History Main / TheCityNarrows

* 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 ''Literature/TheShadowOverInnsmouth'', you'll already have guessed that "[[HalfHumanHybrid sleeping with the fishes]]" takes on [[FishPeople a whole new meaning]] for the Marsh outfit).

* In ''Webcomics/SunsetGrill'' the part of Kieselburg called Lowtown is this. The city authorities practically admit that Lowtown is run by [[TheSyndicate 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.

* 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.

** 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 Fourth Corporate 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.

* The Five Points in 19th-Century New York City.
** Becomes a NonindicativeName in the case of the RealLife 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.
* [[IDontLikeTheSoundOfThatPlace 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.

* 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.
* Certain neighbourhoods of New York City are this. Specifically, the South Bronx and East Brooklyn (especially Brownsville and East New York). are known for being ''extremely'' dangerous.

* [[IDontLikeTheSoundOfThatPlace Hell's Kitchen]] 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.

* "Several parts of Honolulu in ''Series/MagnumPI''" 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 certain... desires... of sailors from neighboring Pearl Harbor, the area became very run down and was controlled by the Tongs and other organized crime syndicates, and it was not a place you went to at night if you valued your life, and it was a wise man who avoided it during the day as well. The area has, however, undergone a revitalization that has -- mostly -- reclaimed the area for decent society.

* The Five Points in 19th-Century New York.

* Hell's Kitchen in New York was a dangerous Irish neighborhood until gentrification began in the 1990s. Before then, varying levels of poverty and violence plagued the area throughout much of its history, even during the 19th Century.
* North Minneapolis, nicknamed Murderapolis.

* Chinatown in UsefulNotes/{{Boston}} was this up until recently. At the time (the 1960s-1970s), Chinatown adjoined [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_Zone_(Boston) 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 Asian markets still live up to the "if you want it, you can probably find it for sale here" reputation that Chinatown has never quite managed to shake off.

* 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 murderously dangerous, 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.

* The Paris metropolitan area encompasses a number of peripheral towns, the seediest of them located in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seine-Saint-Denis northeastern area]], colloquially known as the "9-3", home of [[WretchedHive crumbling Cold War-era housing projects]], multi-ethnic populations, massive unemployment, drug traffic, gang violence, riots. Some quarters of Marseille have also had a steamy reputation since the Middle Ages.

* 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 Latino bands are unpleasant, not psychopathically 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.

** Even Pacifica looks like Beverly Hills compared to Dogtown, introduced in the ''Phantom Liberty'' DLC. Dogtown is an officially not existing 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 Fourth Corporate War, and was abandoned by his superiors after the ceasefire. Dogtown is even more rundown and crime-infested than Dogtown, thanks to the local rulers having no interest in doing anything other than profiting off the illegal trades that go through the territory, and while the locals aren't quite as insular as those in Pacifica, they are even more desperate and violent.

* The district of Martinaise in the city of Revachol from ''VideoGame/DiscoElysium'', 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 NeighbourhoodFriendlyGangsters

** Also East Saint Louis (which is actually in Illinois, but immediately across the Mississippi River from Saint Louis proper). Formerly a thriving industrial city, 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.

* Most of the area of St. Louis north of Delmar Boulevard.
* Ferguson, Missouri, made infamous by the 2014 race riots, is ironically one of the safer municipalities in northern Saint Louis County. That's not saying it's safe to walk the streets at night, but you're less likely to be hit with stray gunfire in broad daylight in comparison to the nearby Kinloch or Normandy municipalities.

* The Lafayette Street/Murfreesboro Road corridor in Nashville, Tennessee. It contains several run-down housing projects and NoTellMotels, 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.

** 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' Hillock") in the generally poor northern Munich area, which had a very popular poor and immigrant criminal subculture (for one, many [[GermanMedia German]] [[PoliceProcedural police procedurals]] [[Series/{{Tatort}} 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.

** The Redmond Barrens of Seattle, which even have a ''mall'' that is one ''gigantic'' black market.

* Kowloon Walled City in UsefulNotes/HongKong 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 TriadsAndTongs 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.
* UsefulNotes/{{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 UsefulNotes/{{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.)
* The Five Points in 19th-Century New York.
** Becomes a NonindicativeName in the case of the RealLife 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 in New York was a dangerous Irish neighborhood until gentrification began in the 1990s. Before then, varying levels of poverty and violence plagued the area throughout much of its history, even 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 UsefulNotes/{{Boston}} was this up until recently. At the time (the 1960s-1970s), Chinatown adjoined [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_Zone_(Boston) 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 Asian markets still live up to the "if you want it, you can probably find it for sale here" reputation that Chinatown has never quite managed to shake off.
* The "SWATS" (or Zone 4) in Southwest UsefulNotes/{{Atlanta}}, Georgia, so called because it's in '''S'''outh'''w'''est '''At'''lanta, 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 ''Series/MagnumPI''" 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 certain... desires... of sailors from neighboring Pearl Harbor, the area became very run down and was controlled by the Tongs and other organized crime syndicates, and it was not a place you went to at night if you valued your life, and it was a wise man who avoided it during the day as well. The area has, however, undergone a revitalization that has -- mostly -- reclaimed the area for decent society.
* 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.
* Certain neighbourhoods of New York City are this. Specifically, the South Bronx and East Brooklyn (especially Brownsville and East New York). are known for being ''extremely'' dangerous.
* 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 [[WretchedHive 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.
* Being the hometown of the ViolentGlaswegian, Glasgow naturally [[WretchedHive 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 ''UsefulNotes/NorthKorea.''
* 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.
* Most of the area of St. Louis north of Delmar Boulevard.
* Ferguson, Missouri, made infamous by the 2014 race riots, is ironically one of the safer municipalities in northern Saint Louis County. That's not saying it's safe to walk the streets at night, but you're less likely to be hit with stray gunfire in broad daylight in comparison to the nearby Kinloch or Normandy municipalities.
* The part of Washington, D.C. east of the Anacostia River, especially when you go below East Capitol Street into the Southeast Quadrant.
* UsefulNotes/{{Sydney}}, historically, had The Rocks (foundation until the early 20th century), Cabramatta (TheEighties 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.
* 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 Latino bands are unpleasant, not psychopathically 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.
* 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.
* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania 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.

* Played with in the third season of ''Series/TheWire''. 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, [[spoiler: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 don't also dare venture into certain alleys that the dealers block with junk.
* ''Series/YancyDerringer'': 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' RedLightDistrict.

* The music video for [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz9-pXuvFEU "FUN!"]] by Vince Staples shows [[spoiler: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.

* There are plenty of cities in ''TabletopGame/RocketAge'', 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 narrows, like Freelandia and Maven Haven.

* 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.

* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania 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.

* In UsefulNotes/{{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.

* ''Literature/HeraldsOfValdemar'''s titular Valdemar is TheGoodKingdom and its capital, Haven, is named for heaven. There's a great set of pastures and woodland besides the Palace at its heart where [[OurAngelsAreDifferent angels in the shape of horses]] live, and someone looking at that might imagine Haven is TheShiningCity. But Companion field is just where the city was founded, and it [[MegaCity 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 TheHighQueen 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.