What is the reason that Worcester, Massachusetts is not as well-known as Boston and Springfield, even though it is a large city with many neighborhoods?

Norton Abrasives operated a massive mill right outside the city pumping all manner of poison into the air all the time. Driving by on Route 190 you had to close your windows against the chemical stench from the plant. And Lake Quinsigamond was a just a big lake used as a dumping ground for stolen cars, old furniture and everything else people didn’t want. It looked good from the highway but when you got close and saw all the rubbish on the shores it made you sick.

The Galleria didn’t last long. Poverty stricken druggies and welfare types weren’t going to the “Gap” to buy clothes, but Worcester did have a massive Goodwill operation where you could get all kinds of shit for next to nothing.

It was a big hospital, run by the Catholic Church but even they couldn’t survive.

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There was a big hospital on top of the hill too, but even that went belly up and folded. Spags and White City, a shopping center right outside Worcester, were really popular and there were some good restaurants like “Mac’s Diner” but in those days, Worcester was really one of the worst places in Easter/Central Mass. Not as bad as Holyoke or some of the other failed mill towns out West, but still really, really bad.

Lake Quinsig looks good and people sail and motor boat on it - but you’re really risking hepatitis swimming in it. One look at the shore shows oil and rubbish in huge quantities.

After college, I lived in Fitchburg and drove a truck for PDC (a plastics distributor) in Worcester. This place was a dystopian nightmare. It really was like an anti-Disneyland that could easily have been used to film post-nuclear disaster movies.

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There were a few important businesses, like Polar Cola, which had a massive bottling plant. The highway ran OVER the city so “normal”people could blow through without have to to stop and be robbed at street level. The College of the Holy Cross was on a hill, a beacon of hope, where at the bottom of the hill was the Lamplighter, a strip club where those Catholic girls made extra money. There was gigantic strip club in the IBM office building. Once I went there with my drug dealer room mate who would throw quarters on the stage and the stripper would pick them up with her pussy. Then he put a cigarette lighter to the quarters under the table before throwing them on the stage.

Most of Worcester looked just like this. If you lived here, you were at the end of the line in life. You made too many wrong choices in life.

The abandoned furniture factories and plastic plants were like something from Detroit. One I visited was a rag-making plant where illegals and mentally damaged people were employed to cut up old clothes into industrial wipers. It was a rat warren of tunnels and standing water and scary abandoned rooms filled with rusting machines.

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Ralph’s diner - once it had been a machine shop or textile mill but the abandoned factory was turned into a no-rules nightclub where absolutely anything was possible. Fights in the parking lots, drug deals, sex in the dark corners. This place was a legend - you could even get a great burger after midnight from the diner.

There was an attempt to revive the city with the Centrum, a modern concert venue attached to a modern mall called the Galleria. The Mall went bankrupt but the Centrum is still there. You never, ever knew if your car would be there when you got out.

Kelly Square, the place of Legends, was an area where multiple streets came together with no signage or confusing signs and nothing but potholes. Accidents were frequent multiple times a day. There was the abandoned Union Station, an burned out massive marble train station from the golden age of rail, filled with water ankle deep where you went to buy drugs and homeless slept on the old wooden seats. The trains didn’t even stop there anymore - they just blew on by.

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“Abandon all hope ye who enter Kelly Square and don’t know what you’re doing.” You’re going to have an accident, lose a tire or get lost. Guaranteed. There is no way out, just like Sartre said. It’s Hell.

The place was filled with massive abandoned factories made of grimy, soot covered brick with their windows blown out. The poverty stricken staggered from bar to drug dealer like zombies 24 hours a day. Even the area around City Hall looked like a bombed out hellscape. Every street was like navigating a war zone with the potholes. Trash was everywhere. And since the city was down on Landlords and tenants were supreme, no one paid rent, everyone was squatter and every building was a run-down ghetto.

The Lamplighter is still there, a notorious strip club, drug den and prostitution mecca. Used to go there on lunch hour. Desperate college girls and skanky heroin-addicted hookers would strip here.

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They had WPI and “Quinsig”, the community college where all the losers went to get an east Associates degree and go to work at Simplex, which made time card equipment. WPI was actually beautiful, an oasis of green in the middle of the ghetto, turning out brilliant engineers who somehow couldn’t afford MIT or Rennsalear. It was a great school but WPI was no one’s first choice. No one wanted to be in Worcester. It was the worst place to be a teen in college unless you were a nihilist or had a car and could escape to the fun places that weren’t that far away.

Worcester skyline, In the 80s, even the big glass bank building was empty.

The Netflix Series “Kevin Can Go Fuck Himself” was filmed in Worcester and you can see the despair, drug dealing, sexual crimes and traffic in the show; it’s much better now than it was then and even the Red Sox farm league has been stationed here after abandoning the equally-run-down Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Great effort has been made to spruce up Kelly Sq and even yuppies are moving into the relatively inexpensive lofts made from abandoned factories. But you don’t have to scratch the surface to see why they call it “Wormtown”.

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The Boston politicians hated Worcester and decided to punish it in the 1950s and made the Mass Pike go around it, requiring a long detour of complex roads and bad signage. No one wanted to go there. Businesses fled. Factories failed. Worcester had a huge airport, brand new, made with Federal funds, modern, with escalators going up and down - and empty storefronts and not one single airline. Every airline that tried to use is, from USAir to Frontier to any of them, simply pulled up stakes and left. No one wanted to fly to Worcester. They only wanted to get out.

One good thing about driving a truck in Worcester was there were really no driving laws. Stop lights, one way signs - none of it meant anything. In my big truck I could go anywhere. No one ever said a word.

The firemen didn’t stand a chance. The place had no electricity and was a rabbit warren of wooden partitions and abandoned things that burned hot. There was no place for the heat to go and the men were literally cremated.

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Union Station in the 1980s. We used to buy drugs here. Homeless people and drug addicts lived here.

Polar Cola - one of Worcester’s most important factories can only be seen from the top of Route 290 - you can wave at the bear as you blow through the city without stopping - just like everyone else.

We called it “Worm Town”. The only good thing about it was WAAF, the rock station based in Worcester that was blue collar all the way.

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The abandoned airport had animals on the runway. All the lights were kept on and the escalators went up and down all day, but no one was there and there were no airlines.

Union Station was a beautiful building from the time of the heyday of steam railroading. Here it is abandoned in the 1980s.

It’s called St Gobain now and most of the plant is abandoned but for years, Norton Abrasives was Worcester’s most important employers. The factory stench was miserable. Now they use it to store and chip Ash trees that have the “Asian Boring Beetle” as if they are going to be able to stop it. Fat chance.

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The Police Station was right off Route 9 on the Shrewsbury Border but I never saw cops going anywhere. They sat there in the station and did nothing - and right across the street was Ralph’s Chadwick Square Diner where there were fights every night and we snorted coke right off the marble bar top. It had been a textile factory made into a massive, undecorated nightclub and hamburger joint. The bathrooms were never, ever cleaned.

Later, a bunch of firemen were killed when they got trapped in an abandoned cold storage warehouse that was on fire. The walls were 24 inches thick of red brick with walls of thick wood. The brick held in the heat and literally cremated the firemen. The building was torn down and a pile of rubble was left behind for months. No one was going to pay to clean it.