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Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

St. Louis is similar: you can walk from downtown to empty grass-filled blocks in about fifteen minutes.

My favorite story is the origin of the City Museum (which, shoutout to the City Museum, it's awesome). The City Museum building is in a former factory, it's about 11 stories tall and fills a city block. It's on the edge of downtown about a dozen blocks from the Arch. The artist behind the museum bought the building in the '90s for something like $700,000. That's a whole-ass industrial building, walkable from anywhere in downtown St. Louis, for under a million dollars.

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They also filmed Escape from New York there in 1981 so they didn't have to spend any money on making a post-apocalyptic cityscape!

https://www.riverfronttimes.com/arts/how-a-1976-st-louis-fir...

I think most US cities are like that in the “downtown to disheveled in 15 minutes” sense.

I'm not quite so sure. The amount of demolished blight in Detroit has left this eerie urban meadow feeling to a decent amount of areas in the vicinity of downtown. Walking the empty streets with empty lots and a few normal or a few burnt out houses is peaceful and fun in a way you wouldn't expect. I haven't seen it in a lot of cities.

I've lived in Los Angeles, Seattle, D.C., New York, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Boston. I've spent time in Phoenix, San Francisco, Kansas City, Chicago, Miami, Portland, Atlanta, and Orlando. None of them come close to what you see in St. Louis. As a disclaimer, I always tell people, every bad thing you hear about St. Louis is true, and worse than you've heard -- but also that the many, many good things about St. Louis are never mentioned, and that's a shame. It's a long list and the City Museum is high on it.

But that said, check out this completely empty block on Delmar and 21st [1], and remember that with the Arch, that's less than 20 blocks from the river. And five blocks north of there is the former site of Pruitt Igoe, which is basically six or so blocks of wilderness behind a chain link fence. I don't doubt there are cities in worse shape (Detroit probably being one of them), but none that I've explored.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZWrwkK6CytcQRNmU6

Many cities have bad areas. But few have that 15 minute dynamic. OK maybe SF with the Tenderloin but even Howard St. isn't as bad as it used to be.

Most older pre-war cities have a core that is hollowed out with more affluent areas nearby creating a stark contrast. Newer cities that developed with automobile sprawl have that more diffused.

In some smaller cities like Savannah that gradient shift is a matter of blocks.

I lived in New Orleans for a bit and a dynamic you have there is that you have streets that were the historically nice homes and you have nearby--even adjacent--streets that were where the slaves lived and remnants of that dichotomy can still be seen in a lot of the housing quality.

I spent a long weekend in Soulard to see Brittany Howard last year. Outside of the immediate mile radius of the neighborhood, my partner and I constantly asked ourselves “where the hell is everyone?”

Ive been everywhere in the US but the Dakotas and never seen a city of STL’s size feel so big yet so empty.

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