Street Fighting Town

From the Washington City Paper, a depressingly accurate profile of College Park:

But whatever the president's success might be on the academic front, Maryland will never rank among the heavyweights. Stocking the student body with mathletes has done little to address College Park's greatest shortcoming: It has the locational charm of a highway rest stop. The campus itself possesses lovely qualities, such as tasteful neo-Georgian architecture and the wide grassy expanse of McKeldin Mall. The town has neighborhoods that are as green and chock-full of pre-war cottages as Takoma Park. But it doesn't suffice. Instead of an Ann Arbor, a Berkeley, a Madison, or a Charlottesville -- perennial chart-toppers on lists of America's most livable citie -- you somehow get, in College Park, an ugly shopping strip, a scarcity of choice, an air of lurking danger, and the promise of thoughtless mayhem. According to FBI figures reported in the Diamondback, the principal college newspaper, Maryland has the highest rate of violent crime among universities of comparable size. [emphases added.]

How bad is it? So bad that Cornerstone, the local bar where much of the recent violence has taken place, has banned all non-students and non-regulars. I'm fortunate enough not to live near that area, but even apart from the violent crime, College Park is one of the more poorly designed towns I've ever seen. The ugliness and congestion of Route 1 figures prominently in the article, but almost as bad are the side roads: many of them are disjointed (literally, they stop at one place and pick up again half a mile away), and there's no real way to get from one end of town to the other, except through Route 1 or the main highways. While there are some redevelopment plans in the works, they'll likely take several years to complete.