Anyone else grow up in a dystopian wasteland?

J

jbj

Poor old Geordie's array...
Just come across some old photos of the scheme I grew up in. I reckon this must be around about the time I went to primary school.

We lived in the bottom left tower until I was around three then moved to a block of flats just outside of the shot until I was 16 or 17. One of my earliest memories is of my dad and his friend using a shopping trolley to shift furniture during the move. :bigg:

FB_IMG_1693650174706.jpg
 
Grew up in a small town a 3 bedroom house maybe 700 square feet. Funny because of when my parents bought the land to build these much bigger brick homes were around us. They didn’t like us were not very nice.
 
I grew up on the west side of Chicago before it turned into a crime ridden area. It was a great place to live. It was primarily an Italian and Greek neighborhood with great delis and bakeries. The diner that the Belushi family owned was a few blocks away. I never got to meet John and Jim though. I'm glad to say that the area is now rebounding.
 
jbj said:
Just come across some old photos of the scheme I grew up in. I reckon this must be around about the time I went to primary school.

We lived in the bottom left tower until I was around three then moved to a block of flats just outside of the shot until I was 16 or 17. One of my earliest memories is of my dad and his friend using a shopping trolley to shift furniture during the move. :bigg:

View attachment 85609
Click to expand...

No offense to you Geordie, but that does look grim as fuck. :embarrassed:
 
I grew up in a middle-class commuter village in the south of the Netherlands. Not that it says much, because 100% of the Netherlands is middle-class, whether you are rich or poor.

NTEuMzgxNTE5LTUuNTY4NTQ5
 
I grew up in a would be midcentury utopia that was well on its way to crumbling late capitalist neoliberal dystopia by the time I was in high school. Everyone huddled around the last fading embers of a dying shopping mall as the failures of “planned community” bedroom community NIMBY bullshit were compounded by systemic racism and deindustrialization.

There’s an exhibit about my hometown in the Smithsonian. It was a big deal in the 1950s and then won an award for housing integration in the 1970s. New waves of white flight and the perils of the greed is good 80s and the go-go 1990s didn’t make the place better. My parents still live there.
 
wok said:
those pictures are from last year, aren’t they? :lol:
Click to expand...

I see Fife is getting it's monthly wi-fi ration :embarrassed:

I've got great memories of growing up there and we never realised it except the gang stuff when we got a bit older but there was extreme poverty and drink / drug use must have been rife.

Part of my remit at work is funnelling money towards kids from areas of high depravation. It's based off a thing called an SIMD region. There's around 10,000 in Scotland and at one point this place was in the bottom 50 which is crazy.

I'm blessed my mum and dad were grafters and didn't let any of us get too stupid or reckless. I'd love to go back and see it from my current world view.
 
There was a lot of violence TBF.

The building top furthest on the left was just across from us. A guy got butchered up the close with a machete over a drug dead.

A guy I went to school with was murdered in one of the buildings next to the towers to.

Loads of stabbings and stuff too. I remember staying at a friend's one night and his brother came home. He'd fallen asleep at a party and someone had shaved his eyebrows off. The dad gave him a golf club and told him he better not come home without blood on the thing. We didn't even bat an eyelid.

Another time the same friend kicked the shit out of some other kid and his mum came to the door with a bat. We jumped out of his 2nd story window and ran way round the scheme. Came walking down and when she accosted my friend he told her we'd been in town so her boy must have got beat up by someone else he was scared to grass on.

Teaching is quite the middle class pursuit, I'm not sure my colleagues believe half of what I tell them if we're talking about our younger days.
 
Motorik said:
I'm not going to dox myself, but where I'm from is not great either. :embarrassed:

Still better than Lurgan though! :grin:
Click to expand...

A friend wants to take his dad to Belfast next year for a bit of mid July cultural festivities.

He asked me for recommendations for stuff to do that didn't involve spending 3 days licking your elbow in East Belfast and I had no answers for him :grin:
 
Just after I moved to Scotland ( 1999) I got to work for a while in an arts centre in Pilton/Muirhouse Edinburgh. This was just before the big regeneration project, and was still one of the most deprived areas in Scotland. Coming from the safe, reasonably wealthy Netherlands, I was in for quite a shock. Have to say though, you get used to the queue of junkies at the pharmacy in the morning, the kids of alcoholic parents/junkies trying to cause havoc in the arts centre quite quickly and I have never been harrassed or gotten into any bother. And the area had quite a strong community spirit.

It was ROUGH though, very rough
 
I grew up mostly in suburban upstate NY, we moved a couple of times but it was still the upstate NY area (Rockland and Westchester counties). I mostly have fond memories of those places, pretty lucky in retrospect.

IMG_6289.jpeg
IMG_6290.jpeg
IMG_6291.jpeg
IMG_6288.jpeg
 
  • Like
Reactions: Tig
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top