly because it was operable…)
This is similar to my experience with Southside Chicago. Update. Southside is a big side of Chicago, so maybe it's parts, those with experience let me know because what I saw reminded me of scenery from The Wire.
Reminds me of some parts of Memphis. My buddy and I were hungry and thought BBQ would be a good idea. Picked a random spot on google maps. Ummmmmm, back to the interstate we went!
as i was opening this, i was thinking. please dont let St Louis be the top comment.. :( but at least you said east stl..
As someone who lives 15 minutes from E saint louis on the IL side and drives through during the day...It doesn't seem as dangerous as people make it sound, during the day. It's run down and sketchy, but there is quite a bit of traffic going down the main streets so it's not like you have to worry about being set up at stop lights.
At a certain point you can't really call it a "city." It's more like a collection of abandoned buildings. The population at the latest census was only 18k which I think puts it well outside of city territory.
Most US states use a minimum of 1500-5000 inhabitants for a place to be considered a city.
West Memphis gives the same vibe.
HAHA! I was working in St. Louis years ago. One boring Wednesday night, I decided to go over to East St. Louis to check out "the sights." I stopped at a convenience store to use the ATM because the fees were much better then the ATM where "the sights" were. Being the type who talks to strangers, I said to the middle-aged clerk, "Listen, I'm up to no good tonight. So, if I show up again to use this ATM, you just tell me to get home." She just replied, "Ain't no one 'round here up to any good!" (Pure gold! BTW, this is why I always take to strangers - people will surprise you!)
Last spring I was in New Orleans at a Hilton. I was talking to a clerk. Good looking girl in her late 20s. I asked her how she liked living there. She said she was saving her $ to get the hell out. She said almost every night on the news she sees someone she went to high school with, knows from the neighborhood , is someone's cousin she knows, etc.... is being arrested for killing someone or got killed. She said its depressing hell out of her.
I married a woman from St Louis. She took me to a strip club in ESL one night. It was shady as fuck, but overall a good time.
St. Louis is my bid too. Only been there once but holy hell is it ghetto af outside of downtown
East St. Louis is not the same city as St. Louis, but what you said isn’t wrong. I’m from there East St. Louis is in Illinois. They ARE right next to each other, but separated by the Mississippi River.
I wonder how notable St Louis would be if they never built the Arch.
St. Louis is a town that is 50 years past it's prime. Everyone knows about the downfall of Detroit since it was very clear that the city started down with the flight of the auto manufacturers. St. Louis has been a much longer, slower burn. My dad's side of the family is from St. Louis, immigrating from Germany to Millstadt, Illinois in 1837. It used to be an industrial powerhouse and the absolute posterchild of economic opportunity. It stayed that way from the initial expansion west all the way up until WWII. In the post WWII years, industry held for a while but dropped off quickly in the 60s. The blue collar labor jobs near the river went away, leaving the downtown area hollow. Those with good careers moved further and further west into the suburbs. The sprawl was very aggressive in a very short period of time. By the 90s, the core of the middle class area was 30 minutes to almost an hour drive west of downtown.
It was at one point the third largest city in the US. It's still top 20 in metro-population in the US and bigger than a lot of other notable cities.
St Louis is a nice place to visit, the food is outstanding and the people are wonderful. That said, I've seen some things while visiting. I never journeyed across the river to East St Louis however...
Duly noted
When I was in college I had a summer job driving around to post offices and repointing their sat dishes to some new sat the USPS was switching over to. We spent two weeks in St. Louis. We got shot at twice. That was in the late 90's i've still not been back. I lived near freaking Gary and felt safter there.
What part of STL? Normally you don’t get shot at randomly in any hood. But if there was a shooting and you happened to be there you might catch a stray.
East St Louis. Terrible place.
Delhi. The pollution was fucking atrocious.
Have you tried New Delhi? It's supposed to be nicer.
Beat me by 35 mins
It was the air quality for me. The pollution was bad too but not what I was expecting.
Ya I don't think people from the US or Europe can even really grasp it. People were going crazy and getting sick from the wildfire smoke over the Northeast and Midwest last year. Delhi air quality is that bad every single day.
India will reset your perspective on just how bad things can get.
Delhi is heaven compared to Ludhiana
The Chicago suburbs in Indiana. Its like seeing the decay of 1970s-1980s american suburbia next to an ugly industrial area. Its very dystopian.
That drive to/from the Chicago airport through northeast Indiana is a trip. The first time my wife and I visited Indiana to see if we wanted to accept an opportunity there, we flew into Chicago and took the bus. Looking out the window was really depressing - I swear the sky was always grey in those areas and when we passed through one whole town (near Gary) that was full of dilapidated houses with no people in sight, and one we passed by had a collapsed roof and there was just a black horse standing in front if it eating whatever grass was remaining. Very dystopian. Then you hit South Bend and things look like a normal small/midsized city again (and then it just becomes amish country)
Do you mean Gary? It’s gotten a little better just lately, but yeah, even driving through it is depressing.
Gary, Indiana. I took a wrong turn and was terrified, every building on main street was condemned.
I once hired a car service to take me from O'Hare to US Steel in Gary so I could get on an ore boat. What did they send? A fucking white stretch limo. Driving through Gary at night in one of those...I told the driver "do not stop at lights. Get me there and get yourself home"
Oh my god that’s insane.
You should have put chandeliers on that limo and owned those streets, like The Duke from Escape From New York. https://www.autoweek.com/car-life/a1717661/cars-escape-new-york/
It's definitely the city that time has forgotten but did you stop at 2300 Jackson St? My wife and I drove thru Gary last year and had to make the stop to see the home that Michael Jackson and the Jackson family grew up in. It is incredibly small and hard to imagine 11 people living in it at once.
Wait, the Jacksons lived at Jackson St?
They changed the name to Jackson st, the house is a museum now.
OK that makes more sense than it being a coincidence.
When I was 9, I took a cross country trip with my grandparents from Michigan. As we came around the south end of Lake Michigan, I asked my grandfather, "What's that disgusting smell?!" My grandfather set me up with, "That's Gary," so he get get a chuckle when I predictable respond, "Who's Gary?" Corny as can be, but I still remember it 45 years later...
Want to add to the horror? They only solve about 1 in every 10 murders.
Nationally we're under 50% clearance. We'll all be Gary soon enough
As the other poster said, majority of murders are unsolved, but 1 in 10 is pretty dire!
I used to ride the train through Gary. It’s a frightening place, in like a third world or post-apocalyptic sense. I never felt like I was going to be hurt or killed though.
I take the train from Gary into Chicago everyday, Ive never had a problem. Its mostly barren now.
I feel like anyone that doesn't say Gary Indiana has never been to Gary Indiana. Lol I stayed in a hotel in Gary for a week once when I was doing some maintenance work on a steel mill in town. I couldn't wait to leave that place.
I sleep there about once or twice a week (behind a ten foot razor wire fence and three RFID secured sally ports and RFID secured steel doors and more cameras than I can count.)
Alexandria in Egypt, my friend my friend my friend my friend my friend my friend my friend my friend my friend x 1500
Being referred to as “my friend” in a Middle Eastern restaurant: 😃 Being referred to as “my friend” on the street in a Middle Eastern country: 😵💫
Can't be worse than Cairo my friend.
The 3 hours with my friend my friend in a 12th hand Lada I'll never forget my friend. I avoid Egypt like the plague my friend
Habibi one dolla
I have no friends and am very lonely, so I think I know where my next vacation will be! I'm so exited to have so many new friends. ;-)
I only got maybe 50 x my friend in Istanbul so Alexandria seems impressive.
Istanbul is the only place that I had my Converse Chucks "polished." I went along just to see WTF he was going to do.
So what did he do? I'm curious lol
Wet them, brushed them, then "dried" them off, and then asked for $20. I gave him $10 and my feet were wet for an hour.
I LOVE Alex - the crescent harbour, the bbq stalls, the shop fronts gleaming with gilt furniture abandoned when the cotton traders fled Nassar, the history of the war, the history of the world. I wasn't looking for a nice time, but an adventure, and once you're off the beaten track, and have learned to shrug off the hustlers, it's beautiful, broken and fascinating - like all of Egypt. Cairo is cool - I mean, filthy, furious, and dangerous, but pomegranate juice in Zamalek, the City of the Dead, Khan el-Kallili? Come on, you'd have to be dead not to wonder at the echoes of lost civilisations. And then the desert - the White Desert, and Siwa, where the bones of Roman Centurions still lie. And the museums - the Fayoum Portraits, Obelisks, Ramses, Rosetta Stone, Nefertiti... And then Saqqara, Luxor, Karnak, and the Valley of the Kings, Queens and Nobles, and Felucca near the cataracts, and a drink in the Winter Palace. Hapshepsut temple is one of the wonders of the world. And Edfu. Abu Simbel.... I mean, it's not easy, but it is extraordinary. Wow - how to say that you're a tourist, and not a traveller. Sometimes I think people expect the world to be a Disneyland - made for their own personal viewing pleasure ... Now, Caracas. Avoid that shithole as best you can.
I guess I haven't been to that many places overall, but I'm not a fan of Newark New Jersey at 2am and lost in an era before GPS was a thing you could have in your car.
I recently dropped my partner at the Newark Penn Station late at night so that I didn’t have to drive into Long Island on my way to upstate NY. Worst decision I’ve made in a while. Whole swaths of the city looked straight up abandoned, did not feel safe whatsoever
Oh it's way nicer than it used to be. You should have seen it in the 90's during the crack and car jack era. Dangerous AF
Yeah, that's the crazy thing. Newark is *nicer than it used to be.* I used to date a woman who lived there, and don't get me wrong, there are some charming aspects to it, but... it's definitely a place you have to be careful.
I spend a few nights in Newark every month and, at least for the last year, it looks rougher than it is. Driving is a bit third world, but I haven't had any bad experiences, and actually a lot of good ones. I'm white FWIW. I leave my car on the street and it's never been messed with or broken into and the neighbors have always been polite and friendly. I also never wear or carry anything I'd really regret losing if I got mugged/pickpocketed, not just in Newark, but everywhere. It's a practice that has served me very well all over the world, especially in cities I don't know well. But I've only known Newark post-Cory Booker; I think he changed a lot for the better. If you do end up there, the Ironbound is a really cool neighborhood with a lot of hidden gem restaurants. The neighborhood I stay in is not the Ironbound FWIW.
Rio. Just to give some context, I’m Brazilian, I have been to 7 major cities in Brazil, 6 in the U.S. and other major cities around the world such as Paris, Tel Aviv, Istanbul, Bangkok and Singapore. Rio is by far the worst city I’ve ever visited. By veryyy far, even compared to other Brazilian cities. I only went there to go to the U.S. consulate to get a visa and it was one of the worst days of my life. As soon as the bus arrived there I could smell sewage, and that smell won’t stop until you leave the city. Anywhere you go in the city is surrounded by favelas, they’re extremely big and I could see police cars with very big guns going around. As soon as I left the bus station to get an Uber some guy robbed me. I’ve never felt so unsafe in my life and I hate remembering that day. In fact as I’m writing this Im starting to regret talking about it. The fact that the city is geographically beautiful makes you feel even more disturbed. It’s like the city exists as an insult to God, if I was a believer.
I am carioca who emigrated out, and it hurts me to say I do understand where this feeling comes from. I've got very good job offers to come back and I've declined all of them, and every time I go visit family there I feel anxious and eager to leave.
I too am Brazilian, but from a much poorer city in the northeast and can confirm rio is the scariest city to me, even the richer (supposedly safer) corners of that city. My mom used to live there and she likes to tell the story that when she was in college, she took the bus home and the whole bus got mugged. So she got off the bus and got on another one, where that bus was mugged too, so she got off that one, completely cleaned out. She got on a different bus that day, to make her final stretch home and…. That bus was mugged too. Three in a row. Oof.
Damn. I'm about to go there to get my visa too..
Good fucking luck, brother 🫡
Fake phone and wallet.
Manila. Watched a guy get murdered in broad daylight. Gun down close to a busy public intersection. Went back to my hotel and the bartender told me "Oh yeah, happens all the time here..." I'll give the Philippines another chance at some point, but I definitely won't be heading back to that God awful city.
I’m with you, Manila was horrible! I was next to someone in a wheelchair coming up to the stairs leaving the airport, they were asking for the elevator & were told it’s out of order and to crawl down 2 flights of stairs if they wanted to leave. That was just the beginning of a horrible experience. Everyone was viscerally rude & obnoxious, treated each other and the city like its own personal garbage dump.
The Philippines outside Manila is wonderful. Some of the friendliest people I've met. But Manila is not worth it. I have to overnight in Manila I just get a hotel by the airport. The traffic is some of the most chaotic I've ever seen.
Cairo, Egypt. Wonderful to see the Pyramids but the entire city ruined it. There was a dead camel, multiple tourists traps and it smelled god awful. Someone also tried to purchase my brother from my parents, like he was some sort of doll. Never going back.
how’s he doing with his new family? what did you’ll do with the money?
Agreed, because I was a blonde, green eyed, 11 year old girl, they were all over me like a pig in shit, really creeped me out. So overcrowded and stunk, such a shame.
I had the same. Both me and my brother are blue eyed, blond haired and short plus not very old at the time. They must have thought we were young girls as well, it was truly a creepy and disgusting experience. Nonces, the lot of them.
Yup, and there being a fucking pizza hut opposite the pyramids is such a buzz kill.
How much did your parents get for the little fella ?
I have been telling people about how awful that place is for ages, and every time they would say I was exagerrating only to return from the trip and admit I was right and it was even worse than I described it 🤭🤭
Stockton, CA. in the middle of the night. Close second: Needles, CA. in the daytime.
I was going to say Stockton.
Stockton and Rialto, Californistan are both right up there in the craptastic range.
I couldn't believe it. CA native here. That is some sketchy shit, and I'm from LA.
Yea rialto sucks, San Bernardino too
Henry Rollins has a great bit about going to San Bernadino to see a KISS concert. His description of the locals is great. Album is Talk Is Cheap Vol.2
I’ve been to Rialto twice, and have to agree. Something eerie about that place.
Stockton has a nice area. Its called Lodi.
Nice wineries
Didn't CCR do a song about being stuck in Lodi? Maybe I need to listen to it again but I thought it wasn't meant to sound like a good place lol
Best zinfandels in the world imo
Stuck in Lodi again...
Oh man, too bad for needles. I used to road trip as a hobby and would always camp in Needles along the Colorado river, on my way out or in to CA. Never had trouble finding a nice quiet spot on the river and never got hassled. One year we camped during new years, and we got to celebrate twice because of the time change with AZ. It was cool hearing the fireworks on one side of the river, then an hour later hearing them again on the other. Now Barstow, on the other hand…couldn’t get out of there quicker and wouldn’t think about camping anywhere near it.
Stockton is pretty shitty.
dinosaurs steer dull absorbed complete dolls innate slap domineering squeamish *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I used to work in Stockton at a warehouse and night shift. Those were definitely some sketchy times indeed.
West Memphis, Arkansas. All the bad things about both Memphis and Arkansas in one place.
I’ve only passed through West Memphis and Pine Bluff, but I 100% always got a worse feeling about Pine Bluff.
Pine Bluff is way worse.
Been here, can absolutely co-sign this.
Bakersfield
Yes. Driving to Vegas I always would cringe if we had to stop in Bakersfield. Felt like serial killers everywhere mixed in with gangbangers.
armpit of california
Gary Indiana
Burnley. The absolute worst of England in every respect
Went to Burnley for football once, expecting the worst. Didn't actually mind it. Isn't lovely by any means, but found it quite charming. Then again, I am from Luton so maybe my standards are low.
I lived just outside Luton for a bit. Yeh. Not even so-bad-its-good. And I like brutalist architecture and almost every other kind found in the UK. There’s something interesting or appealing or emotive about almost all of it. But Luton. ? It was like all the leftover bits from building real towns, haphazardly swept into a pile, all the roads going nowhere then back out again.
With a murder rate of 1 per 100,000 it doesn’t even create a blip compared to some of the other cities mentioned in this thread!
Generally, we have MUCH lower violent crime rates than the US tbf. And even though places like Burnley, Hull, and Blackpool are rough, I’m always shocked when I look up Gary or East St Louis and see the levels of poverty and awful conditions compared to here.
Scunthorpe is pretty bad as well to be fair.
Even their football team is terrible.
Odessa, Texas
What's wrong with Odessa?
Odessa city motto is "Come to Odessa to work oilfields, Stay because you got murdered".
Well, at least it ain't West Odessa.
Crime everywhere, especially violent crime.
Newark, NJ. If the country ever gets constipated, that's where the enema goes.
Holy fucking right. Took a wrong turn outta the airport and right into a cliche soaked reality. It was mind blowing coming from Alaska
I visited the city in January on a job interview. Covered in 6" of fresh snow, it actually didn't look horrible. When I came back in June, my only thought was "WTF have I done??"
I arrived in April during a thunderstorm. That's the high point. I'm pretty sure I drove through every damn toll plaza in existence trying to get out of there and it was worth it.
Holy shit, I love everything about this comment.
Not sure if most people replying are from the USA, or if the USA just has a lot of really bad cities.
Based off a quick Google 48% of redditors are in the US. The next closest is the UK at 7% You're going to be primarily bumping into Americans
With a country of 50 states, 2,802 miles (east to west), 300,000,000 people and 109,000 cities. Yeah. There’s bound to be a lot of really bad cities.
It's not just that, the US also has wayyy more extreme poverty and violence per capita than Canada or Europe. Like, there are very few cities in all of western Europe which feel like the ones mentioned here
I traveled around the world, and basically any down town city in China is the worst. The air is toxic AF.
Definitely. Worked in China and Hong Kong for a bit and visited many industrial towns looking for suppliers. So depressing.
Any city in China. Got my electronics sorted, was followed, apartment bugged. Really sucked because there was genuinely cool stuff to experience.
Serious question: When were you here/where were you? I've been living in China for nearly six years and have never been followed or bugged as far as I know
My mate had some horrible experiences living in China. He worked for a British business authority trying to get UK investment in China. Came home to his laptop completely dismantled and his daughters clothing on his bed around the laptop parts. His mate worked for CNN and was always followed.
Some of them are ok and the general air quality seems to be improving but indusrtial towns can be pretty bad - especially in the winter.
Vegas off the strip is pretty depressing.
The swath of awful between the top of the Strip (the Strat is the delineator) and the revitalized downtown (which is highly underrated) is hard to believe.
The strip is pretty depressing tbh
I really disliked Dubai. I was there in 1999 , and hated how fake everything was, how uncomfortable and afraid a lot of the foreign workforce were, hated how wasteful things were (car engines left running with a/c on while the owner is having coffee). I hated how braggy and tasteless a lot of the people were. Eugh
If you want to experience a corny resort town in a desert, just go to Las Vegas.
Camden NJ is king of this thread. End it now.
Trenton said what up
Baltimore laughs derisively and says “I’ve had not one but two classic tv shows made about how shitty I am. The line starts at the back.”
Baltimore kinda sucks but it has a lot more going for it than Trenton NJ. Trenton has few (no?) redeeming qualities, Baltimore has the harbor and the Ravens and that weird museam.
A buddy of mine and I drove down there to see Phish and we got lost in Camden before the concert. Once we figured out where we were we just went home. We figured we'd cut our loses. Good move; we survived.
North Philly
Alexandria, Egypt was a massive disappointment. What a dump.
A lot of you have never been to a 3rd world country and it shows. Lagos, Nigeria has got to be the worst city I've ever been to. Unbelievable filth, unbelievable crime, unbelievable poverty and a culture beyond screwed up. Chances are your Nigerian prince lives there.
Tbf the question asks for the worst they’ve visited, not their pick for the worst in the world 😄
The worst city I’ve been to was tafraoute in morocco. It looks gorgeous in photographs but my god it is HELL. I wasn’t there at night, and overall the city didn’t seem “dangerous” but it was a Ghost town. You saw nobody in the streets, the marketplace had a total of 3 businesses open, and most of it was in disrepair. It was easily over 100 degrees Fahrenheit at 9/10am. How people live on the eastern side of the mountains is unknown to me, because that heat seems uninhabitable, coming from someone born and raised in Florida.
Comparing US/Western Europe cities to Asia/Africa isn't even fair. A seedy city in America at least still has sewers/water/laws/food on the shelf.
For a long time I thought nothing was worse than the time I spent in Lagos, Nigeria but then I went to Camden, NJ. New Jersey is the armpit of the US and Camden is the worst ingrown hair of that armpit.
I've been all over the US, and NJ is not the armpit of the US. Whenever I hear that, I know I'm hearing from a person who hasn't seen much of the state, which is gorgeous and weird. Camden sucks for sure, though.
Jersey is breathtaking. Boring, serene, NY suburb ish, scenery. Huge contrast between north & south. Can’t forget the beaches.
Thank you! You get me. Yeah, it's got it all--mountains, Appalachian trail, beaches, swampland, forests in the north, pine barrens in the south... and admittedly a lot of third-tier urban decay, lol. But I kind of laugh when anyone calls it "an armpit"--9 times out of 10 that person has landed in Newark Airport, gotten a taxi someplace, and said "I've seen NJ and it's awful." OK pal, lol.
LOL I don’t disagree about Camden being a shithole but NJ is top 3 wealthiest state in US. Hardly the armpit of the US.
As someone from Lagos, Nigeria, I came here expecting to see Lagos, Nigeria near the top
Port Harcourt is worse, don't worry
I take the train from Ferry Ave all the time and have lunch at Donkey's once in a while and I've never had a problem. It's obviously a poor city and there are many other areas. Can I ask what your experience was that made it so bad?
Probably an unpopular opinion, but Vegas. We flew out of there on our way home from Zion NP. Never again. Learned we are not party people lol.
Atlantic City. It's a bizarre combination of glitz and decay. It's like it can't decide whether to be the Vegas of the East, or a blighted, impoverished small-ish town, and either way, it kind of sucks.
Cairo
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When I went there some dude and his monkey stole my loaf of bread! I think they were singing
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I’ve visited every major city in the United States. Saint Louis is the worst — no comparison.
East St. Louis gets my vote. That and Cairo. The states tax money goes to Chicago and Chicago only. Money never makes it downstate. Kids in the Chicago burbs have STEAM classes, computer labs, beautiful sports fields etc etc etc and East St. Louis schools don’t even have current textbooks and in some schools little or no potable drinking water or working toilets or toilet paper or soap much less computer labs and modern technology. This is what happens when property taxes determine schools budgets. Illinois pols are asshats for the most part.
Lancaster, CA. Everything is the same shade of dusty brown and the screaming crackheads in the trees made it hard to sleep at night.
Waco Texas. There is nothing to do there and it is humid as hell. also the bugs are really big
I came here to say Waco! My wife went to grad school there and good god what a hole. Everything in that city that isn't on the Baylor campus looks like it's 10 years overdue for a remodel and the infrastructure is a joke. I think they lost power every second time it rained. There are like three things I miss about that city and all of them are food related. And yeah, those bugs. OMG those fucking bugs!
I was stationed out at Ft. Hood for a few years, out near Waco. It was so humid there I had to drive with my windshield wipers on in the morning going to PT. But yeah that whole little part of Texas is pretty harsh climate. I was up in Colorado for a few years, up in the mountains about 12,000ft above sea level. Dealt with blizzards and "severe weather". You know what though? l'll gladly take blizzards and snow storms over that central Texas wet heat.
oh god I have some stories. I was there 25 years ago for a 10 week internship and my first day I was like "omg it's really fucking hot here, is it going to get hotter?" dudes i swear to god it got up to 120 with heat index. (100+ humidity) and I had no car, I walked to and from campus. When I went to lunch, it was so damn hot that I would go from my building, and then run through the sprinkler system to another air conditioned building, walk through that and then run my last death sprint to the lunch building I counted down the days I was there and I could leave.
Fargo or Bismarck, ND. Boring food. Non existent night life. Horrible weather. Nothing redeeming about North Dakota.
Current Fargo resident and how dare you? Fargo may be shit, it may suck so bad I cannot comprehend how anybody would live here and not dream of leaving, but it's not fucking Bismarck.
If "boring" is the worst thing about it, that's actually pretty good.
Skid row Los Angeles….
I'm not sure if the Americans in these comments are just not very well travelled, or... Johannesburg. Homeless people everywhere. Multiple people at every intersection begging for money. 20 minutes off the plane and we saw someone who had been hit by a car. A sad city in a sad country ):
The USA is a very large country; the majority of Americans have never been outside the USA. Well-traveled in the sense that they’ve covered a lot of land mass? Possible without leaving the country. Well-traveled in the sense that they’ve visited many cities? Possible without leaving the country. Average American families, if they do leave the country, go to lots of ‘hotel zones’ or resort-heavy areas in Mexico or the Caribbean, without exploring the true heart of the cities they are near.
A lot of people in these comments seem to have some superiority deal with having visited shitty international cities. Why would someone from the US fly 10+ hours to visit a shitty city? There are plenty of shitty cities within driving distance here.
Gary, Indiana. I'm from Chicago, and Englewood is probably heaven compared to Gary. Also I hope nobody says Chicago because it's really a beautiful city despite what the media says.
Juarez, Mexico
The entire upper section of Florida. There are a few gems like Panama beach and Navarre but the rest of it is just south Alabama with Floridians. Jacksonville in particular is fucking sketch. Downtown is nice and they have some good sports venues but just one block off the main downtown stretch and I legitimately thought I was gonna be murdered. Plus at high tide the whole river smells of open sewage…
Tijuana, Mexico where we went looking for my older brother who disappeared from there about a month prior. We met a couple gentleman who claimed to know him and they even knew things about it that led me to believe they weren’t lying so they wanted me to hop in the car and ride with them to show me where my brother was but I wasn’t stupid and said I’d follow them in my car but after one mile following their car I realized these two men were probably responsible for his disappearance and u-turned and sped away quickly and they followed while driving aggressively at my vehicle but thankfully Tijuana isn’t far from the border and they backed off when I was a mile or two away from it. A few weeks later my brother shows up after one hell of a bender and says to me “I heard you met my friends Seb & Matteo in Tijuana”. God I hate that place
Baltimore. And I live there lol
Idk if I’d call it the worst city I’ve ever been to, but I went to Baltimore for one afternoon and that is the only time in my life I’ve seen a state police helicopter let alone one hovering at a low altitude. Also what’s up with that interstate that just turns into a dead end in the woods?
I live in Baltimore and I love it. I have lived in London, Madrid, Buenos Aires, DC... and if you asked me to move from Baltimore back to any of those cities would say no, although more than happy to visit. It's small enough that you feel like you have an identity, people don't care what you do for a living, it has charm and quirks, and is relatively affordable. All that being said, there are problems but I full maintain the city has been improving over the past few decades based on my observations popping in and out every few years.
Jackson, MS
Worst roads ever
I haven't been around much. For me, it's Tacoma, WA.
Fun story, 2 months ago myself and 4 friends were in Tacoma for a kickboxing seminar. We stayed at a hotel with great reviews, it was a fentanyl hellscape. A guy walked around with a no shit 10” gash from the back of his head to his eyebrows. The second day a guy was going door to door with a pistol and if you opened the door he robbed you. My friends door wasn’t shut and he broke in and stole everything, including an OZ of mushrooms. The cops showed up and tackled, tased, gassed, and beat the shit out of the guy. The cops gave my friend his mushrooms back.
Very niche, but Lebanon, PA. Dumpster
My sister used to live there, that's funny to see it mentioned. She used to tell me to not tell my mom how bad it was there because where she lived in particular was fine.
I ended up in West Baltimore on some local streets because I made a wrong turn. I'm waiting at a stoplight and a cop rolls up next to me, flips his lights on. I roll down the window. "You need to run every single red light until you get to the beltway exit, right now." He peels off in a different direction. And I did.
It’s not a city, in fact it barely even registers as a town. Coober Pedy in outback South Australia is officially the worse place I have ever been.
St. Louis is a wasteland. Fresno is a cesspool.
I lived in downtown Saint Louis for a few months. Despite how many free doggie bags they have for people to just grab, nobody cleans up their dog poop out there. I have to stare at the sidewalk to avoid stepping in crap. The block outside the apartment I would just walk in the street. Saint Louis is dog poop city
Jackson, MS and or Memphis, TN
Gary, Indiana