The worst place you ever lived?

[Jack]

It's very hard to be objective, and I won't go into details, but what was probably by far the worst place I ever lived in was the place I was happiest in. It wasn't the place that was the important thing.

That's very true. At one point I lived alone in a 50 year old unheated trailer in a small trailer park in the mountains. The train tracks weren't far away, and my neighbors were all mentally retarded. I had no heat (besides a floor heater which didn't work), no transportation, and no washing machine (so I had to wash my work clothes in the cold bathtub), but I was happy there because I felt relatively self-sufficient and needed.

[feadogin]

I once lived in an apartment that was borderline the hood in Oakland. There would be drunks sitting on our porch every once in a while when I got home, cause the police couldn't see them there. The kids in the neighborhood would throw rocks at white people.

One of my roommates moved out when he got mugged across the street from our place by someone with a machine gun.

But I met my fiancee through the next roommate that moved in, so I guess it wasn't all bad.
J.

[chas]

The heliport was first to be completed, and immediately, day and night, the helicopters began landing about 300 feet from my apartment. Late at night, you could hear them coming in the distance. The sound would get progressively louder until my whole apartment started to shake as the helicopters neared the landing site. If you remember the photos of the Coast Guard helicopters flying over the flooded homes in New Orleans during Katrina, and many of the shingles being pulled off of the roofs from the updraft of the helicopter blades, my situation wasn't as bad, that's for sure. However, I wanted to wave a piece of white clothing out my bedroom window and be rescued from the situation. Instead, I had to wait until my lease had expired.

Oh, yeah, the first place with the knife fights was also across the street from the railroad tracks. The first few weeks I was woken up by the freight trains at 3 AM and 6 AM and the passenger train at 6:29. I don't think I'd ever have gotten used to it in your situation, Doug, with it irregular.

[Wombat]

I once lived with a few other students in an old mansion in Oxford. That was great in summer. But when winter rolled around it wasn't so good. We had no heating at all in the house except for what an open fire could generate in a vast, open, drafty living room. We spent all day huddled around the fire. To warm up in the morning we first had to go out and chop the wood required.

The next place I moved into was fine until two people moved in who kept a large dog locked in their bedroom all day and refused to do any cleaning whatsoever. Efforts to persuade them to leave proved fruitless. Then the ceiling in my bedroom collapsed. A huge heavy lump of plaster landed in the middle of my bed. I lived for the next few weeks in the basement until I could arrange alternative accomodation.

In one house I lived in, a friend with nowhere else to stay lived in a broom closet.

Yep, I know. Nowhere near as bad as some of you have been reporting.

[Loren]

Monroe Street in South Philly during the mid to late 70's: We were one of the few white families in a predominently black neighborhood that bordered on an Italian neighborhood - gang fights in the High School yard right across the street from us were a nearly weekly occurance - all baseball bats, chains, and knives.

I got mugged walking to elementary school on numerous occasions.

In addition, our home was robbed (completely cleaned out) 4 times while we were out (during the day.) In addition, we were the victims of a home invasion, assault, gang rape and robbery on another occasion, at which point my parents wised up and finally moved us out. Short of living in a third world country, I suppose it doesn't get a whole lot worse than that any where in the U.S.

Loren

[Joseph E. Smith]

Sherburne street, just off Marion in St. Paul Mn. My apartment building was nestled between two crack houses... trouble day and night. One evening in 1988, I came home from piping at The Taste Of Minnesota, to find a poor slob who had been disemboweld with a screw driver bleeding to death on my front steps. Wonderful neighborhood...

[Mitch]

I remember one place I lived for a short time in my old home-town. My brother and I and our very strange but entertaining friend got evicted from a nice little semi-detached because a neighbor was convinced we were terrorists. So it was off up the gully into a house who's landlord didn't care if we were terrorists or (even worse) young blokes. The new house was built on nice sandstone foundations, but the money must have run-out because the wood frame was clad, inside and out, with flattened 4 gal oil drums. Moving in was challenging in the snow - trying to manhandle our vintage refrigerator up a flight of narrow wooden steps coated in ice.

After a month or 2, my brother and I got sick of the cold and the leaky roof and moved out, while our strange but entertaining friend accepted a couple of drifters to fill our old rooms and pay the rent.

Our friend made some house-rules for his new lodgers - including who would mow the grass and when. When Lodger #2 was still in bed at 1pm on his appointed mowing day, our friend called in his door to remind him "you have an hour to get the mowing started". Our friend was not the forgiving type and not a waster of words. So at 2pm precisely, Lodger#2 heard the lawnmower start outside. At 2.01 he heard the mower enter the house and proceed down the hallway, At 2.02 the mower burst into his room and cut a swathe accross his bed matress, sleeping bag and all. My friend tells me that at 2.01:59.95 he saw the quickest bed evacuation he'd ever seen. "Just like on the cartoons".

So I imagine that for lodger #2 this would also be his worst dwelling ever.

My friend later burned the house to the ground.

Just a few months after all that some real terrorists were nabbed by the feds a few doors up - guns, large quantities of explosives and plans to destroy the water supply of Sydney.

I thought my friend was entertaining, but the main act was living next door all the time!

BTW this is all true, although I have minimised some details for the sake of credibility.

[Cynth]

Wow. The worst place I lived was Fullerton, California in Orange County. Far from all the terrible things people have been reporting, the problem with Fullerton was the utter, complete, sickening, mind-numbing boredom of the place. Nothing but housing tracts for as far as the eye could see. Broken up here and there by horrid little malls that all had a Baskin-Robbins, a Kinney shoe store and some sort of grocery store. On the bus to school you could see oil wells pumping away through the smog. For fun, you would go look at the shoes in the Kinney's shoe store and buy a Seventeen magazine at the grocery store. That was about it. There was a small golf course with a stand of trees that we would go sit in just to be somewhere off the cement and asphalt. I got hit in the head with a golf ball and was given a good scolding. It wasn't dangerous but I definitely think of it as a hellhole.

[Lorenzo]

Winnemucca, Nevada.

I was there building a processing plant for a gold mine.
Pay was good, but the town and eveything else was horrible.
Motel sucked. I only lasted a couple weeks. I couldn't take it.

[feadogin]

Wow. The worst place I lived was Fullerton, California in Orange County. Far from all the terrible things people have been reporting, the problem with Fullerton was the utter, complete, sickening, mind-numbing boredom of the place. Nothing but housing tracts for as far as the eye could see. Broken up here and there by horrid little malls that all had a Baskin-Robbins, a Kinney shoe store and some sort of grocery store. On the bus to school you could see oil wells pumping away through the smog. For fun, you would go look at the shoes in the Kinney's shoe store and buy a Seventeen magazine at the grocery store. That was about it. There was a small golf course with a stand of trees that we would go sit in just to be somewhere off the cement and asphalt. I got hit in the head with a golf ball and was given a good scolding. It wasn't dangerous but I definitely think of it as a hellhole.

Alright, are you from the O.C., too?! Definitely the ugliest place in the state; I'm glad I got out (the beach is nice, though).

J.

[Walden]

I lived in a place where we had problems with cobras and pythons in our yard. The lower level of the house flooded every time it rained. The water wasn't so good... constant dairrhea and stuff. We had a major earthquake in that house. I liked living there better than living in Manila.

[Cynth]

Wow. The worst place I lived was Fullerton, California in Orange County. Far from all the terrible things people have been reporting, the problem with Fullerton was the utter, complete, sickening, mind-numbing boredom of the place. Nothing but housing tracts for as far as the eye could see. Broken up here and there by horrid little malls that all had a Baskin-Robbins, a Kinney shoe store and some sort of grocery store. On the bus to school you could see oil wells pumping away through the smog. For fun, you would go look at the shoes in the Kinney's shoe store and buy a Seventeen magazine at the grocery store. That was about it. There was a small golf course with a stand of trees that we would go sit in just to be somewhere off the cement and asphalt. I got hit in the head with a golf ball and was given a good scolding. It wasn't dangerous but I definitely think of it as a hellhole.

Alright, are you from the O.C., too?! Definitely the ugliest place in the state; I'm glad I got out (the beach is nice, though).

J.

Oh, someone understands!!! Yeah, the beach towns were neat but we didn't really get to go to those places much. I have been back once to look at the place as an adult, and believe me, once was enough.

[CHCBrown]

I have thought long and hard about this one. I was an Army brat for my whole life before I joined the Army myself, and I keep losing count of the number of moves in my life after 25 or so (I'm 45 years old).

I ought to be able to name one place worse than the rest, but the fact of the matter is that, though I've been sent a lot of places I didn't want to go, I've never lived anywhere I didn't have a good time.

Even when the places were terrible, and maybe becasue they were, the people were wonderful.

Maybe I should change my username to Pangloss!!

[Flyingcursor]

Sorry to hear about your situation flanum.

Looks like a lot of you have lived in less than ideal conditions.

I have to decide upon which criteria to base the worst place I ever lived. Two of the worst places were in Portsmouth and Norfolk VA. Aside from the general suckage of being in Tidewater Portsmouth was one of the worst towns overall. It's actually a lot nicer now. I lived in an apartment with two other Navy guys where the ceiling collapsed and the roaches were so bad that at night the walls appeared to move. I lived in a place where the sewage came up through the bathtub. Another where the mice were so thick the Pied Piper would have ran in horror.

When I wasn't living in my car I lived in a hotel on Market St. in San Francisco that personified the essence of urban filth. I'd say that San Francisco was the worst place I lived, not because of my residence so much as the dreaded 4 way stops on every corner. I worked in Daly City so the drive was terrible. Also, because I had a Michigan driver's license everyone gave me a hard time. The bank wouldn't cash my paycheck, I got pulled over three times because I had Michigan plates and one liquor store wouldn't even let me buy beer.

On a positive note we had a great time hanging out on Haight St. with fellow miscreants.

[CHCBrown]

Any bad moving stories/houses from hell scenarios? might make me feel better!

Had to spend 2 years of my life in Albany, Georgia. Unfortunately, I can never get that time back.

Oh, you all don't know where Albany is? It's on the left just before you reach the gates of Hades (the Flint river is a feeder to the River Styx).

Fire ants, the "gnat-line", the red clay. Nope, don't miss it at all.

But Albany has some great road races and triathlons! (or used to, when I lived in Columbus).