Flipside: What is the worst city you ever visited and why?

[dmallind]

218. Most people are picking vast poverty-riddled places

These are indeed grim. I've spent quite a while in Juarez and it's everything most people think, but to me poverty is not the be all and end all of urban blight. I've lived in Buffalo and found it humdrum but not particulary horrible despite swathes of quite shocking decay. I lived just outside East St. Louis for years and yep it's dangerous as hell and squalid. But even crime and poverty fail to make a city truly terrible to me. Crime and poverty can be found in areas of almost all cities after all. No to me the "worst" mantle has to transcend the ubiquitous blight of urban living. It has to have a bloody minded zeitgeist that seems to try to make you miserable, as a city. Not just to have some desperate denizens.

My choice is not particularly poor and not particularly high crime, although it certainly has both. Binghamton NY has a bad start to begin with, in that it has the insane property taxes and hyper-paranoid bureaucracy that dominate the state but has neither the cosmopolitan zest of NYC nor the beauty of the real upstate scenery. It also has the winter weather of upstate NY but seemingly avoids the pleasant fall of places like the Finger Lakes. Grey, endless grey. But all that is just the state and accident of locale. The city itself takes this ball and chain and welds them to several more, starting with a road system designed to frustrate from start to finish. There is but one straight through road in town, and it manages to combine too many stop lights and too few places to turn left - which should be impossible. Then, in a place that gets many feet of snow and solid ice for months, the entrance ramps to the "highways" (they don't actually go anywhere, intended seemingly to take you around the place rather than to it - the highway builders knew something I didn't) are universally roller-coaster level corkscrews. And not just the ramps - there's a 90 degree bend in the highway itself! Needless to say the words "snow plow" are as unfamiliar in town as "professional employment". I have never seen so many "end of 30mph limit" signs anywhere else. Wouldn't it be more informative, simpler, and cheaper to make, signs that told us what the new speed limit is?? And no you can't know by the road type - the fully divided exit-less four lane exiting town has a 35mph stretch for no plausible reason. Every road is not just pothole ridden - you can see and avoid those too easily. They are also surfaced in a bizarre ripple profile that literally has an unsuspecting car bottoming out and then leaving the ground with no warning.

House hunting should be easy in a depressed market and lackluster local economy. Unless that is you want absurd luxuries like sewers, municipal water, gas heat and - holy of holies that is nigh unattainable - central AC. Then you are stuck in one of the two or three newer developments in town - all of which are in floodplains in a place where we had two century-level floods in the brief time I lived there. When you do find a house, surely it's simple enough to get power to that gas and AC you finally found with a phone call like everywhere else, maybe even on-line? Nope - in person only, and with no hours outside 9-4

People on DU often bemoan chain stores and pine for mom and pop alternatives. Binghamton should at least make them happy. That is if they like their mom and pop bar restaurants - not dives mind you, nicer sports bar places - with not just no doors on the bathroom stalls but no dividers beyond 8" of projecting tiles that measures 2' top to bottom. Or if they are fine with no food choices beyond fish fries, pizza and marinated chicken (the local "delicacy&quot . Even Applebees starts to look great after a while. You'd think that at least the absence of recent construction and chain dominance would at least make it charming and eclectic. Nope - endless streets of identical dilapidated featureless square houses converted into apartments, and moribund unimaginative retail clustrered into strip malls guess where - on that no-left turn stoplight nest of course.

Despite being for many years the hub of a massive conglomerate like IBM, Cultural opportunities are limited to a seventh-tier opera company that puts on four student shows a year, golf, and........no that's it. Every single person you meet grew up there, and every single one bemoans the lack of good-paying professional jobs - so guess which demographic left and which one is left? And what conversation does that leave possible but about drunk Jack who was in Mrs. Pollini's class's latest drunken session? If you like parochial ill-educated insular white-bread cliqueism, Binghamton's for you.

But look on the bright side - it's only a bit over an hour to the big city........ of Syracuse. If on the other hand you want to go somewhere where the word ponounced "tie" occasionally has an H in it, it's 200 miles.