Reply #83: There are two US cities I've visisted so far that immediately just felt

[ForrestGump]

wrong: Chicago and Phoenix. Not saying nthat there aren't worse cities in this country, but bot of these places hit me on an elemental level as soon as I entered them...they felt as wrong as places like Joshua Tree and the high plains of New Mexico (to name just a couple) felt so perfectly right. I know lots of people here on DU love Chicago, whether they live there or not, but all I'm saying is that that ttown felt so overwhelmingly wrong to me and for me...Phoenix may have hit me in an even stronger way.

I haven't stopped in Phoenix since the late '80s, but my impression then (apart from that gut feeling that the place was somehow 'off') is that it was an increasingly polluted, sick place with a lot of violent crime and desperation. And heat. But heat's not the real story -- I'd lived in the desert even before I came to Vegas and what is wrong with Phoenix is not a function of heat. The rest of Arizona, for the most part, is great...I could easily live in or near Tucson or Flagstaff, for example, or in a smaller town in Arizona. But Phoenix has always felt, to me, kinda evil.