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It seems as though every region has one...that town or city "on the wrong side of the tracks." It's the butt of local jokes. Efforts that town or city makes to "clean up" their image may be marginally successful, but like a bad nickname, the reputation just sticks. If you're from one of these places, you've probably tried to defend your hometown only to be told you have an "inferiority" complex and at some point you just give up and have a good laugh at the expense of your city.
So where are these places? Why do they have a bad rap and are their reputations deserved? Have any of these places successfuly shed their not-so-flattering images?
Here are a couple of examples from places I've lived:
Superior, WI.
I grew up in Duluth, MN, just across the bridge from Superior, or as the locals call it "Soup Town." It's had that nickname as long as I can remember. Their reputation for an excessive number of dive bars and cheap booze is, unfortunately, quite precedented. I do believe at one time they actually held the "honor" of having the most bars per capita of any U.S. city. Tower avenue is notrious for bar-hopping, stumbling drunks. Most people who go to Superior to drink only see the seedy residential and industrial areas by the bars and think the whole town is just a run-down dump.
Recent efforts to clean up Superior include closing (and even condeming!) some of the worst of the dive bars and "retiring" liquor licesnes as places closed. They've actually done a pretty good job of sprucing up their waterfont area and have a nice pedestrian trail by Barker's Island.
But talk about an inferiority complex! A recent Superior tourism billboard posted on I-35 south of Duluth: "Next to Duluth, we're Superior!"
(Have to give them credit though, it IS a clever little slogan!)
Perhaps the next generation will view Superior in a different light, but I doubt that the "Soup Town" moniker will go away any time soon.
Pueblo, CO
When my husband and I first moved to Colorado Springs, we actually took a little Sunday drive to Pueblo just to say we've been there (remember those commercials for the free government brochures?) I actually thought it was kind of a cute town...had a distinctly hispanic flair and was a nice size (closer to the size of my hometown).
After we lived in COS for a while though, we started getting the sense that Pueblo wasn't the best place to be from. Whenever we went to the local comedy club there was always at least one Pueblo joke. Turns out that the locals viewed Pueblo as the "cheap" part of the front range, not nearly as desierable as Colorado Springs, for sure! Pueblo, starting its life as a steel town, also had that gritty, industrial "rough around the edges" reputation that it just couldn't shake. In spite of recent clean up efforts (including a rather extensive riverfront project) and the fact that it's growing and attracting homebuyers due to reasonable real estate costs, it still has a certain "stigma" to it.
Growing up in Northern Virginia, kids tended to regard Manassas as the red-headed stepchild. Those of us who grew up in the close-in DC suburbs in Fairfax, Arlington and Alexandria, thought of ourselves more as cosmopolitan northerners in spite of our geographic location, whereas we thought Manassas, and Prince William County as a whole, was sort of the stepping stone to the South, with all the stereotypes to go with it. Jokes would be made about rednecks and mullets and shotguns and trailer trash and the like. Was the reputation warranted? Not really. In comparison to the squeaky clean solidly middle class (or upper middle class) areas of Northern Virginia, Manassas was a bit more gritty and blue collar, particularly back then. Even to this day, it carries a similar air. Something about it just isn't visually very appealing, which isn't to say the rest of Northern Virginia is a picture out of a painting by any means. The Manassas however that most outsiders see is the big trucks going down the traffic-clogged main highway, shooting exhaust into the air, with streets lined with car repair shops and gas stations and greasy fast food restaurants with old rundown strip malls and such. The city isn't made fun of to my knowledge as much anymore partially because due to the spiraling cost of housing elsewhere, many other Northern Virginians who lived closer in, have been pushed outwards towards Manassas or beyond, or their friends or family have, so they now find themselves defending it or traveling around it more themselves and saying "well, I guess it's not so bad". In addition, many of the more "southern" blue-collar elements of the city have disappeared as it's turning more and more into a yuppie bedroom suburb.
Growing up in Northern Virginia, kids tended to regard Manassas as the red-headed stepchild. Those of us who grew up in the close-in DC suburbs in Fairfax, Arlington and Alexandria, thought of ourselves more as cosmopolitan northerners in spite of our geographic location, whereas we thought Manassas, and Prince William County as a whole, was sort of the stepping stone to the South, with all the stereotypes to go with it. Jokes would be made about rednecks and mullets and shotguns and trailer trash and the like. Was the reputation warranted? Not really. In comparison to the squeaky clean solidly middle class (or upper middle class) areas of Northern Virginia, Manassas was a bit more gritty and blue collar, particularly back then. Even to this day, it carries a similar air. Something about it just isn't visually very appealing, which isn't to say the rest of Northern Virginia is a picture out of a painting by any means. The Manassas however that most outsiders see is the big trucks going down the traffic-clogged main highway, shooting exhaust into the air, with streets lined with car repair shops and gas stations and greasy fast food restaurants with old rundown strip malls and such. The city isn't made fun of to my knowledge as much anymore partially because due to the spiraling cost of housing elsewhere, many other Northern Virginians who lived closer in, have been pushed outwards towards Manassas or beyond, or their friends or family have, so they now find themselves defending it or traveling around it more themselves and saying "well, I guess it's not so bad". In addition, many of the more "southern" blue-collar elements of the city have disappeared as it's turning more and more into a yuppie bedroom suburb.
I still don't like it though
C'mon man. With celebrities like John Wayne Bobbitt, what's not to love???
C'mon man. With celebrities like John Wayne Bobbitt, what's not to love???
HA! I had forgotten all about that! I remember when it happened and it came out that it was in Manassas, kids in my class went "well, of course, it figures...." just chalking it up to another backwards trait of Manassas. Like there was something indicative to Manassas that inspires the hacking off of genitalia. It certainly wasn't good for the town's image though.
On a related note, several years later, my mom went into a salon in Arlington and one of the women working there was Lorena Bobbitt. I hope she wasn't an actual stylist. She shouldn't be near any sort of scissors. Make her a shampoo girl or give her a mop to clean up or something instead.
It seems as though every region has one...that town or city "on the wrong side of the tracks." It's the butt of local jokes. Efforts that town or city makes to "clean up" their image may be marginally successful, but like a bad nickname, the reputation just sticks. If you're from one of these places, you've probably tried to defend your hometown only to be told you have an "inferiority" complex and at some point you just give up and have a good laugh at the expense of your city.
.
Flint Michigan. Need I say more - Flint's reputation is global, thanks to Michael Moore's "Roger and Me" film. MM is from Davison, not Flint , BTW- he portrayed himself as being from Flint to lend credulity to the movie. He is not terribly popular around here, since he portrayed locals as mouth breathing, rabbit skinning illiterates.
By a weird twist of circumstance, I'm living in Flint now and it's not that bad. In fact a local company sells t-shirts with "FLINT - It's Not That Bad" in big letters across the back. I may buy one.
Of course, Flint needs its own redheaded stepchild! The city on the southern border is Burton, locally known as Burtucky. Lots of ratty mobile home parks and some roads have never been paved since the 1930s.
The city of Flint has been doing a major crackdown on prostitution recently. Burtucky needs to catch up - all the prostitutes have moved south of Atherton on Dort Highway, the city line. It's pretty funny. There's like six scantily clad women at every bus stop the minute you enter the city of Burton. Poor girls.
On a related note, several years later, my mom went into a salon in Arlington and one of the women working there was Lorena Bobbitt. I hope she wasn't an actual stylist. She shouldn't be near any sort of scissors.
Are you serious?!
She hasn't even changed her last name? A woman who lopped off her husband's unit really needs to change her name from "Bobbitt."
Flint Michigan. By a weird twist of circumstance, I'm living in Flint now and it's not that bad. In fact a local company sells t-shirts with "FLINT - It's Not That Bad" in big letters across the back. I may buy one.
I saw that movie in one of my college sociology classes. I love the T-shirt idea.
That reminds me of something I had totally forgotten about until now...back in the 80's, Duluth had this tourism campaign with this stupid "We're Duluth and proud of it!" slogan platered all over t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc. Hermantown (a "suburb" of Duluth) came up with their own slogan: "We're Hermantown and we're proud of Duluth too!"
Are you serious?!
She hasn't even changed her last name? A woman who lopped off her husband's unit really needs to change her name from "Bobbitt."
Haha! Well, she may have. My mom saw her, and this was some three years or so after the "incident" and thought she looked familiar but couldn't place who she was or how she knew her. Then a news story came out several days later about how John Bobbitt showed up at her work with some flowers to try to woo her back (!!!!!!) and they named the salon that she worked at and it was the same one she had been to a few days before, and then it clicked with her and she goes "I KNEW I knew her from somewhere!" and she called up a friend of hers who was a regular customer at the salon to ask about it and the friend confirmed that she does in fact work there, but apparently worked under a different first name for the sake of anonymity.
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T-shirt slogans
