What is the shadiest street stretch you have ever seen?

[doity]

I remember back in the early to mid 90’s I did one of those ‘all you can eat’ type of passes with Greyhound. My plan was to stop in SLC, Denver, St. Louis, and Atlanta. How I picked those cities I can’t honestly remember.

Anyway, besides the strain of sitting on a bus with crying babies at 2:00 AM while trying to sleep and a 2 hour layover in Paducah, KY in the middle of a hot and humid night when the bus’s AC was shut off, things went as well as I could hope for. That is not counting sharing a cab with a fellow passenger to a motel advertised inside of the Denver bus station.

When we get there the first clue was the bulletproof glass and the second clue were the numerous unidentified stains found in the room. I quickly got the heck out of there but that entailed a call to the Denver PD because they wouldn’t give a refund. They eventually settled for half and I asked the cop to take me to the nicest hotel in town. And he did 😀

When the bus got to St. Louis I just assumed that the station would be downtown. Wrong. It was quite a ways out and to say that the area was sketchy would be an understatement. It was a tiny building and as soon as you walked out you were accosted by guys just looking to rip off some guy from Oregon (me possibly?) and they were nothing less than persistent. Lucky for me I was pretty streetwise as I was roaming downtown Portland by my early teen years and back in the 70’s Portland was a different place than it is now. Back then you had all sorts of hustlers and assorted hoodlums down there.

So I had no choice to stay there till morning when the city buses started to roll. Why I never got a cab who know, maybe the well had run dry by that point?What I witnessed on the way to downtown was something I will never forget. Block after block of run down and boarded up houses.....literally this went on for a couple of miles it seemed. And the people on the bus must had known that I was out of place and everyone just sat there stoically almost like they were ashamed of their neighborhood and city. Downtown wasn’t bad though and I went up in the arch even though I had no idea that you could until I got there. I assumed it was solid concrete 😀