The City Narrows

For a good time, enter the dark alley.

Every town in the multiverse has a part that is something like Ankh-Morpork's Shades. It's usually the oldest part, its lanes faithfully following the original tracks of medieval cows going down to the river, and they have names like the Shambles, the Rookery, Sniggs Alley... Most of Ankh-Morpork is like that in any case. But the Shades is even more so, a sort of black hole of bred-in-the-brickwork lawlessness. Put it like this — even the criminals were afraid to walk the streets. The Watch didn't set foot in it.

— Guards! Guards!

In the setting of a large sprawling Metropolis, there is always a certain spot that contains the dark underbelly of city life. It will be the place where the police rarely tread and where those who attend to certain unsavory professions rely on their own methods of protection and enforcement. It will have its own nickname from the locals, it may even be marked out on the official map, and any recognised Thieves' Guild is likely to have its headquarters around here. Its level of actual malice may vary; it could be rather lively and cheerful area with an active Black Market that forms an actual market and where gamblers, whores, and dealers collect for decadent revelry, or a terrifying, silent place where the protagonist is in constant danger for each moment that they spend in this dark corner, even during daytime, an area that's so risky that police won't enter without a SWAT unit. The former is more common when The City Narrows are the Not-So-Safe Harbor district and are thus filled with pirates' and sailors' entertainment in levels that would make Frank Miller blush.

It will also manage to be made entirely of back alleys that seem to only back onto more twisting service roads weaving between Abandoned Warehouses and slum tenements. It is basically the back alley of the entire city which is what distinguishes it from the Wretched Hive: the Wretched Hive is an entire locale of crime and vice but the City Narrows is the subsection of the city that you can accidentally wander into from the nice side, if you walk too far along the Wrong Side of the Tracks (however, as in the above example of Ankh Morpork, a Wretched Hive can still have a Narrows area if the subsection manages to be even worse than the rest). So you can expect plenty of "What's a nice girl like you doing here?" Another distinction is that if a nice businessman on a road trip makes a wrong turn and gets off the highway into a Wretched Hive, they may get conned or mugged and lose their wallet; if they mistakenly drive into The City Narrows, they may be carjacked and killed.

A subtrope of Wretched Hive and Wrong Side of the Tracks. It was Truth in Television back when the Kowloon Walled City existed until 1993 when it was demolished to build a large city park, and it still is to a degree; that degree being how much you can tell the inhabitants of a real-life version of this trope that they live in their city's arse end and not be given a Glasgow Grin. A common place to find an Outcast Refuge, since the "seedy" aspect allows the "outcasts" to live in relative peace.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In Cowboy Bebop: the area around the port on Mars.
• Girls und Panzer das Finale shows that the lower sections of the Oarai school ship are this. A rundown, dirty and lawless waste filled to the brim with Japanese Delinquents and, apparently, derelict tanks.
• Wherever Holyland takes place has this.
• The Gray Terminal, a literal compost heap, which lies right next door to the capital City of Goa Kingdom on Luffy's hometown of Dawn Island in One Piece.
• The Walled City in Witch Hunter Robin, presumably taking its name from the real world Kowloon Walled City that was used in the Bourne series below.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, while Satellite is a pretty bad place (in the first season, at least), there's a part of it where even the natives dare not go called the B.A.D. Area, which stands for Barbaric Area after Damage. The site of the Old Momentum Reactor that caused Zero Reverse, the place is dominated by a crater where the old plant used to be, surrounded by ash and rubble. The reactor is still within the crater, its negative energy now creating a portal to Hell itself. While the Dark Signers made this their headquarters, even hardened residents like Crow were scared of the place.

Comic Books

• The Narrows of Batman's Gotham City also appears in abundance in The Dark Knight Trilogy.
  • Gotham also has Crime Alley, which got the name soon after Bruce Wayne's parents were murdered there.
  • And The Cauldron, which is run by the Irish Mob and mostly appears in Hitman (which Batman is said to avoid). When Gotham was abandoned by the government and fell under gang law, the residents of the Cauldron didn't notice.
• Hell's Kitchen, NYC, had this reputation in real life; consequently, it serves this purpose in the Marvel Verse.
  • Gail Simone wrote a satirical article when Hell's Kitchen started getting gentrified into Clinton; Daredevil runs into Bullseye, who's more interested in getting a latte at Starbucks than fighting.
• The Triangle, a hotspot of gang warfare in Green Arrow's Star City. The Glades from the TV version have since appeared in the comics.
• The subtly named Slumville in Midway City, home of Hawkman, Hawkgirl, and the Doom Patrol.
• Judge Dredd: Sector 301, dubbed "The Pit", had a reputation as the most crime-ridden area of Mega-City One. It was unofficially being used as a dumping ground for the most incompetent members of the Justice Department, causing a spike in police corruption and ineffectiveness until Dredd was sent in to clean house.
  • There's also the once-off location "Hayte Street" in Sector 46, where the local criminals are incredibly active and vicious. Judge Dredd claims he wouldn't leave Judge Death handcuffed and helpless in Hayte Street. The rookie he was accompanying at the time, needless to say, fails quite spectacularly when the perp he had arrested and left at a pick-up point is systematically robbed of everything he owns and then dismembered by organ-sharks before he and Dredd can return to rescue him.
• Downtown in Marvel 2099. Which is the whole of old New York. Everybody who's middle class or above live in mile-high towers, ride aircars and never go near ground level if they can avoid it.
• Sin City:
  • Even as scary as the rest of Basin "Sin" City is, The Projects are the scariest parts. It's so lawless that the whole district is essentially controlled by a tribal society. Marv remembers his old neighborhood fondly.
  • While it's technically outside the city limits, The Farm is a place that both cops and criminals try to avoid. It's been rumored to be haunted.
  • Less scary, but just as grungy: Old Town, where prostitutes aren't outside the law, they are the law.
• Suicide Slum in Metropolis, from Superman

Fan Works

• In build your wings on the way down Ed wanders around Canal Street at night, which is the worst place in Central. It has the highest in gang violence, prostitution, and drug rings. It also has a very active nightlife.
• The portal that leads Ranma Saotome, Nabiki Tendo, Shampoo and Ukyo Kuonji from Furinkan High School to Sigil emerges in the Hive Ward, which is portrayed as a dark, oppressive place of decrepit, decaying buildings that block out the sun and winding, maze-like streets covered in mud, bodily waste, and rotting garbage, inhabited by lunatics, criminals and monsters. It's a place so bad that random puddles are hellgates to the realms of Demon Lords And Arch Devils associated with decay and entropy.
  • Ranma and company return to the Hive Ward in the 8th chapter to visit the Bottle & Jug Tavern. They get mugged thirteen times on their way there. Much to the sorrow of their would-be assailants.

Film — Live-Action

• Either the entire City of Detroit, Michigan or the bar located on the Barbary Coast in Airplane! which was so bad it was "worse than Detroit," depending on which way you want to take it.
• The nearly literal "Narrows" quarter of Gotham City in Batman Begins. It's an impoverished, crime-ridden portion of the city on the far side of the river from downtown where the cops are only willing to go in force, which happens to house Arkham Asylum and the League of Shadows' base of operations.
• Five Points was this in Gangs of New York, as well as in Real Life, in the 19th century.
• Old Detroit as portrayed in Robocop.
• The Red-Light District in Sin City where the whores run everything and the police won't even drive across the line, they just turn around and go back.
• In Star Wars, the underworld of Coruscant, as visited by Anakin and Obi-Wan in Attack of the Clones. One denizen even tries to sell them a Fantastic Drug.
• Wild Thing is set in the Zone, a neighborhood ruled by drug lords and Dirty Cops and inhabited mostly by gang members, prostitutes, and homeless people.
• In My Winnipeg, the city is shown as having two different sets of streets, the front streets and the back streets. The back streets are, as you might suspect, where you find the dark parts of the city. Two competing cab companies, after a war for dominance of the city's cab market, finally compromised by having one company for the front streets and one for the back streets.

Literature

• The Asterisk War: Asterisk has two. The redevelopment zone is full of abandoned buildings following a Noodle Incident in the backstory (it has something to do with the death of the previous Festa governing committee president), while the Rotlicht is full of casinos, black market shops, and organized crime.
• Barnaby Grimes has the Gatling Quays, which are the least pleasant district in the city, and in a permanent state of warfare between twelve gangs who effectively control the area.
• In the second novel of The Bourne Series the infamous Walled City of Kowloon plays a major part as a setting and its wretchedness and the wretchedness of Bourne's old life reflect each other.
• The novel A Child Of The Jago by Arthur Morrison is set in a fictionalized version of the Old Nichol district of Victorian London.
• Chung Kuo has the lowest, "below the Net" levels of the world city.
• In A Clockwork Orange, Alex lives in the type of place where seeing ten-year-olds raped in the streets is uninteresting and people over thirty don't open their doors after dark, but there seem to be quieter areas where it's actually unusual for Alex to break through the door to bash your head in. That isn't to say the whole city isn't a Wretched Hive — just that Alex lives in an even worse subsection of it. Which explains a lot, actually.
• In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "Rogues in the House", the Maze.
  • In "The Phoenix on the Sword", the conspirators meet in one.
• Discworld:
  • The Shades of Ankh-Morpork. A classic example: the cops don't go there at all (except for the werewolf), the Seamstresses' Guild need to rely on a couple of assumed, nightmarish old ladies to keep their girls safe with and each time a major character enters it's basically just a countdown for their first Random Encounter.
  • Even the MILITARY doesn't go there. During Night Watch, while the cavalry try and navigate in the city, Vimes jokes about the Shades, saying that the narrow streets would make it so that the cavalry wouldn't be able to dismount... if it weren't for the fact that their horses would be killed and eaten out from under them.
  • According to The Compleat Ankh-Morpork City Guide "the vigilance of the City Watch has rendered this part of Ankh-Morpork far less exciting to walk around than previously", and the criminals even respect Thieves Guild protection, which they didn't in earlier books. It's still noted for traditional street cries like "No, no, no, please, no!", though.
  • It bears mentioning that most of Ankh-Morpork would qualify as an example of this, at least prior to the events of Men at Arms and the rebuilding of the City Watch, and the bits that didn't were still very much the Wrong Side of the Tracks (with the river Ankh serving as the metaphorical tracks). But the Shades take it to the point where even some of the more civilised crooks are scared to go in there.
• Stephen King's "Down There," the bad side of Bridgeport in Hearts in Atlantis, where low men corrupt existence itself. Stephen King says his "Down There" is a fictional part of a real city. None of the Connecticut locations where action in that book is set have any real-life counterparts. He overlaid a fictional template over the real city and created fiction all over it until only a few features of the setting show through from the real city; for example, the Housatonic.
• Gladiator At Law by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth has Belly Rave (Belle Reve Estates), a slum that evolved out of suburban tracts built for returning servicemen after WWII. While good corporate employees are rewarded with 'bubble houses' ( fully-equipped modern domes owned by the corporations), other cities are surrounded by the equivalent of Belly Rave and dominated by juvenile gangs.
• Knockturn Alley in the Harry Potter books. It's the place where the stores sell Artifacts of Doom instead of normal magical artifacts.
• Heralds of Valdemar's titular Valdemar is The Good Kingdom and its capital, Haven, is named for heaven. There's a great set of pastures and woodland besides the Palace at its heart where angels in the shape of horses live, and someone looking at that might imagine Haven is a Shining City. But Companion field is just where the city was founded, and it sprawls out in tiers from there, with quite a lot of impoverished areas. The slums near Exile's Gate are among the worst. City guardsfolk only come there if residents have transgressed against people with more money, life is cheap, and desperation is everywhere. The Queen's spymaster tells himself in one book that if The High Queen knew what happened there every day she would send Guards and Heralds to scour the slums and set up a forest of gallows - and her people would speak her name with hatred for it, and the worst scum would just be displaced.
  • But, being part of Haven after all there are some limits to its badness. Queen Selenay has instituted a mandatory public education program that comes with a free breakfast, so even a Street Urchin gets one edible meal a day until they learn reading, writing, and rudimentary math. Even cutthroats rapidly band together into bucket chains when there's a fire. And while men can solicit children in public, if they insist after the child turns them down, or whenever an actual publically known brothel with child prostitutes is set up, even the slum dwellers get angry.
• Hoshi and the Red City Circuit has Shirring Point, where most crimes and most innovations occur. Law enforcement has abandoned the area in the hopes that its depravity will remain contained. Hoshi goes there often for information.
• Robert A. Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil has parts of the major city where Johann lives that are referred to as an "Abandoned Area" that are so bad that even the police won't go into them with less than a squad, because smaller numbers might never come back, and they are basically areas with no police protection at all, the criminals feed on each other Kilkenny Cats style.
• In Michael Flynn's novel The January Dancer, the Terran Corner on Jehovah seems to fall into this category, being a ghetto inhabited by the descendants of those expelled from Earth many generations ago.
• In George Alec Effinger's Marîd Audran series, the Budayeen is a cross between this and a Red Light District. Tourists who ignore the warnings and decide they want to sample the delights offered by the Budayeen often leave in a body bag.
• Jack Ketch's Warren (or just the Warren) in the Matthew Hawkwood novels. It was almost certainly this in Real Life as well.
• Murderworld features an in-game zone called Nex, which is an area for trade in illegal or shady products and services, including hacks, cheats, or tweaks to the Murderworld game itself. Gamers who frequent the zone often use avatars that are surreal or terrifying.
• Andre Norton:
  • Several of Norton's science fiction novels (such as Judgement on Janus, Catseye and Forerunner Foray) have The Dipple, a refugee camp in the planet Korwar's capital city of Tikil. The characters who were born there always escape because one has no Happy Ending there.
  • Shan Lantee of Storm Over Warlock escaped from heavily criminal slums, the Dumps of Tyr.
• Emma Finn's One Thing Different series of short stories, and her single short story Spiral Stair, feature a magical transformation version, Barton, and feature protagonists who blunder into the neighborhood.
  “Once you come to Barton, there ain’t no way out.”
• The Reynard Cycle: The Anthill, Calyx's slum quarter, is a perfect example. It's actually the size of a small city.
• King's Landing in A Song of Ice and Fire is itself quite the Vice City with large areas of various flavours of Wretched Hive from docksides to Red Keep to the Great Sept and just beyond the city walls. But, it also has the unabashedly down-at-heels, twisty, and very old (likely the remains of a small settlement predating the Targaryen landing) Flea Bottom found within spitting distance of the great and the "good" up on either Aegon's (the Red Keep) or Visenya's Hill (the Great Sept), where you would be best served by picking up your pace and getting your sword or knife out and ready if you're even remotely well-dressed, riot or not. And, never, ever enquire too hard as to what goes into the bowls of brown served there in potshops and "inns". You might just find out.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe and Legends:
  • The underlevels of Coruscant. The planet is one huge city, so overdeveloped that the lower levels barely ever, often never, see natural sunlight. This drives the property values down and attracts the wrong sort of character (though Palpatine probably tried to shift the blame on non-human immigrants). The X-Wing Series has Gavin Darklighter from Tatooine going to the underlevels of Coruscant and thinking that "if Mos Eisely was considered the armpit of the galaxy, this part of Coruscant could be considered anatomically lower and decidedly less hygienic." In Labyrinth of Evil, Darth Sidious's hideout on Coruscant, seen at the end of Attack of the Clones, is in an abandoned industrial zone called "The Works," not far from the Senate District where most scenes on Coruscant are set. The Works is just as bad topside as it is underneath: rusted, polluted, and filled with vermin, vagrants, criminals, and worse.
  • By contrast, the lower levels of Nar Shaddaa (The "Smuggler's Moon") are a sort of inversion. They're considered safer than the higher levels because everyone walks around armed and no one has anything worth stealing.
• Thieves' World, the shared world fantasy series created by Robert Lynn Asprin, has the Maze in the city of Sanctuary.
• In the Vorkosigan Saga, the Caravanserai in Vorbarr-Sultana long was this trope, until getting cleaned up during and after Aral Vorkosigan's tenure as a Prince-Regent and Prime Minister.
• Such districts pop up in several Honor Harrington novels, despite much of its concentration on a society's upper layers, like the above example.
  • Old City in Chicago is a notorious slum that generally corresponds to both flavors of the trope. The Loop is still a lively bohemian area (where you should pay close attention to your wallet's whereabouts though), and even a Soldier Field isn't that bad, but the lower levels are overrun with the murderous hoodlums, junkies, and occasional rogue Super-Soldier.
  • The Spook Duo set their shop in such an area of the Mesan capital of Mendel. Ironically, this works even if their base is a crowded working-class diner^note Anton even calls it thus, triggering an angry rant by Steph Turner, the owner of the restaurant in question, on subject of how the sanitary violations are one of the few things authorities ever care about there. and with Anton Zilwicki being pretty much the Overt Operative by that point to boot.
  • Even the Austin City mentioned having a couple, despite being on the literally toxic planet of Grayson, where just walking out without your gas mask can give you lead poisoning in minutes.
• The district of Hanaught, Lowgate, in Paul Kelly's 'War Beyond the Veil Series''. Also, to a lesser extent, Dmitrigrad's New Hanaught District.
• L'Étuve, the slum of 18th-century Paris, in Audrey Erskine Lindop's The Way to the Lantern.
• In The Wheel of Time, while the west side of the Eldar in Ebou Dar is relatively safe, wandering in the Rahad on the east side in rich clothes is equivalent to suicide unless you have a Wise Woman with you. Mat jokes that The Legions of Hell could invade the Rahad only for their bodies to show up later, robbed naked.
• The Wild Ones has Ankle Snap Alley, where a majority of the story takes place. However, despite being a "city," it's just a small alley within a real city, and it just so happens that the Alley is home to a group of thieves, liars, and swindling Funny Animals.
• The Witchlands: the city of Lovats has the Cisterns, Absurdly Spacious Sewer exploited by the local criminals and the homeless as meeting spots, warehouses, and even living quarters.

Live-Action TV

• Arrow: The Glades are supposed to be the most dangerous quarter of Starling City, so naturally everyone hangs out there all the time.
  • The B-plot from Season 7 inverts this, as it's shown that sometime in the 20 years between the present and the Flash Forwards, the Glades have heavily gentrified while the rest of Star City has become a decrepit Wretched Hive.
• Brown Sector, commonly referred to as Downbelow, on Babylon 5 is where those who came to the station for a better life but failed to make it tend to wind up when they lack the funds to return home or go elsewhere. It is also a favored hiding spot for various fugitives or covert operatives.

• Doctor Who:
  • The New New York Undercity in "Gridlock", complete with vendors selling mood-altering substance patches.
  • "Face the Raven" involves the Doctor's occasional companion Rigsy, an urban graffiti artist, stumbling into secret enclaves of alien life tucked away inside the streets of London.
• Game of Thrones: Flea Bottom is the main slum of King's Landing. It is where Arya survives after escaping the castle, where Joffrey and his entourage are attacked by a mob, and where Margaery visits orphanages as part of her family's public relations campaign. Gendry, Davos, and Karl all reference it as a fundamental part of their lowborn upbringing, with Gendry and Davos even comparing which one of them lived in the worst part and Davos teasing Gendry that his street (all of a few miles closer to the Red Keep) was where the snobs lived compared to Davos's home.
  • Flea Bottom also gets some focus in House of the Dragon, which is set about 200 years earlier. Particularly, we see and hear of Daemon Targaryen's time spent in pleasure houses and he eventually brings his niece Rhaenyra there to... "initiate" her to pleasure.
• Gotham has a seedy back alley, and it's even called The Narrows.

• The Court of Miracles in The Musketeers, which is ruled by the King of Thieves. So called because when lame and blind beggars return to the Court, they're "miraculously" cured. The Cour des Miracles was a real area in Paris named for that reason, although the series probably exaggerates it a bit.
• Smallville: Suicide Slums in Metropolis. Footage of the Narrows from Batman Begins were used.
• Played with in the third season of The Wire. Hamsterdam (a legalized drug zone, with all of the unpleasantness you'd think that implies, and a bit more) is made as far away as possible with it still being accessible to street dealers. It's still not far enough so that an old lady doesn't live there, or for the press not to notice. Before they were torn down, the high-rise housing projects also acted as this, which Herc, Carv, and Prez find out the hard way after deciding to roll up in the middle of the night to antagonize people hanging out. Police and taxpayers also don't dare venture into certain alleys that the dealers block with junk.
• Yancy Derringer: In "Gallatin Street", Yancy is asked by Colton to break the power of Toby Cook: the crime lord who controls Gallatin Street, the most lawless and dangerous street in New Orleans's Red Light District.

Music

• The song "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" by Jim Croce describes the south side of Chicago as such. Specifically, it's "The baddest part of town."
• Finnish song "Katupoikien laulu" (Song of Street Kids), which happens "kätkössä Sörkan laitakatujen" (in the shadows of the side streets of Sörkka). "Sörkka", the district Sörnäinen in Helsinki, Finland used to have a sinister reputation in the past. Today it is on its way to gentrification.
• The music video for "FUN!" by Vince Staples shows a suburban white kid going through Vince's real-life neighbourhood Ramona Park on Google Street View, with all sorts of activity shown in vignettes.

Podcasts

• The Adventure Zone: Ethersea: In the underwater city of Founders' Wake, the area nicknamed "Joshy's Knuckle" is where you go if you want dangerous, possibly illegal work that pays more, or need to get your hands on something forbidden (or legal, but very hard to get, such as spices). Joshy, the man for whom the place is named, is considered to be a shameless opportunist and con artist by most of the community, and he he makes no attempt to hide it, though he will do favors for people he decides he likes.

Tabletop Games

• Eberron: Sharn has a fair chunk of the Lower Wards and most of the Depths, with particular attention paid to the Cogs (which double as an industrial sector) and Lower Dura.
• Freedom City has The Fens, which as the name suggests was basically built on a swamp.
• In Magic: The Gathering, the city plane of Ravnica has the whole undercity, run by the murderous maniacs of Rakdos, the assassins and spies of Dimir, and the Golgari necromancers.
• In the Planescape campaign setting, the planar city of Sigil has the Hive. It's one big lawless slum where criminals, anarchists, death-worshipers, and demons fight for control. Even Sigil's normally formidable Harmonium guard are too afraid to patrol there. And even the Hive itself has a part that's bad even by its standards, the Slags. This place is in complete ruins, having been torn apart by a Blood War battle that spilled over into the city, there's seismic activity that makes the remaining structures unstable, and a demonic predator called Kadyx hunts the place. No sane resident ever goes there, and few that do come out alive.
• Ptolus has the Barrens, a lawless slum that even the major crime syndicates leave alone because it's too unruly and has nothing worth stealing or controlling. The Undercity Market is an aversion: it's Beneath the Earth and full of adventurers, but it's mostly for resupplying, and it's successful enough that it has a burgeoning residential area as well—and being full of heavily-armed adventurers is actually pretty good for keeping things relatively civil and orderly.
• There are plenty of cities in Rocket Age, each with their own narrows, but the most likely place for players to run afoul in is Emancipation's former factory and slave districts, which are full of crime as the city has yet to replace slavery with anything meaningful for the people that were freed. That's ignoring the cities that are literally just narrow, like Freelandia and Maven Haven.
• Shadowrun:
  • The Redmond Barrens and the Puyallup Barrens of Seattle, the latter of which even have a mall that is one gigantic black market.
  • Also the Aurora Warrens in Denver. Nominally part of the UCAS, but in practice a kind of international no-man's land of undesirables. Largely equivalent to the Barrens.
  • The Shattergraves of Chicago. It's the wreckage of where the Sears Tower was brought down by a terrorist attack. As the site of a mass-casualty terrorist incident, it's loaded with angry ghosts and has become the territory of a massive number of feral ghouls because they're the only ones the ghosts can't drive out.
  • Kowloon Walled City still exists in Shadowrun's version of Hong Kong and is even worse than its real-life version. Rebuilt as a refugee resettlement project, the Walled City is a cesspool of despair and misery, and powerful toxic spirits called Yama Kings feed on the inhabitants and actively keep things as bad as humanly possible in order to maintain their food supply. The place is bad enough that Insect Spirits fear it.
• While calling the entirety of Cthulhu City for Trail of Cthulhu this wouldn't be too inaccurate — it is, after all, a city of ambiguous existence that, even if it's real, is cut off from the greater US and mostly run by cults of Mythos entities — Westheath, Chinatown, and the Innsmouth Docks are the main hubs of criminal activity. Westheath is run by the old-school Mafioso of the Malatesta gang (give or take a bit of cultism), Chinatown is held by the Tsan Chan Tong (with some mysterious connection to the "cruel empire of Tsan Chan" that will exist in the year 5000), and Innsmouth is the home of the Marsh gang (and if you have even a basic awareness of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, you'll already have guessed that "sleeping with the fishes" takes on a whole new meaning for the Marsh outfit).
• Traveller: many Starports have a "Startown", typically at the area where the Imperial government's jurisdiction ends and the Planetary one begins.
• The lower you go in a hive city in Warhammer 40,000, the more it resembles this trope. The lowest levels are home to those even the basest dregs of society don't want such as mutants and rogue psykers. And it gets even worse further down: Necromunda, for instance, has giant psychic spiders.
• Carbon 2185: true to Cyberpunk style, just about every major city has these. London is now divided between Inner and Outer London. Inner London is practically a corporate police state, while Outer London is controlled by a variety of punk gangs that are engaged in a near-constant guerilla war with the corporations.
• Freedom City has the Fens, an area of porn theatres and drug dens that many people think it's a shame hasn't been destroyed in a superhero battle, and to a lesser extent Southside, which has a growing gang violence problem.

Theme Parks

• The gangsterland scene in The Great Movie Ride at Disney's Hollywood Studios fittingly has this as its setting.
• Doctor Doom's Fearfall at Universal's Islands of Adventure is located in the "darker" part of Marvel Super Hero Island — a seedy alleyway that's appropriately titled, "Doom Alley".

Video Games

• The Slums district of Amn in Baldur's Gate II, home base of the Thieves' Guild, full of beggars and yet if you try to rest your party on the streets, the city guard will never fail to stop you.
• "Shantytown" in the Finkton district of BioShock Infinite's Columbia. Populated entirely by the lowest-income residents of the floating city, who work brutally exploitative jobs in Fink's dangerous factories and warehouses and are mostly people of color. After the dazzling splendor of most of the previous areas explored in the game, the grim descent into Shantytown comes as a reminder of what's *actually* keeping a society like this afloat(figuratively speaking, that is).
• Cyberpunk 2077: Even the Wretched Hive that is Night City has one in the form of Pacifica: a massive resort-like district for the superwealthy that was abandoned and defunded mid-construction in the wake of the Unification War, Pacifica is now a mess of half-finished and mostly unfunctional infrastructure home only to criminals and the truly desperate. NCPD doesn't dare set foot in the place and crime is so bad there that former Night City Mayor Lucius Rhyne managed to make crime drop 3% overnight by designating Pacifica an "independent district" and thus technically no longer part of Night City.
  • Even Pacifica looks like Beverly Hills compared to Dogtown, introduced in the Phantom Liberty DLC. Dogtown is an officially non-existent enclave within Night City, ruled by a renegade NUS colonel who was sent to secure a beachhead in Night City in the last days of the Unification War, and was abandoned by his superiors after the ceasefire. Dogtown is even more rundown and crime-infested than Pacifica, thanks to the local rulers having no interest in doing anything other than profiting off the illegal trades that go through the territory (The Voodoo Boyz at least do a minimum of civic works to keep the locals on their side, BARGHEST just couldn't care less), and while the locals aren't quite as insular as those in Pacifica, they are even more desperate and violent.
• In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, website Reddit is portrayed as a Not-So-Safe Harbor. At first, the place appears to be a classic Port Town, then you discover that those who lack upvotes are forced to live in the downtrodden, crime-ridden Downvoting Lane located in the back alleys of the city.
• The city of Clawville from Chicken Police has the Cobbler District, though in the present it is more popularly known as "the Hive", which a ghetto where 98% of Clawville's insect population has been forced to live by law under squalid conditions in cheap, subpar housing. As a result, it is quite crime-infested and experiences regular race riots.
• Dark Souls has the Lower Undead Burg, which used to be this. And then everyone went hollow. Whereas the upper half of Undead Burg and later Undead Parish start off with regular Hollow Mooks, then a series of knights in the castle and church area, lower undead burg is populated by throngs of barely-there Hollows, wild dogs, and tight corridors where thieves ambush you from behind.
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution has the Youzhao District in Lower Hengsha, the hunting grounds for the Harvesters.
• The district of Martinaise in the city of Revachol from Disco Elysium, where the game's plot takes place, easily qualifies. While explicitly not the worst neighbourhood in Revachol (that dubious honor goes to the dying factory district of Coal City), Martinaise is one of the poorest, and has gone completely unpoliced by the local police force, the RCM, for over twenty years. While The Hardie Boys, a vigilante group affiliated with the local dockworker's union, the Débardeurs' Union, have cleaned it up considerably in the last ten years, the fact remains that, by most outside definitions, the Débardeurs' Union are nothing more than Neighbourhood-Friendly Gangsters.
  Lt. Kim Kitsuragi: It's our fault for leaving this place to the dogs. To the Union. To the company. Not daring to come here more often. It's like I told you — this place is an orphan. Fallen through the cracks.
• In Dragon Age: Origins, Dust Town in Orzammar is regarded as a breeding ground for Casteless, criminals and the outcast members of Dwarven society. There may be a King on the throne of Orzammar, but in Dust Town, it is the Carta that rules with an iron fist.
  • The Darktown district of Kirkwall is said to be this in Dragon Age II. In practice, however, Hawke will find the other districts much more dangerous, especially at night, since all the muggers, bandits, and blood magic cults hang out in them.
• Freeside in Fallout: New Vegas, though it has a less hostile edge than other examples on this page. Sure there are thieves, muggers, drunks, drug dealers, and annoying advertisers. But a gang called The Kings and the friendly-anarchists The Followers of The Apocalypse keep the place from going totally to the dogs.
• Within the ruins of Boston in Fallout 4, there is Goodneighbor, filled to the brim with mercenaries, criminals, drug addicts, ghouls, and others who don't quite fit in with "proper" society in Diamond City. Thankfully, the city has a kindly don in Hancock, the ghoul "mayor" who welcomes everyone with open arms, but won't take any shit like ne'er-do-wells picking on the downtrodden, or the Institute and their insidious schemes.
• The Garry's Mod map rp_nycity by user Fishke is set in a miniature version of New York City circa 1999. The Lower East Side part of the map features several narrow and dirty alleyways, and includes an underground restaurant/gang hideout, a coffee house that's really a drug den, and a secret fight club with fresh bloodstains in the ring.
• In Lamplight City, there is the Cholmondeley district, which is the most impoverished and worst neighborhood in the city of New Bretagne. Fist-fights, muggings, vandalism, and homelessness are a common daily sight in the Chum. It is so crime ridden that the police don't go out of their way to respond to much of it. In addition, since Bill, the partner of the Player Character, Miles Fordham, grew up in Cholmondeley, he'll repeatedly relay stories about how scary it was being a kid growing up there and how happy he is that he and his sister left it behind.
• In Mass Effect, the worst parts of the Lower Wards on the Citadel are implied to be like this.
  • In addition, the shiny and modern Illium is indicated to have more than a few such places, being described as Omega with more expensive shoes.
  • For that matter, Omega is pretty much all this.
  • One possible backstory for Commander Shepard is growing up in a district like this on Earth.
• The favela in Modern Warfare 2 in Rio. There's literally an entire army of heavily-armed Brazilian criminals there who do not take well to outsiders. You know you're in a bad place when the only viable way to enter the area and locate the one criminal you're trying to find is to walk in shooting a weapon in the air so you can draw the militia out for a straight fight instead of trying to sneak through and get surrounded.
• The back alley, a section of the docks (which is pretty bad in itself) of the city of Neverwinter in Neverwinter Nights 2 also the beggars nest from the first game.
• Persona 3: The back alleys of Port Island Station are the seediest part of the city, being where all the hoodlums hang out. You do get into some real danger the one time the plot sends you there, but the rest of the time you can go there as much as you want (and you have to for some sidequests), and the worst you'll get are two teenagers cussing at you.
• It's possible to build these in Pharaoh through a combination of low-grade housing, high taxes, unemployment, low food, lack of police presence, and highly undesirable surroundings like an Industrial Ghetto. If discontentment is allowed to rise too high, houses start spawning criminals who don't stay in the ghettos, instead homing in on the palace and tax offices to steal your money. However, they only appear on higher difficulties.
• The village in Quest for Glory I has a single alley not fully protected against violence by Erana's spell. During the daytime, it's safe and a beggar spends his time there. At night, however... Unfortunately, where you stand, Erana's spell is still active.
• The crumbling slums of Meiyerditch in Runescape are so labyrinthine that they actually form a mini-Agility obstacle course for players. Expect to see pale, emaciated humans cowering in back alleys, fearful of the Vyrewatch who are raising them like cattle for blood tithes — the player also stands a chance of being tithed if they spend too much time outside with a Vyrewatch nearby.
• The Redmond Barrens feature prominently in Shadowrun Returns.
  • In Hong Kong, the shittyness of the Kowloon Walled City is a major and highly spoileriffic plot point.
• The Yakuza series depicts exaggerated versions of various seedy entertainment districts across Japan, chief amongst them Kamurocho, a takeoff of Kabukicho as noted in the "Real Life" section. Unlike other examples, Kamurocho isn't any more decrepit than the rest of Tokyo — it even has an ultra-modern skyscraper — but it is home to basically all dirty business for those who know where to look. Combined with the fact that it's the stomping ground for various Yakuza gangs, street thugs, and the occasional weirdo as well as Kamurocho getting embroiled in a lurid conspiracy every game... Better get used to violent confrontations on nearly every street and alleyway.

Webcomics

• Ciem Webcomic Series: Candi Levens has to rescue Maria Sanmarcos from a part of Dirbine where a lot of really bad stuff seems to happen disproportionately. It's a mess of brick buildings many of which do not have clearly defined reasons to exist.
• The Glass Scientists utilizes the real-life Victorian slum of Bethnal Greene, described as "The city's oily belly, a foul-smelling swamp belching half-digested dreams" where shadows and wickedness abound.
• In Kill Six Billion Demons, the city of Throne at the heart of the multiverse has the Shades, a part of the already rough Ashton which, due to Throne's unmoving sun, is in perpetual nights. It's entirely inhabited by violent criminals and the worst kinds of demons.
• In The Letters Of The Devil, the run-down warehouse district becomes a scene of violence and chaos when Gilly attacks Cedric with a syringe.
• Ronin Galaxy, Cecil explains at the beginning of chapter two that the Moritomi Complex seems like an average city until you enter a suspiciously dark alley. Then it turns into a feudal Japanese red-light district.
• In Sunset Grill the part of Kieselburg called Lowtown is this. The city authorities practically admit that Lowtown is run by l'affaires and the legal business that are there pay them protection money. In fact, l'affaires often keep the peace better than the police do.
• In Tales of the Questor, they have their capital city, Sanctuary — and the "suburb" commonly known as the Tumbledowns, a multi-story shantytown filled with street gangs and other dregs of society...

Web Original

• In The Gamer's Alliance, Threshold, Alent's northeastern district, has an ominous reputation and has driven many people who have ventured there insane. The very air, ground, buildings, and narrow, labyrinthine and twisting alleys seem to be alive and hostile to any non-native, and the shadows play with trespassers' minds with sometimes fatal consequences. It later turns out that the people living in Threshold are in fact disguised demons whose chaotic powers have warped the district to suit their needs. The horrible experiences that trespassers had turned out to be manifestations of their own inner darkness and emotions which were triggered by the demonic auras in the area.
  Javan: The truth is that the only real darkness in this place is the darkness you bring in it yourself. Every sin, every repressed memory, every stray fear, and blind rage. Everything people want to ignore about themselves. What's in here was always there, it's just a bit more... insistent in its existence in Threshold.
• The Rape Tunnel. "It actually has its advantages. Criminals are too afraid to come into the rape tunnel neighborhood, so we're actually pretty secure here."
• RWBY: The initial appearance of Mistral is of a beautiful city that uses every inch of picturesque mountain slopes to create an apparently happy, tranquil place with spectacular views. However, Qrow warns the teenage heroes to stay away from the city's lower levels and mentions that anything can be bought there for a price. When he goes looking for Huntsmen to join them on their quest, Ozpin asks him to choose those who can be trusted; Qrow cynically responds that they can be trusted to put up a good fight and heads into the seedy lower levels to find them. Here, strangers are met with suspicion, Faunus discrimination is openly displayed at the entrances to businesses and both businesses and homes are run-down and shabby.

Western Animation

• The ironically named Good Luck Alley in Big Hero 6 and Big Hero 6: The Series. In the film it's where illegal robot fights take place, the series extends it being where you go for other illegal contests and buy military-grade robot parts without needing to explain what you want them for.
• Several episodes of Darkwing Duck have the villains holed up in an area of St Canard that appears to actually be named "The Bad Part of Town".
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Trixie goes through an alleyway to find a shop that sells the Alicorn Amulet.
  • In Twilights Kingdom Part 1, this is where Tirek begins stealing magic from unicorns.
• In Thunder Cats 2011, young Prince Lion-O is introduced sneaking cloaked and hooded into the worst part of Thundera's slums, only to catch the eye of a gang of "Alley Cat" muggers who've just finished beating a hapless Dog. He's there to shop for Lost Technology, or rather, "certain hard-to-find collectibles" in the Black Market, having cultivated a relationship with its proprietor Jorma.

Real Life

Europe

• Inverted in a lot of real-world cities, where the fact that you can buy old houses extremely cheap makes them prime locations for gentrification. For example, The Lanes in Brighton, England, a warren of winding roads and crooked houses that is the remnants of the original fishing village, is nowadays full of ridiculously expensive boutiques and restaurants.
• Moscow:
  • Khitrovka in the Imperial era. Overlaps with Outlaw Town, since it was an area which was a "safe haven" of sorts for gangsters, escaped convicts, and the like. Ironically, it sat right between the bustling Kitai-Gorod business district and several affluent residential neighborhoods in the downtown area, whose inhabitants had to see (and smell) its unsavory character every day, but nobody could do anything about it, so much was the influence of the landowners, who reaped enormous profits from the area. The district was purged clean by Bolsheviks after Red October.
  • There's now a popular theory that Khitrovka's reputation as a criminal hell-hole was artificially inflated by the leading journalists of the time, such as Vladimir Gilyarovsky, because, well, criminal stories simply sold better. In reality, it was perhaps something like Kowloon (below) — a simple dirt-poor neighborhood where some criminals had set their shop. Another point is that Gilyarosky was a Communist and had used a quarter's reputation (that he himself helped to build) to criticize the Tsarist Government.
  • Nowadays it's Southern Butovo, Tekstilschiki and the Southeastern borough in general, and the entire suburb of Mytischi. (The most crime-ridden district, Golyanovo, has the crime rate but lacks the reputation). Though usually the worst you can expect is to be separated from your cash and cellphone. Lethal muggings are much rarer than they were back then.
• Kopli in Tallinn, Estonia was previously plagued by low school attendance, crime, drug use and alcoholism. The inhabitants also lived in decrepit old Soviet-era apartments, some without indoor plumbing or electricity.
• The outer half of the VIII. district of Budapest, Hungary. It's suspiciously similar to a jungle — a machete greatly increases your chances of survival.
• The North Praga district of Warsaw, Poland. There's even an old saying "Jedziesz na Pragie, to weź pan lagie" ("If yer goin' to Praga, get a big stick, guv."). Before World War II, Wola was this as well, but it slowly gentrified over the years.
• Several parts of London have had this image at various points in its history — Southwark of 500 years ago was famous for its brothels (licensed by the local bishop!) and St. Giles was the place the police would only go en masse.
• Being the hometown of the Violent Glaswegian, Glasgow naturally has several. Historically, Maryhill and Ruchill were this, but they have vastly improved in recent years. The most notable ones these days are Drumchapel, Easterhouse, Possilpark, and Shettleston. Shettleston is notable for having a lower life expectancy than North Korea.
• The Paris metropolitan area encompasses a number of peripheral towns, the seediest of them located in the northeastern area, colloquially known as the "9-3", home of crumbling Cold War-era housing projects, massive unemployment, drug traffic, gang violence, and riots. Some quarters of Marseille have also had a steamy reputation since the Middle Ages.
• Munich has a few districts traditionally known as the city's narrows. The oldest is the Au ("Valley") on the eastern banks of the river, which was traditionally a piss-poor workers' community with many two-storey houses (a rarity in Munich's mostly-five-storey centre). But in the last few decades, it has slowly transformed into a popular artsy neighbourhood not unlike Soho, with cosmic property prices thanks to the many charming old houses. The Au's most outstanding feature however has always been — and still is — a relic of its more infamous times - the Auer Dult, an annual junk market and Catholic fair — one of the largest of its kind in Europe.
  • Then there also is a much more contemporary district with that reputation (commonly referred to as a 'Glasscherbenviertel' — a 'glass shard quarter'), the Hasenbergl ("Hares's Hillock") in the generally poor northern Munich area, which had a very popular poor and immigrant criminal subculture (for one, many German police procedurals loved the area) until the end of the last century. But nowadays, it's also well on its way to gentrification — present-day Munich has the lowest crime statistics of any major German municipality.
• Mention the Pan Bendito area to residents of Madrid and a lot of them will make an "oh boy" face. Now, Madrid being a fairly safe city, Pan Bendito is not at the level of some other areas listed here; locals will tell you to avoid it if you can and not carry anything valuable if you cannot, but the local bands/gangs are unpleasant rather than murderous, and it's not like you need to have a death wish to walk in. Still, it's definitely one of the "least desirable" places in the city, along with sizable parts of the Usera and Villaverde districts.
• Christiania in Copenhagen is a rather odd example. Originally the area was a military installation in the city (its last major use was to execute war criminals after World War II), which was taken over by students, artists, and hippies and turned into a commune in 1971 when the military abandoned it. In the decades since, the area has been in a weird legal limbo similar to Kowloon, with different governments trying on and off to shut the commune/free state down, with no success. As a result, minor crimes, most famously open sale of marijuana, are not only common but part of the commune's fame. Hard drugs have been unofficially banned by the residents since the late '70s but are still a problem.

Asia

• Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong used to be a living poster-child example of this trope, complete with being made of nothing but cramped back alleys in between buildings with tiny little shacks selling all sorts of socially unsavory stuff. It has since been demolished and replaced with a handsome park. Kowloon's situation was much more complex than this suggests, though. While it's hard to deny that Triads and Tongs had definitely set shop there, they tended to watch their step, and most of the district's population were simply poor people trying to scrape by. Most of the Walled City's problems stemmed from its weird legal status (theoretically it was a Mainland China enclave within the Hong Kong territory, which prevented the city's utilities and police from operating there), and the fact that it was situated under the approaches to the city's Kai Tak airport, so no highrises could be built there, and people tried to use the available space as efficiently as they could. At the end of its life, when agreement with the mainland authorities permitted Hong Kong's services to operate inside the Walled City, the situation there markedly improved, but its reputation was already set in stone and in 1993 it was finally demolished.
• The Tondo area of the city of Manila remains one of the poorest and most densely populated areas in the metropolis and stands in stark contrast to the gentrification that the rest of the city and its neighboring metropolises have experienced in the past decade.
• Japan:
  • Nishinari-ku in Osaka, considered the slum of Osaka and the most dangerous place in Japan. It is infamous for multiple rioting incidents, a strong Yakuza presence, and the largest Red Light District in Japan. It is almost literally on the Wrong Side of the Tracks from the much more upmarket Namba district to the nearby north.
  • Kabukicho in Shinjuku, Tokyo has long had a reputation as a hotbed of Yakuza activity and den of iniquity. How much of that remains true and how much is merely a cankerous sore of a stereotype that media has allowed to fester is widely debated.

The Americas

• Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, although it's known just as much for its sheer poverty (combined with copious drug addictions) as for being dangerous. This is where serial killer Robert "Willie" Pickton did his hunting, and as such has a reputation for women (especially prostitutes) just... vanishing.
• International Boulevard in Oakland, CA, used to be called East 14th Street until the city changed the name as part of an effort to change its image. It hasn't really worked.
• The poorest neighbourhoods in Mexico City like "Tepito" tend to be this. These places are where most muggings and drug-lord firefights take place. If you ever come to visit, stay close to downtown and never be outside late at night.
• Skid Road, in central Seattle, was such a place in the early 20th century — the proverbial "Skid Row" having derived from its name. (The neighborhood has since been gentrified and redubbed "Pioneer Square", though it's still not the sort of area one feels comfortable walking around in after dark.)
• New York City has a few examples, past and present:
  • Certain neighbourhoods of New York City are this. Specifically, the South Bronx and East Brooklyn (namely Brownsville and East New York). are known for being extremely dangerous
  • The Five Points in 19th-Century New York City.
    • Becomes a Nonindicative Name in the case of the Real Life Narrows, which is a tidal strait separating Brooklyn from Staten Island; similarly, the nearby neighborhoods of Bay Ridge (Brooklyn) and Shore Acres (Staten Island) are quite nice middle-class neighborhoods of standalone houses.
  • Hell's Kitchen, NYC, was a pretty dangerous neighborhood until gentrification began in the 1990s. Before then, varying levels of poverty and violence plagued the area throughout much of its history, including during the 19th Century.
• North Minneapolis, nicknamed "Murderapolis".
• Bunker Hill was this during the golden age of Los Angeles (c. 1917-1963). Not even South Central comes close today.
• Chinatown in Boston was this up until recently. At the time (the 1960s-1970s), Chinatown adjoined Boston's Combat Zone, home to porno theaters and prostitutes. It was literally only one block from the Boston Common, the park at the heart of the city. Rising property values, the ability to watch porn at home, and the fact that the Chinese got sick of the bad reputation the area had, all led to its demise. It's now a perfectly nice light-commercial area for the most part, but there are still certain areas that are known for prostitution and drug sales, and some of the scuzzier curio shops and markets still live up to the "if you want it, you can probably find it for sale here" reputation that Boston's Chinatown has never quite managed to shake off.
• The "SWATS" (or Zone 4) in Southwest Atlanta, Georgia, so called because it's in Southwest Atlanta, or because the SWAT team is always there. Quite a few rappers are from there, including T.I. and Big Boi.
• "Several parts of Honolulu in Magnum, P.I." up above? The most notorious of these several parts, at least until a wave of clean-ups in the early 2000s, was Hotel Street in Chinatown. Long a Red Light District catering to sailors from neighboring Pearl Harbor, the area became very run down and was controlled by the Tongs and other organized crime syndicates; it was not a place you went to at night - or even during the day, really - if you valued your life. The area has, however, undergone a process of revitalization/gentrification that's at least made it safer.
• East Orange, NJ is a rough place in general, being a former industrial hotbed that later went the way of so many other cities of that sort. Even then, however, a good deal of it isn't too bad if you have some basic street smarts and don't act like you're scared out of your wits. The closer you get to Newark, however, the nastier things get, progressing from "rough" to "lock your doors and don't look at anyone" and all the way to "not even the locals dare tread here, and if you do, all bets are off on how screwed you are". Case in point, March 2009 is the only month Newark has gone without a homicide since the 1960s..
• North Milwaukee has this reputation, though it could be reasonably argued that its reputation is due to the local media focusing so heavily on a small handful of neighborhoods where this is the case at the expense of many perfectly safe areas
  • North-Northwest mostly. The North East side is very yuppie, especially the Northshore suburbs. Center and North Avenue are very dangerous, though
• North Philadelphia is the most dangerous part of the city due to high levels of poverty and crime in the area above Girard Avenue and includes the Philadelphia Badlands, a region infamous for its huge drug market. The Badlands also spill over into adjacent neighborhoods in Northeast Philly such as parts of Kensington.
  • West Philadelphia is also dangerous the closer you get to the middle of the district. A few neighborhoods in Southwest Philadelphia are also dangerous, especially Kingsessing.
• While it is definitely not particularly dangerous by national standards (or even regional, as Lawrence, Haverhill, Lynn, and Fitchburg are all an hour away or less), Manchester, New Hampshire still has its parts that will give even the locals pause. The West Side, while rough, isn't too bad until after dark. The "tree streets" (a misnomer, as the area in question has plenty of streets with names that are wholly unrelated to foliage) east of Elm, on the other hand, get worse by the block. Basically, if it's anywhere near the middle of Lake Ave or Valley Street or literally anywhere along Wilson Street, lock your doors and don't walk too far unless you know what you're doing.
• Oak Cliff and the rampant crime within was one of many reasons Dallas, Texas earned the "Murder Capital of the U.S." several times before a concentrated enforcement effort cleaned up the crime considerably. It's still rather wise to avoid Oak Cliff and some parts of Deep Ellum at night.
• Most of New Orleans counted as this before Katrina hit, but especially the huge Housing Projects, areas so dangerous even the police wouldn't go there unless they were tugging along a SWAT team. After Katrina, it isn't so bad, but it isn't exactly better either.
  • Katrina basically rolled the dice on which areas counted as the Narrows. Some of the worst neighborhoods (Mid-City and many of the housing projects) got much safer due to the overall depopulation. Many outlying neighborhoods (like the already-troubled 9th Ward and New Orleans East) turned into lawless frontiers due to a lack of police manpower.
• South Side Chicago is often on the rougher side, but few neighborhoods compare to Englewood. One of the absolute poorest parts of the city, Englewood's crime rate is unbelievably high even by national standards. Beset with a rapidly dwindling population, universally failing schools, and widespread unemployment, Englewood has been the focus of numerous revitalization attempts, every single one of which has failed. At this point, it is known as the part of Chicago that only those with a death wish visit.
• Bad neighborhoods seem to zigzag all across the Baltimore landscape, but West and East Baltimore have it particularly bad.
• Saint Louis, Missouri:
  • Many neighborhoods on the north side of town have more abandoned homes and empty lots than standing ones. Parts of the Natural Bridge Road corridor are considered by some sources to be the single most dangerous neighborhood in the US.
  • This extends to some independent municipalities in northern Saint Louis County (which the city is not a part of), such as Kinloch, Normandy, and Pine Lawn. Ferguson, Missouri, made infamous by the 2014 race riots, is ironically one of the safer cities in North County.
  • Also East Saint Louis (which is actually in Illinois, but immediately across the Mississippi River from Saint Louis proper). Formerly an industrial city with many sources of employment, the area was hurt by job and population losses to an even greater extent than most places in the Midwest. Today, it's more similar to a ghost town than it is to a bad part of an otherwise thriving city.
• The part of Washington, D.C. east of the Anacostia River, especially when you go below East Capitol Street into the Southeast Quadrant.
• Santiago, Chile has La Pintana, the clearest example available for a city district where violent crime is an everyday thing. Drug trades on every corner and nightly shootouts with increasingly high-caliber weaponry are widely known, and everyone within it and surrounding areas knows not to be around once the sun goes down, unless they want to risk stray bullets or a mugging at knife-point. The cops still have a presence there, thankfully, but they only enter in large groups; it's fairly common for random cartel thugs to take potshots at them otherwise.
• In Denver, East Colfax, Capitol Hill, and Five Points have this reputation. Five Points in particular is a strange mishmash of gentrified apartments and trendy shops intermixed with seedy back alleys and run-down buildings.
• Pine Hills, Florida (technically not a part of the city of Orlando, but borders it and is often erroneously considered a city neighborhood) gets this reputation a lot. Locals have nicknamed the area "Crime Hills", and it is known for a high prevalence of gang violence.
• Drew Park in Tampa, Florida. It's a mostly industrial neighborhood with little housing, but still notorious for seedy strip clubs and prostitution. Part of the neighborhood's problem is its geographic isolation- it's bordered by the airport to the south and west and stadiums to the east, so problems in the area tend to fly under the radar versus if they happened in a more populated area.
• The Lafayette Street/Murfreesboro Road corridor in Nashville, Tennessee. It contains several run-down housing projects along with the odd No-Tell Motel, and is blocked in by interstate highways which isolated the area and limited its growth. Despite sitting less than a mile from the popular Lower Broadway tourist district, it's not the kind of place you want to be at night.
  • Nashville in general has been heavily gentrified even in areas that were previously known for crime, so in many areas it's block-by-block as to whether you are in a good or bad part of town.

Oceania

• Sydney, historically, had The Rocks (foundation until the early 20th century), Cabramatta (The '80s until recently), and Sutherland. Nowadays, Fairfield and its accompanying suburbs (Yennora, Guildford, Villawood) are probably the one part of Sydney you should avoid at all costs.
• Auckland's southern suburbs are particularly notorious for gangs and robberies, especially the southern half of Manukau, including Otara, Papakura, and Mangere.

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