Frightening urban no-go hell zones you've lived in

I've lived in LS6 in Leeds, but not the hip studenty bit - the iffy area below Hyde Park where the riots were in 1997. Also suburban Barnsley and on a Wakefield council estate were both far more genuinely scary than anywhere I've been in London.

Albay could sure use some gentrification. Talk about white flight. After 1985 Albany was abandoned

chris, when did you live in LS6? and wakefield on a saturday night is very scary indeed.

Central Albany, yeah. And it's getting worse since whassisface moved the government basically all down to Poughkeepsie. Reason? So his kids education wouldn't be disturbed. Yeah, real family man, what about all the kids of the state workers who were displaced?

Rockefeller though after he built that Capitol Plaza, that it would revitalise "downtown". Boy, was he ever wrong.

However, it was good because it meant that the bloke who started the commune bought said crackhouse for something like $10,000.

I lived on 11th Street between B & C in Manhattan in early 1980. What a scary block that was--bodega on the corner which was a front for the neighborhood heroin dealer, menacing types hanging out at all times, a shooting gallery down the road, that sort of thing. Still, nobody ever bothered me if I walked on the other side of the street. A friend from my hometown moved in with me and after a couple of weeks she just took her bags and headed back to Connecticut. I couldn't get it together to pay the entire rent (something like $250) and was evicted. Couldn't scrape together 250 bucks! God, I was pathetic when I was 18. I guess I just didn't give a shit, I'd move in with a friend in a tonier neighborhood, like First and A. It's all totally gentrified now, of course.

Unlike the awful LA neighborhood I once lived in near MacArthur Park. I don't know how you feel about this particular pop landmark--in my Jimmy Webb world I pictured never ending birthday parties in the rain with melting cake and beautiful balloons and such--but the surrounding neighborhood has, I believe, the highest incidence of violent crime per capita in LA. And the corrupt cops of the notorious Rampart Division. But you wouldn't really know it walking down the block I lived on, with it's cute little Spanish-style courtyard apartments. LA's insidious like that.

The plaza is like a huge spaceship that landed on Albany. Neighboorhood s were destroyed. And to show for it? "The Egg" which features such fine acts as "The Yugoslav National Juggling Team". And the State Museum full fo scary dead-person wax displays. PLus, most of the riverfront is beautifully tangled with overpasses and ramps.

Is there any place in the UK remotely as dangerous as the average american city?

But The Egg is KEWL!!! The only reason that Albany was great for me to land in as a teenager was cause I was obsessed with architecture, and the downtown area is so perfectly preserved (ie never gentrified and filled in with office blocks) that it shows every layer of American architecture from the Dutch Colonial to Post-modern as you walk up the State Street Hill! And the Capitol itself... did you know each floor was built by a different architect as they were fired and hired by whichever politcal party came into favour? (this was before the Democratic machine) That's why the basement starts out Romanesque, goes through gothic, and ends up being high, flowery Rennaissance by the time you get to the top floor. And it's the only State Capitol that doesn't have a dome. I could tell you loads of obscure architectural oddities about Albany. Probably cause it's the only thing the city has going for it!

Erm... Tom, yes. I think that American cities are just publicised as being "worse" while the British still like to keep this idea that they are more "civilised" because, you know, guns are banned and all.

I was gonna say that this is why American tourists are regular victims of anal rape when abroad, but I realized that I was pulling that factoid out of my ass.

Gareth: I was on Harold Walk from about Aug 96 - May 97.

As long as you lik e your architecture all spraypainted and covere d in crack.

Tom - having lived in New York(pre-1994) and London, I'd have to say London is infinitely worse. NY I think has/had more Mafia-type crime (i.e. the type that doesn't really bother anyone), while London is full of angry, desperate, bonehead drunks all "giving it the large one" as people say. Still, there never was a problem that wasn't solved by a huge influx of firearms into the community!

i lived in a room in a 1913 rooming house in vancouver .
Water was out 3/4 of the time, wireing caused fires randomly, the stoves were gas and all of us were afarid to use them because they looked like they would blow up
The fridge leaked freon and the roof leaked rain. There was no parking and it was 2 blocks from smack central. There were roaches and rats.
It cost 213 a month .
I stayed a year before i made it into the dorms.

What people say 'giving it the large one'?

Grew up in Dublin and went from shitty area to shitty area. North Dublin....Ballybough to be precise is definitely the gateway to Hell. The crap bus service in Dublin stops at 11:00pm so if you're on the piss, you got a choice run to the bus stop before last orders or walk home. Through Ballybough most of the time and there was only once that I didn't come accross a burning car with 10-year olds dancing around it and that's because the fire brigade got there and put it out so it was just a hissing smoking shell. From there moved to Clapton in London for a while .. 16th floor of a high rise. Favourite pastime was watching from afar the night before bin-day and watching my "neighbours" throw their rubbish bags from the multiple stories of this concrete prison into the streets below! After that moved to Jackson Heights New York...not too bad .... plenty of drugs, prostitution and killing but avoidable if you knew where you were going. Live in Amsterdam now and all is serene.

We also have A Local Shop For Local People, which features its entire stock behind bars! Gr8.

The Off Licences in Manchester keep their stock behind BULLET PROOF GLASS. Where I lived in Manchester wasn't too rough - it was quite studenty - but people did tend to get shot occasionly. There was a club round the corner from me where the BOUNCERS were bundled into the back of a van and driven off and then someone ran in and shot the manager (though obviously he shot like a girl because the manager survived)

I could never decide whether it was SCARY or reasurring to see armed policemen walking around the streets (I settled on reassuring because it was less scary)

Where I live now is pretty dicey, due to people who lurk nearby who are shopping for crack. There were communal basement areas that became crack dens earlier in the autumn, but they were shut down. There are also two flats in another stair that are similarily occupied but the people who live in them don't hassle the residents. Their customers are really filthy and can't even do monosyllables, but truly depressing because some are recognisable to me as people who were a little bit more 'together' when I first moved here. What's really gross are the teenage thugs who hang out here after school when it's dark, looking to buy a little bit of ANYTHING and I always see some kind of Crack Ho scuttling out when I go to buy the papers of a morning. This is because King's Cross has been Zero Toleranced and a lot of the drug traffic has moved down this way.

But all takeaway places still deliver.

Have to agree with MB and PS about Tooting - very mellow place, as indeed is Streatham (but then I again I live in the nice Leigham Court en route to the Common bit).

Oamaru, where the sewerage meets the sea. Home of the eternal bogan and pestilential crop of terminally old.

Where we live now is pretty bad. We hear close gunshots a couple of times a week. There's a crack empire directly behind our house and lots of little thugs wandering the streets. But we have a big dog who will rip someone's throat out before they get near us and we know our neighbors so it's not too bad. We just don't walk outside after dark.

Demesne Road, Whalley Range, which had reg'lar shootins in the pub up the end of the road. And it was great fun visiting mates in Moss Side, one of whom was mugged - he had no money, so they took his dole card. Woodhouse, Leeds - some seriously scary kids round there The edge of St Anns, Nottingham - crack hos, crack shootings, loony men carrying lengths of meaty chain Hyson Green, Nottingham - surprisingly quiet given its reputation and the gangs of dealers, but far too many burglaries given that nobody round there had anything to nick Am now in Kentish Town. It seems really quiet and rural after all the other gaffs.

"No-go" zone would be an exaggeration, but I moved into DC's Mount Pleasant neighborhood...in the wake of a series of anti-police riots. It was only after I settled in that I discovered that the park where the whole incident started was half a block from my new apartment.

That said, it wasn't terribly onerous, once you got used to the bulletproof glass in the liquor stores and fast-food places. I'd go for a few weeks hardly noticing the area's grimmer aspects, until something--like hearing gunshots from the alley--happened. Still, the period of the Shotgun Stalker was unsettling...especially because my mother heard about the series of shootings before I did, and of course she did the motherly thing and gave me a call telling me to get out of the area.

My mom used to worry when I lived in Cambridge's Central Square, but it never really bothered me. Then when I moved out here, we had the WTO riots right outside my door- that was most definitely the definition of urban no-go hell zone; I retreated to a friend's place in Ballard (teensy corner of Seattle that's north of the ship canal and basically a sleepy suburb) for the rest of the week. I was living across the street from the Westin where Clinton & the other attendees were staying, so I figured it was best just to leave.

-Chapeltown, Leeds. I'd deliberately take the bus a halt further to avoid getting out near the local pub (see below). Thanks to the 'baby robbers' 90% of street muggings in West Yorkshire occured within a 500 metre radius http://www.bbc.co.uk/leeds/talk/images/violent_city_main.jpg -Toxteth, Liverpool 8. 3 locks on the front door, circular hole in the window where someone with a glass cutter tried to break in, being told to avoid Granby Street day or night...warned off falling for flirtatious red-headed beauty because local gangster was sweet on her..

-Govenhill Glasgow, addicts forming cues in the stairwell for the heroin dealers flat downstairs, first the neighbours being burgled by having the front door kicked in...then ours.

cues = queues (ffs!)

Whalley Range

So what did you get for your trouble and pain?

This year there are police in stab-proof jackets patrolling the route between my university and the Halls. On the local news last night they explained how they've opened up 4 safe corridors for moving between the different campuses, and they're meant to have a Police helichopter monitoring the situation from the air, though I haven't seen that yet. It's like Kosovo or something.

another case against bloody Manchester, then.

I moved just out of college into DC's Petworth neighborhood just off Georgia Ave.. before the metro station opened.. One month after the move I went to drive to work and found that overnight, some junkie took a power drill to my car door & didn't succeed in stealing either the stereo or the car, but did cut him/herself in the process and bleed all over the place. Got mugged at gunpoint once at 9:30am, and the cop taking the report asked if we knew about the crackhouse across the street..
Last night before moving out heard a shooting nearby, some poor Columbia Heights woman getting her laundry was killed in the crossfire.