Don't fly here...

Hmmm, the wife and me took our planned flying vacation in April...
Turned out to be a nasty weather driving vacation of some 4000 miles...
Went to see the Arch (underwhelming)... In getting back on the highway
I took a wrong turn and wound up in the worst part of St. Louis just
blocks from the arch... Looks just like inner city Flint, and Detroit,
and Chicago, and Philly,and Pittsburg, and Cleveland, and other cities
I have been... Didn't know where I was for sure and I could have been
in any of those cities... (how come a nice country boy like me keeps
getting lost in these places... I don't get lost in the woods.)
So from that perspective St. Louis is neither better nor worse... I
did not feel threatened driving narrow tenement streets in what was
clearly gang territory, with grafiti, and litter...
I can't speak for St. Louis, but Flint and Detroit have to be a hard
row to hoe for the civic officials... The manufacturing base has
collapsed and the upper and middle classes have mostly fled to the
burbs, like Troy, Oakland, etc... The city population has increasing
percentages of deep poverty, prison records, hard drug addiction where
stealing is the only way to obtain the drugs, crumbling infrastructure,
hoplessness, gang bangers controlling entire neighborhoods, alcoholism,
single mother families where each child has a different surname and no
father in the home, declining educational levels and standards... The
social contract is broken... And that social contract involved the
neighbors knowing your business, being willing to help, and being
willing to let you know if they disapproved of your life style and your
childrens behavior..

At the same time these are large cities that come to life in the
morning with choking traffic streaming in from the burbs to the
downtown and business centers, the malls, the corporate headquarters
established in prior eras, the auto plants... Hundred thousand dollar
cars driving past eight thousand dollar houses... But there are not
muggings at the stop lights or fire fights in the Middle of Jefferson
Avenue... Commerce goes on because even poorer people need food,
clothing, medical care, birth records, gasoline, lawn mowers, rental
movies, and on, and on... The court house complex is a major center of
activity and of economic flow with money changing hands... Used car
lots abound... Check cashing stores abound... Rent To Own stores are
legion... Convenience stores sell cigarettes by the pack or by the
single smoke... Beer and liquor sell well... Cheap clothing and cheap
furniture stores multiply... KMART, WALLMART, etc., do well in these
areas... Sams Clubs, and similar stores are not seen in the inner city
as that population base does not make volume purchases, one smoke and a
single beer are more like it...

You do not take your life in your hands traveling through these
cities... However, go bar hopping, hanging around rough places at
night, looking to get high or laid, and they might just find your body
in the morning... Seems from my readings in latin from high school
(long ago in a world far away) that this has been true from the
earliest writings of man, not just since the post industrial hangover
in Michigan... The Roman soldiers knew that there were certain bawdy
houses best avoided if you wanted to be around in the morning...

denny
hemlock, michigan (one stop light away from being just a wide spot in
the road)

Javier Henderson wrote:
Jay Honeck wrote:

The list of the "Ten Most Dangerous Cities in America" was released
today.

Lake Forest, Mission Viejo and Thousand Oaks in California, and Cary in
North Carolina don't have airports. Is this a list of cities by crime rate?

If it's possible to fly out of Cary, I'd like to know, I live just
outside the city limits!

That's why we live in Durham - for the danger and the airport!

"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
oups.com...
The list of the "Ten Most Dangerous Cities in America" was released
today.

Listed as the most dangerous cities a Camden, New Jersey; Detroit,
Michigan; St. Louis, Missouri; Flint, Michigan; Richmond, Virginia;
Baltimore, Maryland; Atlanta, Georgia; New Orleans, Louisiana; Gary,
Indiana; Birmingham, Alabama.

snip

Anyone regularly fly out of any of these cities? Are they as bad as
they make them sound?
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Atlanta ain't bad. Like anywhere else, there are neighborhoods you don't
want to enter, but the vast majority of the city is a very nice place.

I'd guess the statistics around Atlanta are very skewed. Probably 1.5
million or 2 million people work in the city, but well under a million
people actually live inside the city lines. If a crime happens to a
commuter, it counts in the numerator part of the crime statistics, but not
in the denominator part... That makes the crimes/person figure look worse
than reality.

KB

On Mon, 21 Nov 2005 14:23:10 -0500, Javier Henderson
wrote:

:Jay Honeck wrote:
: The list of the "Ten Most Dangerous Cities in America" was released
: today.
:
: Listed as the most dangerous cities a Camden, New Jersey; Detroit,
: Michigan; St. Louis, Missouri; Flint, Michigan; Richmond, Virginia;
: Baltimore, Maryland; Atlanta, Georgia; New Orleans, Louisiana; Gary,
: Indiana; Birmingham, Alabama.
:
: At the other end of the scale, the safest cities are named as: Newton,
: Massachusetts; Clarkstown, New York; Amherst, New York; Mission Viejo,
: California; Brick Township, New Jersey; Troy, Michigan; Thousand Oaks,
: California; Round Rock, Texas; Lake Forest, California; Cary, North
: Carolina.
:
: Strangely, I've flown into three of the ten worst -- and none of the
: best! (Although I've visited Mission Viejo...)
:
: Anyone regularly fly out of any of these cities? Are they as bad as
: they make them sound?
:
:Lake Forest, Mission Viejo and Thousand Oaks in California, and Cary in
:North Carolina don't have airports. Is this a list of cities by crime rate?

Lake Forrest and Mission Viejo border each other, and are pretty hard
to tell apart. I can't believe anyone would list them as separate
cities, but they are both incorporated. They're both about 10 miles
south of John Wayne Airport (SNA). Thousand Oaks is about 10 miles
east of Camarillo airport.

On the bad list, I've been to Gary, Atlanta, Detroit, New Orleans and
St. Louis. Gary was horrible. There was nothing there. They were
doing the Miss Universe pagent there while I was there (God only knows
how they picked Gary) and the contestants and TV crew never left the
hotel.

The others cities had something worthwhile, even if (large) sections
were off limits. But Gary was hopeless.

Jay,

When I lived in a burb of Chicago, I kept my airplane at the Gary,
Indiana airport. At the time it was the great undiscovered airport in
the Chicago area. The city of Gary was a place to avoid and the days
that I took the train from downtown Chicago to the station nearest the
airport and then had to walk the mile to my hangar, I was always a bit
concerned, but never had any problem. The people at the Gary airport
were absolutely wonderful to me. When the hangar I had developed a
serious leak, airport maintenance personnel used their trucks to help
me move my stuff to another hangar while mine could be repaired. The
airport manager put me into a larger, more expensive hangar but kept
the rental at the lower rate. Hangar rates were the lowest in the
Chicago area and the airport had a number of instrument approaches,
including an ILS.

The downside was the incredible level of air pollution from the
industry in the area, which meant that a layer of dust and grit would
form very fast on all horizontal surfaces in the hangar. The upside
was that I knew the airplane would fly because I could see the air g.

Once Meigs was terrorized it meant that figuring out what airport to
use when flying into Chicago got a lot tougher. I've found that it's a
tossup between Gary and Midway, with the prices at Gary being much
lower. Going toward Chicago you do not go through the city, just past
a lot of industry separated rather incongruously by hopelessly tacky
casinos.

Wouldn't care to live in Gary, but unless the airport has gone
seriously downhill, it's a good place to keep an airplane.

I've flown into Troy, Michigan (Oakland Troy Airport). Pretty good
place, surrounded by high dollar city/suburb.

Warmest regards,
Rick

Further, the statistics for Richmond (and perhaps other cities as
well) are skewed in that the crime stats for the City do not include
the suburbs in the surrounding counties that normally balance out the
crime rate. As a homeowner in Richmond and a resident in DC, I feel
much safer in Richmond than I do in DC...especially in the air

Michael Moore lives on Park Avenue in Manhattan.

There is a DFAH zone (Do Not F*&K Around Here) established in a 100
yard zone on my home in Alabama. The word is out that there is a crazy
foool who WILL shoot your sorry as@ if you make an attempt to penetrate
his home area.
The neighbors consider it the safest zone in the area for 5
miles.......
Ol Shy & Bashful

Amen
Ol Shy & Bashful - a wide world traveler and adventurer in the seediest
places out of pure boredom

CNN quotes the mayor of Camden: "We're doing so many nice things now.
It's unfortunate that somebody always wants to bad-mouth Camden," Mayor
Gwendolyn Faison said.

Yeah, if you just ignore that murder, prostitution and drug trafficing
thing ....