Ones that come to mind for me are Vegas, Toronto, Paris
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Salt Lake City, Utah. Utterly gorgeous, but strongly reconsider moving there if you aren’t a Mormon. The whole valley/arguably state has a constant fog of oppressively bad juju looming over it, despite being truly breathtaking.
Relevant but I’m currently going down this Bricks & Minifigs vs Ben rabbit hole and wow these mormons are creepy as fuck.
Their entire history is insanely, deeply fucked in ways most people don’t realize. Dating back to the very beginning.
Do you have any recommended reading?
So, so much. My very long comment got wiped before I could finish–I was trying to find an old 1800s newspaper account from the Library of Congress, so consider yourself lucky I’m relegated to a phone keyboard. I’m working on a book myself, so I’ve got huuuuuundreds of sources, but many of them are historic and hard to share conveniently. For a quick variety:
Fifteen Years Among the Mormons by Mary Ettie V. Smith (1860) is one of the most breathtaking page-turners I’ve ever read. Like many works that touch on history Mormons don’t like, they’ve been very successful at whitewashing this to a mere “unfair anti-Mormon polemic,” but…eh. Very complicated, but it really has the ring of truth to me compared to other similar sources. That’s the source of the screenshot re: SLC.
Exposé of Polygamy in Utah: A Lady’s Life among the Mormons by Fanny Stenhouse (1872) is a favorite. She had a sharp wit.
No Man Knows My History by Fawn Brodie (1945) was a nuclear bomb of a book.
In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (1997) goes into the MINIMUM 33 girls and women Smith “celestially wed,” including minors, mother-daughter pairs, etc…
For a much more accessible option, look up Mormon Stories on YouTube. The church recently sued them, so you know they’re good. And lest you sneeze at that, the Mormons successfully forced fucking WIKILEAKS to take down one of the church’s internal instruction manuals (it’s copyrighted material of the literal legal corporation that is the Mormon church). They’ve got crazy money, crazy connections. You’ve no idea.
Look up what was the first Sherlock Holmes book (Part 2) and ask yourself why captive Mormon women became such a theme then. In the UK!? Yup. And so much more.
Did you know that the Mormon church owns 2% of the landmass of Florida? Like right now?
I’m just trying to say: it’s a deeeeep fucking rabbit hole.
I just discovered this yesterday and went all the way down that rabbit hole. Holy moly they are really trying to beat down on the guy trying to do the right thing. That police department is NASTY.
It looks like he has some good lawyers coming his way though. Looking forward to the second part of the civil rights lawyer’s video (and part three of his own).
Seems like it’s a really deep rabbit hole!
I’ve heard that, in terms of geography and natural scenery, Salt Lake City is the city people want when they think they want Denver.
Definitely SLC. Hands down.
Shit is like walking through the looking glass.
And not in the cool, drug-induced way. Not like that at all.
Council Bluffs, IA. I once had family there and there’s a story in our family. One of them had a radio of some sort that works on trucker frequencies and he overheard a conversation between trucker CBs that went something like:
- “I’ve never been to Council Bluffs before. What’s it like?”
- “Well, if the earth needed an enema, Bluffs is where they’d put the tube.”
It used to be a railroad town, but the railroad pulled out and left economic carnage in its wake. Meanwhile, Omaha, just across the river, is comparatively very affluent with skilled jobs in tech, so Bluffs is kindof “the slums” (casualties of the worst end of capitalism.) and Omaha is all gentrified and hip, which rubs salt in the wound, and those who are still in Bluffs are the ones who lacked the wherewithal (luck, credit (social, financial, or otherwise), mental health, etc) to move to Omaha. Last time I was in Bluffs (and that was even before I knew the rail background story) it really felt like there was just a pall over the whole place. The strangers you saw at the grocery store or whatever just seemed “down and out” in an undefinable way. The local government seems some combination of corrupt and incompetent and the few folks I know of who still live in Bluffs there are racists and MAGA nuts and grifters and (I say this with love) deeply mentally ill. It’s a disturbingly strange and depressing place.
Phoenix. Don’t ever make the mistake of moving there or you’ll have a hard time leaving. It’s the closest thing to purgatory I’ve ever experienced. I certainly aged, but I don’t think I matured a day while I was there.
Dubai is the most liminal fucking city in the world. If a hospital corridor was a city, it would be Dubai.
The opposite of this would be Hanoi. That’s a city where each street feels like a living, breathing animal.
I’m not sure I’d describe it as “bad vibes”, but Detroit has always struck me as charmingly postapocalyptic. It’s the only place I’ve ever seen fires in barrels in the middle of streets in real life.
I never want to go back to St Louis.
This. Or anywhere near Missouri, for that matter.
Also true. I guess Columbia was ok
Sounds like a great name for a song.
was there recently, goddamn despressing
Fucking Dallas, TX. Of all the major cities in North America, Dallas is the most devoid of culture. It is a city inhabited by cars, not people. If you took the average of all North American cities, it would be Dallas, but not in a way that derives any value from the cities included in the average. If you asked an LLM to generate an American metroplex, you would get a low-resolution, but otherwise one-to-one map of Dallas and Ft. Worth. Dallas is the backrooms except with a clear view of the sky.
Houston.
…Toronto? Wtf is wrong with Toronto
I don’t get Paris either. It’s a big city, what do you expect? I love it. I’m currently in Prague and I reaaaalllly prefer Paris.
Paris is shitty for tourists who follow the main path. It certainly has many cool places and things if you care to look. You just won’t see any camera wielding Japanese tourists there. And of course it has all the crime and poverty problems you expect from a city that attracts anything and anyone of note from the whole country.
Now Lille, that felt off. Or any place on the Mediterranean in winter.
It’s just NYC without any sort of character. Concrete buildings and dystopian. I just don’t like being there.
As a lifelong NYer now living in Toronto I beg to differ. Sure it’s smaller than NYC by almost every metric except land size, but it has hidden pockets of community and life if you look for them. Compared to NYC, Toronto is greener, friendlier, and better for artists. It has lots of third spaces, which are all but extinct in NYC. Parts of NYC truly are nothing more than dystopian concrete slabs (ever visit Midtown?)
Unfortunately, both cities are victims to festering capitalism and governments that hate us, so you are correct in your assessment of gentrifiers stripping it for parts. The same exact thing can be said about nearly every city in the US and Canada. It’s almost always done against the will of the people who actually have to live with their changes. In NYC, just last year we all banded together to narrowly defeat a proposal that threatened to demolish Coney Island and replace it with a dystopian mega casino - and that was just one of six casino proposals that year. At the same time in Toronto, Ford’s spa was a mirror of the same type of development and now Sneaky Dee’s is at risk of becoming condos. I don’t see this as a failure of each city but rather a casualty of right wing politics and the greater class war.
For what it’s worth, I do miss NYC and all my friends and loved ones out there. As they say, you can take the NYer out of NY but you can’t take NY out of the NYer. I truly do love both cities and look forward to the day I can reunite them.
Johnstown PA.
Was there a little over a decade ago on a beautiful summer Saturday afternoon. There was barely any traffic in the city, and we were the only people out walking around (we stopped by during travel to see the flood museum, it’s small but really interesting and slightly eerie, if you’re ever in the area go check it out, it’s worth the stop). I don’t think we really saw other people until we went over to the edge of town to another main tourist attraction (the incline plane railroad).
Although to be fair most of the rural East Coast (and I guess the US, but I’ve mostly traveled around the East Coast states) is like that. A bunch of sad towns that maybe were something once when their respective industries were booming, but now are sad, impoverished towns filled with once beautiful buildings that are falling apart.
Lots of Western PA and most of WV are like this. Absolutely gorgeous wilderness areas and amazing outdoor activities but the towns are really depressing.
Summersville, WV is one of my favorite places to visit but I’d never live there. Fayetteville is awesome and the new National Park is helping bring money. It’s funny to me the locals are upset that it is bringing in money but it was kind of depressing before. There needs to be some happy medium so the locals benefit but they need to stop fighting progress.
A lot of upstate New York is like this. Many once great towns but population dropping for decades.
The town I grew up in was a great place to grow up. But the major employer left and nothing replaced it. It looks exactly the same except greyer, run down, partly abandoned. At least I don’t think there are any $5,000 houses left , so that’s something
There are too many rural towns in upstate NY (especially driving up to Buffalo) where you keep your windows rolled up and don’t stop anywhere. Very white supremacist coded.
I get that they were left behind and remaining residents feel desperate, but that shouldn’t mean a sharp turn toward the right
I said similar in the last few elections: do you really prefer the guy wanting to “tear it all down”, over the candidate who at least recognizes the problem and proposes something, even if you don’t believe it? So now we have cuts in aid of all sorts, cuts in healthcare, cuts in job development, cuts in pollution remediation for the least advantaged, instead of retraining that you don’t believe in? Really? So it’s better to sit there starving with no heat, not enough food, no access to healthcare, mine tailings threatening your town, etc? But at least you p*wned the libs, who wanted to …. Help?
My two cents as an outsider: there are two parties in the US, the conservatives and then the Republicans.
If you are desperate, you vote for change. Any change. That includes the candidate that promises to spit in your face personally.
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Why Calgary? One of the nicest large cities I’ve spent time in.
Stampede is bad energy though.
What about Deadmonton, especially the last 10 years? It’s like a giant liminal space
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I lived in Calgary while I went to college and I made so many friends with zero effort. I thought that the huge transient population was kind of cool. I live on vancouver island now and connecting with people here is almost impossible by comparison
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I’m in Victoria, too. 8 years here and not much of a friend group even with such like minded people at work.
I feel like Victoria is maybe the best city in all of NA but man the vibes here are strange. Go out west into the woods and it just gets weirder. I have stories and those woods breathe evil I swear.
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My gf moved here less than a year ago from mainland and she can’t believe how strange and different people are on the island compared. There’s also that weird group of people who never seem to leave victoria and they have such an incredibly narrow minded view of everything. My manager at work was born in victoria and the furthest place he’s been on the island is point no point. Wtf.
Why Miami, I know the florida man stories but I assumed that happens more in the north and areas outside the main city ?
Wow, New Orleans? I love that city.
Downtown Clearwater FL has been pretty much taken over by Scientologists and is quite creepy now.
Alamogordo, NM. All of Oklahoma.
IME, Brussels is truly awful. Grey, ugly, depressing and decaying.
I happened to be there during the Ommegang and got tickets. It was awesome. That square is the only bit I enjoyed about Brussels, though. And the fries, naturally.
I love Belgium but Brussels is alarmingly lame
I hated Brussels… it was so depressing. I took the high-speed train from Amsterdam… my introduction to the city was stepping into Midi Station, which smelled like a urinal. The sheer number of homeless people was shocking. No one cared about them either, they were sat on the ground surrounded by garbage 💔
It’s like Marseille without the sun and friendly Southern vibes, that’s what it reminds me of, especially the Midi area. I recall walking nearby and there’s like a tunnel where the tram goes by, and people had set up tents and impromptu “restaurants” in it. What a mess. But my brother and his lady just went to Bruges and they said it was beautiful so it’s not like the whole of Belgium is as ugly. 🙏
- Newport, Wales.
- Wisbech, England.
My parents came to visit me in Wales. They suggested we go to Newport to look around. I just answered “Hm, let’s not”. There’s just such an odd feeling walking around that city.
