> I’ll stop ranting. But the city as a whole is very nice. Ask any local and they’ll say they been hearing the same thing for decades “Worcester has been on the up and coming”

I mention this every time it comes up, but the earliest I've ever seen the phrase "Worcester Renaissance" used is from January '05 when they started to push the Paris Cinema to shut down in earnest. I know they were using it before then because people in the articles talk about it like it's some ongoing process, but it's just so patently Worcester.

There's all these civil servants in the articles saying, "Worcester's a developing city! We're in the Renaissance! We can't have a porno theater right next to City Hall! It needs to be shut down so we can build something good there!"

So they shut it down. What happened to the property? It sat there, vacant, for twelve fucking years. And after twelve years what did they put in its place? The Beer Garden. Quite possibly the shittiest restaurant in Worcester.

I'd take the porno theater over that place any day, at least the Paris was honest about what it was. It wasn't a faux-gastro pub with sub-Denny's quality food.

>Worcester rent is high relative to what it was 5 years ago

This is the issue, though. I've lived in Worcester for that five years. The city has really not changed that much, sure they've built some new shit, but day to day life in Worcester is no different than it was five yeras ago. But still the rents go up. Some good restaurants have opened, but other good ones have closed. The infrastructure still sucks, trash pickup is a fucking nightmare, the city's leaf collection policy is "push them all in the road, making the roads more dangerous, and we'll come pick them up in like a week," it'll snow 14" and the plows still leave 3" caked on the road...but we got a baseball stadium!

Like I said, the question is what are you getting in return for the money you're spending and is it worth it? In Worcester's case it's getting increasingly hard for a lot of people to justify spending the kind of money it takes to live here.

> however, the city has definitely improved an extraordinary amount over the past decade or two

In some respects, yes. In other respects, not so much.

>It’s walkable

Worcester is absolutely not a walkable city. Downtown and some other places, sure. But lots of places lack well-kept sidewalks, if they have a sidewalk at all. There's been multiple posts here in the past about it. Look at the heavily residential North Lake Ave. Your options are "walk in the trash-covered grass" or "walk in the middle of the road." And there's plenty of other places in the city like this.

>shows, events

The Hanover is fine and gets an okay mix of stuff, but it's hit or miss. Some years you get Morrissey or Elvis Costello, other years you just get Waitress & Shen Yun again. It's very rare that the DCU gets anything good for concerts, which isn't really their fault, the entire live event industry has changed, but still. I nearly shit myself when Maiden announced they were playing there. And The Palladium, while it'll always hold a special place in my heart, ropes off a bunch of the seating now, charges an arm and a leg for tickets, and yet still has the worst sound system I've ever heard. I don't love Providence by any stretch but every single concert venue I've been to there puts Worcester's to shame.

>and it’s being built up and invested in

Debatable whether or not that's a good thing.

>Literally every city has some crappy neighborhoods, homeless people, gang activity, and higher than normal rent, so that can’t be an argument against the city.

My dude, are you seriously trying to say that "high rent" cannot be an argument for why a city is a bad place to live? There was literally just a study about how crazy the rents in Worcester are getting And yet the city's solution continues to be, "build market rate apartments to attract Boston transplants rather than housing that the people who live here can actually afford."

Ultimately, whenever people make posts that are like, "Worcester's got all this stuff! How can it be as bad as people say!?" it leaves out two things: a) the bad shit about living in Worcester and b) the second half of the equation which is, "Does all the good stuff about Worcester outweigh the shitty parts?" Ultimately that's a personal question, and people are going to come down either way, but it's not as simple as, "Look at all this great stuff, how can you not like living here!?"

Yeah, there's some cool stuff to do in Worcester, but I'd trade fucking Polar Park for halfway decent trash pickup in a heartbeat.

My thoughts exactly.

Judging by the people in Worcester's municipal government all you need is a pulse. Sometimes, barely that.

New Tradition has more of a punk vibe. Like, it's in the same building as a barber shop and a motorcycle shop, last I heard there was a tattoo shop going in, too.

Bring back the Paris Cinema.

>I'd bet the money they save from not staffing late offsets the fewer cups sold.

For sure. Most of Brew & Fuel's customers are people who work downtown. Aside from the places that specifically cater to an evening crowd like Beer Garden, the Common area mostly clears out once City Hall and the other offices close. Acoustic Java does great business in the morning and lunch hours too, I mean, they recently (at least relatively speaking) opened the roastery location so they're clearly doing okay.

New Tradition does open weirdly late, but they also don't really cater to an office crowd, so it probably doesn't hurt 'em too much.

Bottom line is if being open later was worth it, those places would be open, but it doesn't, so they're not.

The Chicken Tikka poutine is like the one American "poutine" I will accept. It's just so good.

Yeah, there's pretty much nowhere around here to get curry chips and believe me I have been trying to find one since 2014.

It's basically on everything in the store excluding the comics on the racks (so, back issues, trade paperbacks, etc are on sale) and very expensive merchandise. ($500+)

Peregrine is great. Local emo, they play Ralphs fairly regularly. Very few bands in Worcester will draw a large crowd on their own, but most shows at Ralph's will do a decent crowd.

>Well to that I say at least back there I had sidewalks and trash bins.

The trash situation in this city is genuinely unforgivable. There's a weird dearth of public trash cans and the city's trash collection policies are fucking insane.

If you're going to insist that all my recycling goes into a bin you need to make that bin big enough to hold at least a moderate amount of recycling. If you get one item in a big box you basically cannot fit anything else in that bin. I got a new monitor on Black Friday and put the box out with my recycling today thinking, "Eh, maybe I'll get lucky and they'll pick it up." Nope. Literally stood there and watched the guys just ignore it and leave it on the ground. And they wonder why people just dump their trash.

The library's airing all the ones that fall during library hours, so they should be showing USA vs. NED but I can double check as well.

Yeah this is honestly the first time in like five years I've seen someone say anything positive about Hangover/Broth.

I miss a certain dive bar that disappeared in the wake of a minor league stadium. Fuck, now what was it called...

A lot of them don't have their own libraries but Worcester Public has branches in a lot of the bigger schools (Roosevelt, Goddard, Burncoat, and Tatnuck) and I know there's been talk about putting them in a few more. Whether anything will ever come of that is a different story.

That being said, yeah, schools should have their own libraries.

I have to get on Chandler for two seconds and it's the worst part of my day.

That is it's major design flaw I will give you that. It's theoretically faster for me to go through Kelly square to get home and I still generally just choose to avoid it cause it's such a pain at rush hour.

It's also safer for pedestrians than the old design which I think is a plus.

No the peanut was a good change. I'm tired of the Peanut Slander.

It's a food truck not a restaurant but Mama Roux makes a hot chicken that I would kill for. Then again I'd kill for most of their food. Seriously, check out Mama Roux people.

Choose & Mix has better Bibimbap than Simjang did, but then again I always hated Simjang so ymmv.

>And just as an aside your source is Teen Vogue? 😜

Kim's a respected labor writer who's been published inThe New Republic, WaPo, and Esquire as well as had a literal book about the labor movement published by Simon and Schuster. But sure, go off about how writing for Teen Vogue is something to scoff at as if it's some great accomplishment to be the least liked person on a municipal subreddit.

Pretty much everyone knew it was gonna happen. Plenty of people kicked up a fuss but...no dice.

Thanks! Got it working. Seems like the direct link was being wonky for some reason.