Wow, that's a new one on me. Where in Chicago did you experience this?

1. Birmingham, AL
2. Syracuse, NY
3. Indianapolis

Dallas and Denver...
 

.....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
In fact with the exception of austin and san antonio pretty much all of texas

too true. Austin and San Antonio are like oases in the dessert...the rest of Texas, especially Houston and Dallas, well....they make LA look good :p

Ditto. Biggest disappointment ever when visiting a city.

Houston and Kansas City were the worst. UGH.

For those ragging on LA, if you visit any of the nice coastal towns, LA can be beautiful. Downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood drag down the city as a whole though.

I have never understood peoples fascination with Austin. Its crowded, dirty, expensive with homeless panhandlers and drug addicts everywhere. The crime rate is way out of line for its size and there always seems to be a traffic jam on the freeway going through it. Sure there is a lot of music, but so does Memphis, New Orleans and even Little Rock. Austin is way overrated. Maybe it will get better when AMD and Intel do their layoffs soon.

It's just miles and miles of suburbia, and the beaches are no nicer than anywhere else. It has no flavor.

New York.

I first visited in 1994 and found the place dirty, gloomy, and like a Third World country. I think it has improved since then but I still don't like it. The whole atmosphere of the city is just too dark and gloomy. And I find hotel employees, taxi drivers, and other service personnel to be quite often unfriendly and to have poor communication skills. (Why do so many New Yorkers communicate in grunts and fragments? Is it too much to expect them to speak in normal English sentences?)

New York and LA are the only major US cities I never want to live in.

Exactly - it's a real city, not like Plano or wherever. That's why it's so different from the rest of Texas (except SA) which is not a real city :p

yes, we refer to it as "the armpit of Ohio"
:eek:
different strokes for different folks, i guess. i love the feeling of landing at LAS, seeing the strip out the window - it just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Someone once said to me "everytime a plane leaves for Vegas and I'm not on it, a little piece of me dies inside."

It has perhaps the best preserved and largest population of mid-century modern residential architecture of any city in the world, every type of ethnic food, and the hub of US beach culture, but no flavour?

As others have said - you need to know how to approach LA.

NY is not third world. NY may be dirty, but I will take it any day of the week over most cities.

.....

Detroit
Atlanta - Some of the suburbs may be livable, but for visiting, there's no there, there.
Cincinatti - sort of moldering away
Richmond
Denver - increasing identity loss, and the pot done melted
Memphis
St. Louis - Lewis and Clark departed from there, the recommended option
Dallas - always choose Fort Worth
New York - I've been visiting since 1958, and every time there's a little less unique about the place and "doing" even simple evolutions has become more difficult. It's still NY. I still go, but at some point it becomes not worth the effort - although it seems cleaner and safer than in the 60s.
Portland - a great place to visit, but a long way short of as advertised and expectations.
Miami - aside from Calle Ocho and the Cuban American population, among the world's most unappealing and noxious citizenry.
Orlando - a pustule among the palmettoes.
Las Vegas - boring and mostly over-rated excess, unredeemed even by the gambling, most of which is less fun than shooting craps in an alley