Worst city center/downtown you've been to?

[Zinneke]

Discuss

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Flint, MI

[Mr. Smith]

Amarillo, TX

[GeorgiaModerate]

BRTD will probably hate me for this, but probably Birmingham.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

BRTD will probably hate me for this, but probably Birmingham.

....

What the hell is wrong with it? What's not to appreciate about the Sloss Furnaces, Birmingham Museum of Art and the many vibrant breweries?

[GeorgiaModerate]

BRTD will probably hate me for this, but probably Birmingham.

....

What the hell is wrong with it? What's not to appreciate about the Sloss Furnaces, Birmingham Museum of Art and the many vibrant breweries?

Well, the last time I was there was probably 35 years ago. I recall it as being shabby with not much interesting to do.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

BRTD will probably hate me for this, but probably Birmingham.

....

What the hell is wrong with it? What's not to appreciate about the Sloss Furnaces, Birmingham Museum of Art and the many vibrant breweries?

Well, the last time I was there was probably 35 years ago. I recall it as being shabby with not much interesting to do.

You should come to Furnace Fest this year! You're much closer than me after all.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Tallahassee, I guess? All the one way streets are grating. I tried to Uber downtown when it was possible because parking was always hard.

[Santander]

Jackson and Trenton are both pretty grim outside the little government area, especially after business hours.

Houston was always incredibly lame, but it's become even worse post-COVID. SLC is quite bad, too, with all the huge streets.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Fort Irwin, CA.

[Crumpets]

Delhi. I was there a few months before the 2010 Commonwealth Games, which became infamous for mismanagement and cost overruns. A bunch of stuff they were trying to do to improve the city was only half done and basically left in a state of disrepair. So, there were many, many sewage pipes that just emptied into open latrines (where a newer pipe was maybe one day supposed to go) that you could smell all over the place. The number of emaciated and probably dead dogs I saw really didn't help either, and that's not even considering everything already associated with Delhi like the slums, the lack of clean tap water, the horrific pollution, and so on.

Now granted, I still had a really good time there, the auto-rickshaws were awesome, seeing a Bollywood movie in an Indian theater was really a new moviegoing experience for me, Chadni Chowk smelled so strongly of so many spices, you really didn't care what else you were smelling, and the flea markets were probably the best I have ever experienced anywhere. Plus, I've heard from people who have been there since 2010 that pretty much all the issues around the half-finished infrastructure projects from that time have been at the very least dramatically improved if not fixed.

Honorable mention to Detroit, but that wasn't the downtown area that was bad, it was the abandoned residential neighborhoods (this was around 2015 when there were still many dilapidated houses that have since been demolished).

[The Dowager Mod]

Houston.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Places that came in way below expectations:

Worst overall census deisgnated place: Washtucna, Washington
Town center: Saguache, Colorado
University town center: Pocatello, Idaho
City center: Montgomery, Alabama
Big/major city center: urban "downtowns" are so manicured that it's hard to really generalize but of those that come to mind Houston was pretty disappointing when I was there

[John Dule]

Any city or town in NOVA.

[Progressive Pessimist]

My own town. It's bisected by two major highways and very much the opposite of quaint.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Honorable mention to Detroit, but that wasn't the downtown area that was bad, it was the abandoned residential neighborhoods (this was around 2015 when there were still many dilapidated houses that have since been demolished).

I visited Detroit once, there's like two or three main downtown streets you are supposed to stay on, and as soon as you get off of one of those it's like I am Legend.  Just eerie abandoned street with trash blowing around in the wind, the only sound is some music blasting at way too high volume from someone's apartment.  Totally colorless, just grey.  Looked like how you imagine the Soviet Union looking.  This was like eight years ago.  I also visited the Renaissance Center and it was just painfully obvious from the inside that it was an unfinished building.  Everything was unfinished concrete, there were stairways and doors that just went to nowhere, completely empty rooms, exposed pipes and wires and construction materials, that kind of thing.

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

Downtown Baltimore.  Nothing against Baltimore, but I groped in a bar there, so don't have any plans to go back anytime soon. 

[holtridge]

Probably Chicago. I have no desire to ever return.

[Blow by blow, the passion dies]

São Paulo

[Fmr. Pres. Duke]

Jackson, MS or Macon, GA. Both were depressing during my brief times there

[Roll Roons]

Niagara Falls, Ontario.

[nicholas.slaydon]

San Jose, California (the city was just so dead) and Buffalo, New York (it looked like a grim place to live from my point of view).

[GM Team Member and Senator WB]

Downtown Baltimore.  Nothing against Baltimore, but I groped in a bar there, so don't have any plans to go back anytime soon.  

having been there for the AMS conference, even in the "safe/bougie" areas of downtown I felt unsafe traveling alone and constantly looked over my back during the mile walk to my hotel from the convention center. One night I tried to stop by CVS for some ibuprofen because of some killer headaches and it turns out they only let like 5 people in at a time then lock the store to prevent theft. Not even the bad parts of NY I visited were that bad. I think I have to agree here.

Tallahassee, I guess? All the one way streets are grating. I tried to Uber downtown when it was possible because parking was always hard.

this is up there too, went for a college tour and left early in part because the whole place reeked of sewage.

adding to the college tour list, Starkville MS felt like stepping into a Klan rally as soon as we left campus for lunch.


of course my old hometown's "downtown" was kinda depressing but it's not a city, so I'm not counting it. At least there it was just kinda a downer rather than outright hostile.

[It’s so Joever]

Of major cities, downtown Indianapolis is pretty meh. Nearly every large city center has stuff to do, but Indianapolis fell flat.

[wnwnwn]

Ica? Very lame
Lima's downtown outskirs are dangerous, but the main touristic areas aren't that much.