Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/27/why-essex-is-crap-or-at-least.html
…
3 Likes
Cape Cod has quite a few people who revel in ignorance and lean VERY hard right.
4 Likes
Essex… the new New Jersey.
3 Likes
2 Likes
Why not both?
10 Likes
“young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren”
How charming, we have those here, less the industrious…
3 Likes
My wife grew up in Essex (Chelmsford, actually) and her family is still back there. I grew up in Birmingham and before I had a reason to go there, I always pictured Essex as a kind of outer-outer-london. There’s a clip from Monkey Dust (a satirical cartoon show the BBC ran in the early 2000s) that sums it up.
2 Likes
We made the out of towner mistake of stopping in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire last year. Motorcycle parades all day long, drunks yelling in the streets at night. Sounds like Essex.
2 Likes
The great Jonathan Meades’s BBC program about Essex
6 Likes
Downtown Vancouver offers a similar experience. The transition from the restaurants, boutique stores and multimillion dollar condos of Gastown to the third-world living conditions of East Hastings is a matter of 100 feet.
5 Likes
Sounds like San Francisco, where in some places, such as the Mission District, they are intermixed in alternating buildings.
5 Likes
Well, the first single was good:
6 Likes
Unfortunately his standards slipped.
1 Like
Yep - I was coming to post the same link. Meades is peerless.
3 Likes
Gloucester, Essex County, Massachusetts. Salty fishy townies plus the artsy fartsy. Triple-deckers next to million dollar Victorians. You can see world-quality art in a museum and then watch a drunk guy fight a seagull in the same hour.
6 Likes
Holy!! I came here to suggest the same place — where I’m visiting this weekend, actually. I love that the old fishy Gloucester still persists. Literally a block from hipster art galleries and semi-fine-dining and whale watch cruises I can go to the original Crow’s Nest bar (from “the Perfect Storm”) where fishermen with Popeye voices yell at you and there’s keys behind the bar to rent rooms upstairs by the hour.
4 Likes
Also crap. See Newark.
1 Like
What about this Essex?
3 Likes
I love Gloucester. It’s the last place on the North Shore that still has that real salty vibe. I worked at NOAA for the fisheries office for a long time and really always appreciated working in Gloucester.
3 Likes
Oh this is St. Peter’s Fiesta weekend! You so psyched. You NEED to see the sienne boat races and the greasy pole.
4 Likes
