Roughest looking street corner in the U.S courtesy of Google Street Views

[turnthelightsoff]

Most of Buffalo's east side is a bombed-out hellhole, as you can see on Google Street View. Arguably the worst area is bounded by Genesee to the north, Broadway to the south, Bailey to the east, and Fillmore to the west. This is one example:

204 Walden Avenue, Buffalo, United States
http://goo.gl/maps/6c96h

[dalparadise]

With regard to imagining what these places were like in their prime, I look to the vacant lots with remnants of foundations. There's a story there.

Once this spot held a building--maybe a house or a store. It was here because people bet on this area. They wanted to live here. it was better than the alternative, whatever that may have been. Maybe it even thrived as a neighborhood. Maybe it was vibrant and close to downtown. maybe neighbors met in the evenings outside or at the corner market. Perhaps it was always "working class," but proud and clean. Owners cared about their homes and businesses. Landlords, many of whom lived in the neighborhood, did too.

Over the years, however, the neighborhood changed. First, a few houses went unpainted for a few years. Then, the economy went down and people lost their jobs. Working people stayed, but many families pulled up roots and looked for the next better thing--either in a nearby suburb or a different town altogether. Landlords who once lived in the neighborhood moved away. Now grass was going unkept and trash was starting to pile up. Worse, drug dealers moved into a place few seemed to care about or even notice. It was much easier to do their business with no one watching.

The remaining poor people without options to leave lived like prisoners in houses that were literally falling down around them. Some of the absentee landlords resorted to arson of their property in an often fruitless attempt to collect insurance money on a building that was worth about as much as their car. The burned out hull of this home or store, where people once placed their dreams of a better life, may have sat on the block for years. Kids got hurt playing in the charred ruins. More drug deals were done behind the building. More fires were set by neighborhood thugs.

An empty foundation tells a story. Finally, someone in the city decided enough was enough and had the debris removed, purportedly to keep the neighborhood safe from further injuries and drug activity, no doubt, but really just to ease fears of the city's liability if someone were to be abducted, raped or killed on this site. No one cares about places like this until it hits home.

Or, could it have been inspiration from that one house on the opposite corner--the one with the old lady who never left. The one with the fresh new siding and the bright red awnings installed by her grandson? In this hellhole of burned out buildings and vacant lots, could an owner or developer see a spark of pride in the neighborhood that inspires him to clean up this charred safety hazard and start making plans for the next rise of this neighborhood? What would it look like? Who would live there?

Would it be a cash-grab or a place for the kinds of families that once lived here, long ago?

[313Weather]

Originally Posted by jtur88

If you pan around on that one, it looks like a pretty decent neighborhood, just happens to have a house that is abandoned and neglected.

Yep.

It's not hard at all to find numerous corners in Detroit that are FAR worse than that.