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Nah, Knoxville. They weren't actually battle zones like Cle440 describes. More like "bad" neighborhoods with the emphasis on reputation. The predominately AA neighborhoods here aren't that bad either just stay away from the projects.
Doesn't Minneapolis have poor neighborhoods?
They were pretty bad neighborhoods, but I wouldnt call them "battle zones". The closest to that would be E85th and Superior in Cleveland.
2 of the 3 times I was shot at I probably could have avoided. Both occured after 10 PM at night in notoriously bad neighborhoods. Nobody out in those areas at night is up to anything good. Another thing is that I was with friends who either were active in drug dealing, or had a past of drug dealing.
I will say that a lot of the beatings and stabbings Ive seen were pretty random though. A lot having to do with just being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
We rarely have beatings or stabbings or shootings that are purely random. Occasionaly someone will get caught by a stray bullet in the projects. Which is sad and it happened again this week.
"I was with friends who either were active in drug dealing, or had a past of drug dealing."
This is what can get you shot. In most major or minor cities.
"area that was notorious for crime" Probably notorious for property crime. That might have been the next 'hood over from me. There was a notorious crime across town last year that got a lot of media attention, but it's location wasn't particularly noteworthy. And word on the street is it wasn't random, either.
yeah growing up as the white kid in a all black/Hispanic neighborhood isnt easy. im the only( white European) in my high school in Miami. but w.e its alright doesn't bother me
some Bahamas pics
Hey man i know how you feel! What school do u go to in miami?
I grew up and still live in a small city in Pennsylvania about an hour north of Philadelphia called Reading. The majority of Reading is pretty bad, it got alot of the crime from New York after Giuliani cleaned house, and it didnt help that the area I'm in is known for being one of the worst.
Here it's not at all uncommon to hear gunshots every night and there have been several times were I read the paper to hear about 4-5 seperate shootings in a single night. At one point a burned out car was found in an alley right behind my friends house with a dead body in it, my neighbor (a good friend of mine and a good family man) was killed in my backyard with an icepick after a traffic argument while driving home, the house directly next to mine was always a known crackhouse (rather often I would walk outside to be see Swat with guns drawn raiding it), and it was just in general a pretty rough area. Definitely a place where you wouldn't really walk around by yourself if you didn't know people there.
Any night you go out you'll see prostitutes working the corners, obvious crackhouses that do things like keep a light inside the entrance on or throw a shoe on the roof to show their open, and heroin, crack, and coke dealers standing in the streets practically waiving cars in.
The city really used to be a nice place but it's constantly getting worse. It really is a sad thing to watch a once thriving city just deteriorate infront of you. However recently the police have been making an effort to crack down even more and in the past few months there were several dozen cameras installed on corners around the city in areas that are notorious for crime but it almost seems like a lost cause in a way. Reading's location between New York and Philadelphia is one of the main reasons for the high crime because all the drugs that move between the two cities come through here (theres actually a road here nicknamed the "herion highway" for just that reason.
I can tell countless stories of run-ins I've had here but I really don't feel like getting into it.
I also spent some time in a place in Jamaica called Priory in a mountain village composed of shacks in what's reffered to as the "Cockpit Country". The way people live there is unlike anything you'll ever see in America. Definetly the most unsafe I've ever felt and that's coming from someone that grew up in and has hung out in many rough cities in my life.
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"area that was notorious for crime" Probably notorious for property crime. That might have been the next 'hood over from me. There was a notorious crime across town last year that got a lot of media attention, but it's location wasn't particularly noteworthy. And word on the street is it wasn't random, either.
No, for crimes such as drug dealing, shootings, and murders. A lot of gang activity also and there were projects in the area. There was a lot of houses and buildings in the area that had been hit with stray bullets. There was a girl killed in that general area not too long ago from a stray bullet. She was sitting on the couch inside her own house. Maybe "notorious" wasnt the right word. They were well known dangerous neighborhoods in the area, lets put it like that.
I've grown up in crappy neighborhoods, but due to my outcast-like personality and my overprotective mother, I was "shielded" from most of it. Outside of school, of course.
My early childhood days were in Detroit. The neighborhood I lived in was fairly empty compared to the rest of the city, so things were relatively safer. I remember regularly going to the party store by myself or with my younger sister a few blocks away with no problems. There were a few times when some kids broke a window and we had a few things stolen, but these were from people we happened to know.
I moved to Mississippi when I was about 12 or so, in a town near Jackson. The part of town I lived in was in my experience, well...worse than the neighborhood I grew up in Detroit. This was mainly because so many people in this part of town lived in public housing. I had to walk past two of these projects when I walked to school, and the project kids always caused gang fights while going to and from school.
In this little town of 10,000 people, 5 people I went to school with were killed from shootings or stabbings between the time I was in the 7th grade and when I graduated. Just last year, a former classmate of mine was killed and some kid shot a 14 year old point blank in the head, killing him instantly. There's nothing worse than inner city crime in a small town in the backwoods...
Yes Hunters Point,Ca.
Not to be a "drag" but I don't feel like sharing much of what happened/what I did in that neighborhood when I was growing up but I did grow up unlike some people and went from the projects to a penthouse and tried to bring (not literally) as many of my friends as I could. Meaning I tried to help as many of my friends out of the projects as possible even thought a lot still live there including family. Not bragging in anyway but not many black males from the jects have seen or done what I've done unless they where someone I was close with,haha.
Cle, I think I can guess the neighborhood whereof you speak. Something like 40 - 50% white, 30-40% black 10-20% hispanic. Lots of stray bullets in the housing projects, sad to say.
Unfortunately we had an retired gentleman in another neighborhood struck by a bullet while in his mom's living room, speculation it was a case of mistaken adress by the shooter. That's in a neighborhood that looks pretty and well kept up for the most part but there are some bad elements around.
Cle, I think I can guess the neighborhood whereof you speak. Something like 40 - 50% white, 30-40% black 10-20% hispanic. Lots of stray bullets in the housing projects, sad to say.
Unfortunately we had an retired gentleman in another neighborhood struck by a bullet while in his mom's living room, speculation it was a case of mistaken adress by the shooter. That's in a neighborhood that looks pretty and well kept up for the most part but there are some bad elements around.
Im confused...do you even live in the Cleveland area?
No, the area that Im talking about is about 60% hispanic, 30% black/mixed, and 10% non-hispanic white.
The 1st incident occurred in a neighborhood thats about 50% black/mixed, 30% hispanic, and 20% non-hispanic white. The 3rd incident occurred in a neighborhood thats about 60% black/mixed, 5% hispanic, and 25% non-hispanic white. These are all rough neighborhoods.
Location: Cleveland, OH USA / formerly Chicago for 20 years
4,069 posts, read 7,315,088 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cle440
Yeah I definitely have.
Im currently 28 years old and up to age about 22 I lived strictly in bad neighborhoods in the Cleveland area. Specifically I was born off Storer Ave. on the Westside of Cleveland, pretty bad neighborhood. I mostly grew up in Central Lorain, and Southside Elyria though, both bad neighborhoods. I also had family/friends where I lived for a short time off E85th and Superior Ave. on the Eastside of Cleveland. One of the worst neighborhoods in the US.
I have experienced a lot of bad things living in those areas. Ive been directly shot at 3 times, very scary moments. The 1st happened in Central Lorain about 95, I was mistaken for a gang member and shot at in broad daylight in a alleyway. The 2nd happened in South Lorain about 98 I was out late at night near a bar in a bad neighborhood, friends got into a fight and I was shot at. The 3rd happened in South Elyria about 01 I was out with a friend who was involved in drugs, a "drunk crackhead" couldnt think rationally and chased me down a side street shooting repeatedly. Other than that, Ive seen people get shot and stabbed in front of me. Ive had friends and family get killed or overdose on drugs. Ive been stabbed and jumped myself several times, also seen it happen many times. I had my house broken into and our stuff from outside stolen numerous times. We had our cars stolen several times. Ive seen everything about the drug dealing, from $5 bags of weed to bricks of cocaine and Heroin. Pretty much everything that happens in the worst streets and projects, Ive seen.
When I was about 23 though I was given the chance to live in a suburb and later travel throughout the US and I did. Needless to say I did it, and havent looked back since. I got out of the old lifestyle I had and am a different person now. Ive seen many ghettos and nice areas in many cities throughout the East Coast and Midwest. Right now I live in a working class neighborhood in Lorain, OH in the Cleveland area. Its much better than my old neighborhoods. I still have friends in the hood though. There was a lot of good times, but many more bad times make it not worth it.
I grew up living in some pretty rough "white ghetto"-type neighborhoods on the West Side of Cleveland back in the '60s and '70s. Not the kind of "war zone" neighborhoods where I worried about being stabbed or shot, and I didn't know from gangs back then, but there were a lot of young teenage punk "street toughs" hanging out on the streetcorners with a "chip on the shoulder" mentality who were always ready to pick a fight and beat you up for any or no reason. That's just how it was.
The first place I remember living was the Lakeview Terrace Projects off West 25th north of Detroit Avenue. We lived there from 1961 (moved there when I was five months old) up until 1965. That was actually a pretty decent place to live back then, it didn't get really bad until some years later. Back in those days quite a few white people still lived in public housing.
Most of my growing up years after that were spent living off West 38th and Bridge Avenue, in the days before all the Ohio City gentrification. That neighborhood, though getting bad, did have its good points. There still were quite a few Irish and Italian and Hungarian immigrants left over from the old days (my grandmother was Italian and lived a block away, and our landlords living downstairs from us were an elderly Hungarian couple). Gradually those old immigrants were moving away, however, to the suburbs, and were being replaced by Appalachians and Puerto Ricans. The only blacks (at the time) lived in the public housing around West 25th Street. We lived there pretty much without incident until the 1970s, when my dad got mugged a couple times being out late at night drunk... once the muggers got his $200 wristwatch. Also, an elderly lady living next door to us got her purse snatched on several different occasions, even though she only went out during the day. She used to tell us about "the old days" when she and her friends used to walk home from downtown across the Detroit-Superior bridge in the wee hours and nobody ever bothered them.
Aside from being bullied at times, I myself didn't really have any major problems there. But right on up to the age of 17, I never went out after dark in my neighborhood alone.
Probably the worst place I ever lived was at West 6th and Railway in the Tremont area... when I was about 7, my mom took me and left my dad and we moved into this real dump there and were on welfare... We had an unimpeded view of the Industrial Valley and the steel mills, I remember, and as a kid I thought that was really cool. But there were frequent gunshots outside at night, and my mom sternly ordered me to stay away from the windows. Once a bully kid living next door shot a BB gun through our kitchen window, and on another occasion threw a brick through that same window. I hated that kid, but was friends with his cousin, who lived down the block and was really nice.
Fortunately we only lived there for a year, then moved. (In recent years I've been back to that corner and there are now upscale townhouses where our rundown shack once stood... neighborhood's changing.)
Other places I lived growing up: Off West 25th and Denison Avenue for a very brief time... this was in 1969 and the area was a bit rough I suppose... I was scared of the neighbor kids living downstairs from us... but my cousin and her husband lived just a few blocks away, at West 32nd and Denison, and I thought that area seemed OK...
After that my mom and I moved to the Riverside Park projects, on Parkmount off Rocky River Drive a few blocks south of Puritas, near the airport... we lived there about 1 1/2 years and that area was actually pretty decent back then. We had a townhouse with our own upstairs/downstairs, nice modern (for the time) kitchen and bath, and large grassy area in back for kids to play in. I actually liked it there. But in 1971 we went back to live with dad again in the West 38th and Bridge area... and by late '70s that area was getting worse... more arson and stuff going on, and they cancelled my grandmother's fire insurance... She sold her house in '79 and moved in with one of my cousins in the suburbs. She was getting too old and infirm by then to take good care of her house and her garden anyway.
In '79, after high school graduation when I started working full time, I lived off West 74th and Detroit for six months, upstairs of a double house on Rutledge Avenue, my first place of my own. I learned for myself how rough the area was when my place was broken into, robbed and vandalized repeatedly, and neither the Cleveland police nor my landlord were any help.
After that I moved to the suburbs (Lakewood) where I felt safe for 15 years... then relocated to Chicago where I live in a highrise in a very good part of town for the most part (although there are a few rough spots a couple blocks away).
Last edited by andrew61; 03-10-2009 at 10:24 PM..
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