Also, Detroit, though it’s getting better.

PPs already mentioned it but I was also going to say most of the high desert in CA around Palmdale/Victorville, e.g. Lake Los Angeles, Boron, Barstow, Hinkley. High desert up the 14 is kind of the dumping ground for LA County, for its sex offenders and sewage, and outside of the larger towns everything looks like it was built in the 1950s and then forgotten about (i.e. the old Route 66). The dusty small towns outside of Las Vegas that survive on gambling and prostitution (e.g. Primm) have the same feeling.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Chernobyl.

Also, Soviet era apartment blocks and apartments in Ukraine and Russia.

I know it will sound weird, but I grew up in one of these blocks and they are nostalgic to me. In fact there is a FB community where people post pictures of Soviet era landscapes, so I am not the only one.

Wow, that's interesting. We were posted in the region for work, and in the first year were talked into taking an apartment in a Soviet building that was minutes' walk from work. It was the entire top floor of a Khrushchyovka, and the apartment itself had been fully renovated and looked great. But outside the windows and in the rest of the building itself, it was bleak as hell. The crumbling walls and general run-down look, plus the filthy, dog waste-strewn land childrens' "playground" areas outside the blocks were super sad, especially because there were often empty alcohol bottles and cigarettes thrown into the childrens' sand pits or under the swings. I made friends with a local family who lived in a non-renovated little flat and you could hear EVERYTHING from the neighbours above and around them.

We moved into an expat type building after that one year.

Gary, Indiana

Centralia, PA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania

I was there before they destroyed the last houses and buried the graffiti highway. So sad to see the empty lots and remains of where the town had been

Anonymous wrote:Morecambe is the worst place I have been in the UK. Like Seaside OR, full of slot machines, heroine, and despair, with creepy Victorian undertones.

shudder. sounds like the bay in Morecambe is also deadly, like Seaside.

Anonymous wrote:Cumberland, MD. Something just feels off and creepy. And this is coming from someone who has spent years driving through western Pennsylvania on the way to my hometown near Youngstown.

I wish for a renaissance for Cumberland. It is such a pretty setting.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I'm not talking about poverty, crime, or abandonment so much as a sense of gloom and despair.

Weird sentence. These 5 things are very interconnecting.

Anyway, the Delta in AR is the saddest feeling place, outside of urban areas, that I've ever seen in the US.

Its a subtle difference.

Please elaborate. If you're OP, why is Utica creepy, bleak, and featuring a sense of gloom and despair, but not poverty, crime, and abandonment?

Not looking to pick a fight. It's a vibe, a haunted-ness. S Central LA, ie, may be crime-riddled and impoverished -- yet still pulse with spirit and life.

I'm not either. Sorry to come across that way. I think it's interesting to think about. And sad, of course.

Syracuse feels this way to me. So do many blocks in downtown Rochester, NY. Detroit.

I was also going to say Syracuse. I visited Syracuse as part of my college search and got a dismal vibe.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Cumberland, MD. Something just feels off and creepy. And this is coming from someone who has spent years driving through western Pennsylvania on the way to my hometown near Youngstown.

Oooh, agree. I went there on an ill-fated "vacation" once.

What was ill fated about the “vacation”?

I was trying to turn a friend into a boyfriend and it failed miserably

SE DC.

Albany, NY on any weekend in January.

Anonymous wrote:Utica is very bleak.

not nearly as bleak as the small town of CNY. Oriskiny Falls looks straight out of a horror movie

Gary Indiana

North Adams, MA. It's an old mill town full of crumbling buildings that weren't that nice when they were new. And the attempts to build it up as an arts destination with Mass MoCA are just sad.

Murano- I stayed there overnight because it was a lot closer to the airport for an early AM flight out. Once the tourists left but even when you were off the beaten path it was empty, signs of flooding above your head.

Anonymous wrote:https://www.google.com/maps/@34.413341,-117.3778434,3a,75y,265.51h,87.48t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1stJZ_MNSjmqUceOjW_Wn7Dw!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo1.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DtJZ_MNSjmqUceOjW_Wn7Dw%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dsearch.revgeo_and_fetch.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D96%26h%3D64%26yaw%3D27.991241%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656

I visited this neighborhood in the high desert of California during the housing crash of 2008/2009. Picture foreclosure papers blowing in the wind like tumbleweeds. Boarded up 3500 square feet, 5 year old homes in a suburban community. Lots of people who bought these new "McMansions" as the neighborhood was built up in 2005/2006 for $450k only to have them be worth less than $100k a few years later. Truly a place of broken dreams. One of the most eerie places I've ever been.

If the Google maps street view is current or more recent, looks like it’s turned around quite a bit.