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Cairo's downtown is anything but well-preserved. In fact Cairo is best known these days for ghost-town voyeur tourism seeing as the entire downtown business district is abandoned and rotting back into the earth, as are most of its residential streets.
The only thing keeping any part of Cairo afloat was the public housing development on the edge of town, and as I understand HUD ordered those to be torn down. The city was already 80% abandoned before they were closed, I reckon the place is about 90% abandoned now.
Duluth was originally built like it was going to become a big city but that petered out in the early 20th century so its downtown and Central Hillside neighborhood are basically a museum of late 19th century Midwestern urbanism.
Duluth and the Mississippi River towns like Winona, La Crosse and Dubuque are the best smaller cities in this part of the Midwest in my opinion. They are also quite hilly, which is unique for the region.
Agree about the river cities. In IA, besides Dubuque, there's Burlington, Fort Madison and Keokuk. Keep going south, there's Hannibal (though incredibly touristy) and Quincy.
Vincennes is an interesting case, ok, maybe not. It just feels like a little town that could be so much better than it is. They have a........cute?....downtown. Main St itself feels like it should be the anchor of a vibrant downtown, lots of intact historic buildings. The riverfront park that hosts the George Rogers Clark Memorial is nice. To the east, perhaps a stretch to call it walking distance, is Gregg Park which is a nice city park with a lot of intact historic housing stock. Really nice area, albeit pretty small.
The rest of Vincennes.........oof. A lot of unrealized potential in Vincennes. You'd think with VU just to the NE of downtown, you'd see more continuous activity between downtown and campus. It is lacking, but there is at least some potential there. Too bad VU acts more like an island than an anchor to something better.
Speaking of which, driving around campus was as much a disappointment as the rest of town. Considering it's one of the oldest universities in the midwest if not THE oldest, it was quite a shock to see no historic character at all. We expected to find at least a small core of traditional "university-gothic" architecture; instead we saw a collection of soul-crushing, late-20th-century utilitarian box structures, along with that ridiculously corny and out-of-place "Bourbon Street" style student housing development.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben Around
You obviously missed Cairo's historic district:
Yeah, no I didn't. About 5 buildings maintained mostly with state-supported preservation funds in a city that's literally 90% depopulated leaving behind thousands of abandoned and rotting houses with thousands more already razed to the bare lot does not constitute an "intact" district.
First time I was in Cairo IL, it was like a mini=Las Vegas. A dozen flashy neon-lit honky-tonks with riverboat motifs, music filling the streets. 1956.
First time I was in Cairo IL, it was like a mini=Las Vegas. A dozen flashy neon-lit honky-tonks with riverboat motifs, music filling the streets. 1956.
And that was after its decline had already started. Fast forward several decades and that decline just kept on going through today when there's almost nothing left. It's impressive how the four square block area or so around Riverlore and Magnolia Manor still hold out as a cohesive habitable neighborhood while the rest of the city just rots around it. And I can't imagine how or why that Ford dealership still hangs on.
Several of the smaller state capitals in the Midwest (Des Moines, Springfield, Lansing, Madison) have some nice historic stuff in their cities or in the area. The Lincoln historic area in Springfield is (or at least was prior to the start of the pandemic) very popular and New Salem, IL is very close (https://www.visitspringfieldillinois...storic_Village). Spring Green, WI is also very lovely and has some nice architectural history.
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