For once, Danville wins first place
Danville was voted the most boring city in Virginia
After being born in Chesapeake and living in Virginia Beach for four years, it’s not too terribly surprising to see that Danville, VA, was number one on the top ten list of most boring places in the state. Chesapeake, number six, and Suffolk, number four, although all trees and crime, cannot begin to touch the lack of excitement Danville has to offer.
Just to go down the list of criteria from Movoto Real Estate’s “Big Deal List”, Danville’s night life isn’t the greatest. Hampton Roads had the pleasure of blinking neon lights in bar and club windows on every street corner. Here? If you want to have a little fun, maybe you could throw a flash mob in front of one of our apocalyptic-looking paper mills.
Other than country music, our city doesn’t have much variety, especially when it comes to live concerts and festivals. Maybe if you got someone like Pharrell Williams, who was born and raised in Virginia Beach, you too could be “Happy”.
Danville does have a few perks when speaking on its active life. From its nature trails to Ballou Park, the city has its gems. One just has to exercise long enough to find them.
As far as Arts and Entertainment, Danville’s list is a series of ones. One movie theatre, one bowling alley, one skating arena, one mall, one Walmart….
In comparison to Virginia Beach, Danville has a very wide variety of fast food places and decent restaurants for the population numbers. There are plenty of places to go: McDonald’s, Kickback’s, Habachi Grill. However, the sad fact still remains that it took this city so many years to add a donut shop to its business list.
Thanks to the closing of the paper mills years ago, families scrambled to grab their things and fled to the nearest city with jobs. Without money to buy things, the population of young adults from 18-34 plummeted.
No one can deny that downtown Danville doesn’t have some of the prettiest Victorian houses, but why is it that every road has shops boarded up on either side? I’ll admit, it’s better than tiny apartments stacked on top of each other, but it looks like a set off of Brad Pitt’s World War Z.
Lastly, and also the main root to this cities problem, unemployment. Let’s be honest, anyone can go to Sonic and get a cashier job, but what about giant corporations? Factories? Agencies? Danville is unbelievably boring because it doesn’t have jobs. It doesn’t have people because there’s nowhere to work. There are no new hip attractions or fun places to go because the population is dwindling. See a pattern? Sorry Danville, but it’s not entirely your fault. Until unemployment is fixed this city will remain the most boring.
So if this incredibly opinionated article does not sway you one way or another to believe that Danville is mind-numbingly dull, you’ve probably been born and raised here. Sorry to say this, but there’s a huge world out there past Danville’s city limits, that everyone should be able to see. Maybe then Danville’s faults (lack of things to do, deserted buildings, and unemployment) will be crystal clear.
See the original article here at http://www.movoto.com/va/most-boring-places-in-virginia/
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L.C. Moore • Apr 1, 2015 at 2:02 pm
First of all I don’t have much confidence in a reporter that doesn’t do enough research to realize Danville never had paper mills. That was Dan River Mills that closed. They made cloth. A little more research would have told this reporter the worlds largest tobacco market dwindling away also took a lot of jobs and money from Danville.
I’m on the board of a group that brings in entertainment to Danville. I am sure Ms. Bowker has never tried to hire entertainment. To get Pharrell you would need a venue that could handle at least 20,000 people to make enough money to pay what he would cost. People don’t understand that an artist that has any kind of name at all will cost $40,000 to $100,000 and Pharrell probably wouldn’t drop by for 10 minutes and sign autographs for that. By the way we have tried other types of music and people didn’t come.
I am also not sure if a bar on every corner is a good thing or not.
Our nature trails also includes over 30 miles of one of the finest single track mountain bike trails in the US plus 8.5 mile paved trail that is still growing. I would like her to visit the warehouse district with with some beautiful condos and a couple of fine restaurants. She needs to take a walk up Main St. downtown and look at the new businesses that have opened.
You don’t loose the largest consolidated textile mill in the world and the largest tobacco market in the world without some difficulties recovering.
Let’s work on improving the area instead of complaining about it.
adviser • Apr 2, 2015 at 9:01 am
Thank you for your comments. Please also read the other side of this issue which we offered in Danville Proves Opinions Wrong by Anna Kueng.