October 14, 2004

• Here in Wilmington, North Carolina, the bad part of town is probably the north side. Not so coincidentally, that would be the part of town that is furthest from the expensive oceanfront property. As almost all cities are built next to water, I would guess that the bad part of town is the part furthest from the water if the water is swimmable/boatable. If the water is not, then the bad part of town is probably closer to the water.
• Austin - everyone tells me the East Side of town is the bad side.
• The town I live in now is too small to have a bad side, but I grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, where the east end was the bad side of town (very industrial, 2 steel mills) and the west end was relatively posh (where the University is located), so I guess it fits the theory.
• well, I live in Oakland, CA. anyone in the Bay Area can tell you that the term "West Oakland" is/(was) synonymous with scary/ghetto/crime/blight stereotypes. I live in West Oakland. some of those stereotypes are true, for some parts of West Oakland (I live on a very nice block) however, anyone in Oakland can also tell you that East Oakland is way worse. the notorious district 5 of "Oakland is murder capital" fame, is East Oakland. thus seeming to support your theory, moneyjane
• Small town Hannibal,Mo. *America's Hometown*, it's the south side that is the bad side. In my hometown it was the west side of town that was *across the tracks* meaning the wrong side of the tracks.
• Mont-Laurier, Québec, bad side is North. But Montreal's Côte-des-neiges & Notre-Dame-de-Grace are/were pretty seedy & westward. (NDG is far better nowadays than in the 80s/early 90s) For Montreal, it was the Anglo west / French east thing that made the western neighborhoods nicer. But right now, I've seen more and scarier things in my western immigrant street than back east. Actually, the only other really bad place I can think of is Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. That's the traditionnal poor, french borough.
• In San Francisco, the bad parts are confined to pretty small areas, mostly in the east, but all away from the water. However, across the bay to the east, we have Oakland, which is somewhat more ambitious in its dangerousness.
• I can only assume that in the area where the term "Southies" means something, it is the south that is bad.
• I'm in a farming commmunity in central California, and the place is divided in half by a railroad. I live on the "good" side of the tracks, the east side. The west side is the "bad" side of town, though I can't really tell that much difference between them. My next door neighbor, on the other hand, had bought so deep into the west side being the bad side that she radioed her husband on a set schedule of six different times and went armed any time she went to the Chinese restaurant one block west of the tracks.
• Weeeell, the Lower East Side used to be bad... but now it's mostly "hip." If you want to find New York badness in an easterly direction you probably have to go to Brooklyn... and much further east than Williamsburg (also once a "bad" area). When I lived in Boston it was South. And in DC it was East, for sure. I dunno. Maybe it is predominantly south and east, but parts of the Bronx would probably disagree.
• Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, and the West Side is the bad side, no contest. I've always wondered why it seems to be the other way around everywhere else.
• I live in the so-called bad side of my town (which is smack in the middle), and it's not really all that bad. You just have to know to dress down. My next-door neighbour packs heat if he's out alone at night, but I've never felt that unsafe. (Not being white helps.)
• Pittsburgh, PA, by the way.
• East Nashville was the bad part of town, until the gays moved in and started buying all the houses and renovating. Then the Yuppies followed. So I don't know if it's still the bad part, but I am visiting this weekend, so I'll check it out.
• Traditionnaly, the poor lived next to their workplace, and the rich, a little bit away. East Coast port cities would have their factories near the docks, which would be in the eastern part of town. However, I don't know how this holds for river/lake cities. And I have no idea about the West Coast. Europe is probably another matter entirely. I know some of them have a low/high city distinction, like Quebec City, and some pretty sharp boundaries between bad/good sides: in Marseille, there's a street where one side is all good, with tourists, businesses, etc., and the other side is really bad.
• Toronto: East side. Also parkdale which happens to be west, but it's the east side that is really notorious.
• I think that calimehtar is exagerating a bit. There is a big suburb at the East end of the East End that has a reputation for crime due to its vast suburbanness, but no part of Toronto is really bad (at least not by the standards of the rest of the world). My brother was once mugged in Toronto. They let him go because they thought he was a visitor from overseas and, you know, they wouldn't want to create a bad impression or anything. There are places like Jane and Finch (in the North-West) that are relatively high crime, but you don't feel unsafe there or anything.
• I grew up in Tulsa, where the north side was the bad part, followed by the west. Generally "west" meant more "lower income" and "older, shabbier houses" than "bad" per se. There is a river that runs north and south, but it has no bearing on the sociological divide. (Parts of "East Tulsa" are actually west of the river, and vice versa.) The prejudice against anything north is so strong there that nearly all new construction is to the south and east, and has been for a long time.
• In Melbourne, Australia, the west side is the bad side. Not quite as bad as we are lead to believe American cities are, but there are areas of terrible poverty, despair and unemployment. The eastern suburbs tend to be more affluent (and better served by things like public transport)
• In Reading, Pennsylvania it is the East side of the town that is bad, while the west side is a very yuppie area. Reading is also ranked 20th in the US for their murder rate. The east side also happens to be on the river.
• Adelaide, South Australia: bad = deep north, deep south, mid west.
• The North End of Winnipeg is the bad side of town. My inlaws once lived there. As a Vancouverite, I too have been facinated by the downtown east side. I'm old enough to remember going with my mother to Woodwards and then down Hastings to the White Lunch cafeteria. Back then it wasn't a seedy place at all, Gastown was (pre 1971.
• Over here in Nanaimo it's the south end although Nanaimo generally has always had a reputation as the bad part of Vancouver Island (and it is on the east side). Down in Victoria, the bad neighborhood is kinda right smack in the middle but the entire city is being rapidly gentrified by hordes of retiring baby boomers.
• I am guessing that the fact that the posh suburbs of Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney are the eastern ones has something to do with the coriolis effect.
• Santa Barbara has become increasingly gentrified, even the funk zone by the train tracks and garbage-sorting facility is being re-zoned and touted as "close to the beach". There's only one street that has a particularly bad reputation, it runs east from the main drag. In recent years the hipsters have started opening shops there, so soon the transformation from pleasantly funky seaside town to Disneyfied playground-for-the-wealthy will be complete.
• In the Greater Seattle Metro Area, "Eastside" equals Bellevue, the swanky part of town. Bill Gates lives on the Eastside. The farther south you go from Seattle, the crappier the neighborhood.
• This is totally cool - it's one of those wierd little things I've wondered about for ages. So far, it looks like the east is still in the lead for bad-assedness. Behold the "East Van Cross". Ignore the asterisks; had to put those in as spacers for the formatting. You used to see this as graffitti and jailhouse tattoos. *V EAST *N
• Actually East LA, contrary to popular belief, is a nice place to live. Sure, there is a bit of graffiti and there are gangs, but it is nothing like South Central LA. As a matter of fact, there has been a request from city fathers to start calling it "South LA" so as to not continue the idea that this is a dangerous place. I'm not too sure about this line of reasoning. If I start calling a shark a "angelfish" it's not gonna stop it from biting my leg off.
• In three towns in NC I've lived in -- Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and now Durham -- the east side is indeed the lower income. Especially Winston-Salem, where I grew up. So glad I left.
• London - while the East End's always had a bit of a rep, I'm not sure it's the case any more. A bit like NY, a lot of the old East London scummy bits have become trendified and hipster-ridden. Personally, I'd say South London's the worst, but really there's bad bits all around, in those nasty dead zones between where the city stops and the suburbs begin.
• In Chicago it's largely the Southwest side, but there is some pretty sketchy areas directly west of the loop and northward to around 3500. Also anywhere near a subsidized high rise that ain't senior citizens.
• I grew up in Phoenix, where the words "south Phoenix" were usually uttered after the words "There has been another stabbing/shooting/murder/drug bust in..." I lived in Dubuque, IA for a while. The bad section of town was so bad that it was in a seperate town and state (East Dubuque, IL). Actually, it wasn't that bad, and it did have all of the area's strip clubs in one convenient place.
• In Providence (RI), the South Side is the fabled "worst" part, though that's been changing as folks have begun renovating some of the fine old houses there, and forming community empowerment groups. The East Side is where Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design are, as well as some of the best early houses of Providence. There's also a rather nice "ghetto" on the E-Side, Mt. Hope, which is where I live and love. It hasn't the cachet of the rest of the East Side, but as far as I can tell, it's better that way. *looks around for Actually Settle, who must be around here somewhere*
• following up on drivingmenuts: Austin's east side has it's dangerous parts, but mostly its just poor. There are one or two parts of south austin that probably qualify but even there, there isn't much that qualifies as 'dangerous' or a bad side of town on the scale of New York or other real cities. The water runs through the center of town. East Austin was hurt when the airport closed/moved, so I suppose that is part of it.
• Sydney, Australia. West = bad, East = good, North = very good, South = nothing.
• Here in Sydney the "bad" part of town is the outer West and inner South West suburbs. The affluent areas are the North Shore and the Eastern Suburbs.
• Actually, North Philly is the fucked up part. I go to Temple which is right on the edge of it. The people around there leave the students alone for the most part as far as I know since we do alot for the community, but also because the campus has one of the largest police departments in the country devoted to it, supposedly from all the money Cosby poors into the college. It's a pretty good location if you want to support a herion addiction, I am told; but they blasphemously put a mural to Grover Washington on campus in the city that gave birth to Coletrane.
• Theory regarding why East Side="Bad" (in US): most settlers back in the pioneer days travelled roughly East to West...built homes and businesses when they found a suitable community, which would place them on the East side. Over time, the community built up, edging more Westward with each iteration of newcomers and growth...over decades, the original structures on the East side got worn, weathered, and neglected, while ever-newer digs were being built on the ever-expanding West side. Whaddya think?
• I can think of New York's Lower East Side But what about the Upper East Side, which is the poshest part of town? NYC is too big and complicated for any generalizations to apply.
• North Minneapolis is generally regarded as the "bad" part of town. The Mississippi River divides North Minneapolis from Northeast Minneapolis, which is considered blue collar but is slowly gentrifying. South Minneapolis has pockets of "bad", but is mostly gentrified or gentrifying. We're getting more and more "bad" in the 'burbs. Most of the high profile meth-related crimes seem to happen in suburbia. (Or maybe they just get reported more.) Several years ago a meth lab blew up in a building about half a mile from where I lived in South Minneapolis. Today that former meth lab building is across the street from condos. St. Paul is right next door, but I don't know much about it now. When I lived there in the mid 90s a centrally-located neighborhood called Frogtown was considered "bad", and downtown St. Paul was completely deserted after 5:30 on weeknights.
• so someone posted about nashville.. in Memphis, the east portion is actually more or less the affluent suburbs (which is comprised of Cordova, East Memphis, and Germantown amongst others). A good chunk of the bad area here tends to hang just east of downtown, which is fortunate cuz just west of downtown is that rivery thing, and is sandwiched between downtown and midtown.
• I can tell you why London, at least, historically had a poorer East End - if you were a pre-modern city with sewage and industrial waste flowing directly into a river that flowed west to east, where would you put the poor people? (and the industry, and butchering, and tanning...) About Toronto: bad is neither west nor east, but with rings of ghettos emanating from downtown, generally where industry either once was, or still is. I know the west side best, but the east is generally a reflection (just as many rich, just as many poor). As an example: Running on the Bloor subway from Yonge to Kipling - Bloor to Christie - good, then fashionable; Ossington to Dundas - kind of run down; Keele to Royal York - good to posh; Islington and Kipling - industrial and poor on the south, richer to the north. North West - Jane & Finch, it's not scary as Vancouver's East Hastings street, but it's poor. So is Rexdale - and Jamestown (Martingrove and Steeles). The North east has similar places, as does the south west (like Longbranch). General thing all of these places share is being near brownfield, and poor access to public transportation (don't know if that is a cause or an effect.)
• I grew up in the Northeast, and it was my experience there that the south side of the cities in the Northeast was generally the worst. New York would probably not fit this model because it is a bunch of islands. The bad side of cities in the US generally means the poorest section. The poorest section of the cities in the US often have a very large black population. I believe that people fled the South for slavery-related reasons both during slavery and shortly afterwards. As those people tended to be poor, they would essentially stop their journey and set up camp once they reached a city. Coming from the south, that would mean that they were at the southern end of the city. I believe that this theory would also account for cities east of the Mississippi as having their poor sections on the east side of town. Or maybe I'm just an idiot.
• bernockle, our two theories seem to complement each other...good insight.
• Dallas is bad on the west and south sides, though it's kind of fuzzy. Still, there's a bad west side for you...
• Bad Bad Leroy Brown
• I recall having this discussion with a friend once, who had taken some sort of weird historical urban "planning" (er, development) class, and one of the points that came up had to do with global-scale weather pattern (the jet stream, for example) causing consistent trends in city development throughout the years, something along the lines of N/NW would be the cooler part of town in the summer and/or pollution would tend to blow towards the S/SE(applicability of these varying throughout the centuries, of course). I throw this out here despite that it is currently not backed up by fact (though I am desperately searching for supporting links) in the hopes that maybe someone else has heard of this and can share some wisdom.
• shinything is pretty spot-on about Minneapolis. A friend of mine lived in a totally scary neighborhood somewhere in South for a (very brief) while, but I don't know exactly where it was. He only lived there for a couple of months, but managed to get shot at on one or two occasions. I used to work in a pharmacy in north Minneapolis. Some interesting things happened there, although nothing particularly dangerous. My brother lives in way north Minneapolis, which is a decent if somewhat lower-middle-class area. I'm surprised nobody has mentioned East St. Louis yet. It's a separate city (across the river from St. Louis proper) but is definitely the "bad part" of town there.
• Regarding Minneapolis-St. Paul, I used to live on the East Side of St. Paul and some parts would be considered bad, by the local standards. So, more depressed than actually "bad". I agree with FedoraUndershirt that North Philly is the winner of the "bad side of town" award. I went to college in West Philly (ok, University City really) and that was no picnic either.
• Nutty Industries: ten years ago, I'd have agreed with you regarding East St. Louis; hell, I lived in west Belleville then, and when the wind was right you could hear gunfire coming up over Signal Hill. Different story today. East St. Louis got the Boat, now they have police worthy of the name, new construction, people moving back. It's still got some dicey spots, but MUCH improved. Nowadays, what was concentrated in East St. Louis is now dispersed throughout the region - went and central Belleville, Sauget, Centreville, Alorton, Brooklyn, West and south Alton. For city of St. Louis proper, near north city and midtown are the trouble spots. Midtown is funny. Downtown, the sidewalks roll up at End Of Business and leave the whole region to the tumbleweeds and the CHUDS who chase 'em; move west, and you hit midtown, spreading north and south to connect those quadrants of the city, then you hit University City and Clayton and suddenly you're money again. But yeah, to rerail: in St. Louis, bad part of town is near-north and midtown.
• Our household had more stuff stolen from it living in St. Peters (inner Eastern Suburbs of Adelaide) for one year, than living for 18 years in Para Hills (about 17ks north of the CBD, nothing ever pinched). When you're a cyclist, all the 'bad' part of town stuff is pretty over-blown. Cars are everywhere.
• Further to jb's comment about effluent, etc, Adelaide has a nice old east-west slope to it in the inner couple of rings of suburbs, so perhaps that was an additional reason for toffs moving out to the east - less flooding. There's also the looking into the sun thing when going home. More fanciful speculation no doubt.
• Aside from the fact that there's a high level of heterogenity in Detroit, it's the central North that's ugly, especially around the City Airport, which is the ugliest I've ever seen any American city. But that may be in part because eastern Detroit is about the best part of the city, right up against the water. Which reminds me of a Journey lyric about being born in South Detroit. Which, to anyone who lives in Southeastern Michigan, means Windsor. Kalamazoo, it's the west... Syracuse, it's the east...
• There seems to be the more historical wrong side of the tracks, and the recent rehabilitated or gentrified used-to-be-bad areas. I wonder, if you go back, say 60 years, if you'd get east popping up even more than it does now.
• North Las Vegas, North Baton Rouge, South Tucson.
• READING, PA? Wow...never thought I'd see that name-checked here, loto. I'm near Reading for 1/2 the week, and did, indeed, spend 10 years living in the heart of beautiful downtown Reading, every section of which is a bad part of town. The rest of the week I live in, emmm...yeah, it's true...South Philly. I'll agree with the previous posters on that count. South Philly is a historically blue-collar area, heavily populated by Italian and Irish neighborhoods, punctuated with tiny 2 or 3 block areas of just about every ethnicity you can imagine. The diversity exists, but we try to keep it our little secret. North Philly is "the bad part" but has, for the past 20 years, slowly become more gentrified as the hipster contingent stakes their claim. Twenty years ago homesteaders began buying abandoned industrial sites and they've now started to branch out, forcing locals to relocate further north, or west. This ugly bit of displacement was promoted by developers, and the resulting artificial/manufactured neighborhood is cunningly referred to as "Northern Liberties". Charming... Savvy monkeys with an interest in NYC history will draw parallels with the wholesale removal of the indigenous Eastern European and Latino neighborhoods on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Give me the little neighborhoods in South Philly anyday: Pennsport, Bella Vista, Queens Village, Passyunk, Southwark, et al. Additionally, there are only 2 places in all of Philadelphia to get a real cheesesteak, both in South Philly, and they face one another on opposite corners of the same intersection. And they're both open 24/7. And if anyone's still reading and wants to pick a fight: Geno's for steaks, Pat's for fries. "Whiz, without." (Someone give that man a sedative...Golly, I just rambled on...)
• Geno's definitely, but no Whiz. Blech. "American, with."
• I can't really think of a "bad" part of town here (Ann Arbor, MI), except for maybe the student housing areas, which have a sexual assault about two or three times a month and the occasional larceny. For this area, when you start travelling East, it gets progressively worse, with pockets of really horrible inbetween (Willow Run area, Inkster, West Detroit), until it gets really posh.
• East side for my current city. West side is where the most soul-sucking suburban hell wastes are, but the East side is gang territory.
• Here in providence we used to have a joke. What's long and thing, black at the ends and white in the middle? Benefit street. Only nowadays the blacks have moved even further away from the art students. So to answer your question, the bad part of providence is the poor fucking dismal neighborhood where we put minorities.
• My guess is that it all relates to weather/climate. If the wind blows all the bad stuff (factory smoke, dust, etc.) toward the east, why would anyone want to build new stuff on that side of town? Build the new stuff on the west (and maybe northwest) side of town.
• Shawnj- I'm in Ann Arbor too, but it doesn't have a "bad side." There are low-income housing projects taht ring the city, but they're all over. And frankly, Ypsi's pretty damn safe for the most part, until you get to Ecorse...
• That's what I meant by going East. The town proper has, in it's worst areas, a few assaults and larcenies a month. Then again, I look at Ann Abor/Ypsilanti as being essentially the same community and tend to think of the whole Metro area when I talk to people that live outside of the area.
• I live in Calgary and the East side is the "bad" side, although it's really not that bad compared to even the not so nice areas of Mtl and Toronto... I remember thinking about this a while ago, and one theory we came up with was that when the cities were smaller, the industrial areas were in the middle of what is now the city. With the prevailing winds being Westerly, all the crap would blow towards the eastern areas of town, making them less desireable to live in. And whoever was talking about NDG being a rough area of Montreal must be talking pre 1980, because I went to high school there, and it was a pretty affluent neighbourhood.
• w00t! I'm actually in Vancouver at the moment! Normally, I represent Chicago, where our "east side" is a bunch of water. Yes, the south side is sketchy, but there's crappy sections sprinkled throughout the city as if some sort of urban fairy had a gentrification wand and a ghetto wand, but never wielded them both at the same time. And moneyjane, I'd buy you a drink, but I'm only in Canadia for one more day.