The Place of Bad Men

There was a railroad trestle in my neighborhood when I was a kid. It was a huge, ancient, wooden structure that separated my neighboorhood from the more civilized parts of Duluth. Beneath there was scrubby woods, and a shallow, polluted crick full of shopping carts and suckerfish. Next to the crick was a dimly lit path through the sticker bushes, and this path was the fastest way to get to Grand Avenue.

The thing was, this path was also a Place of Bad Men. These men were mainly just stew bums finishing off a bender in the weeds, but there was a pretty good number of pervs there, too. Though nothing extremely awful ever happened there to my recollection, all of the teenage girls in the neighborhood had stories of being flashed.

Still, we all continued to use the path, because the only other way to get to Grand was to walk around the trestle, which was a several blocks long. And walking around meant you had to walk back. Eventually, the trestle was torn down in the 1980s when they started putting up businesses in that area.

Anyway, I wonder. Were there places of bad men in your neighborhood? Places that, as an adult--especially a parent--make you utterly cringe? When I look back at all the dangers I was only vaguely aware of at the time, it's amazing that we survived. But then when I look back again, I realize that not all of us did.