I once visited Corpus. Saw two (possible) crack houses within 30 minutes, saw a Mexican swinging around a 9 foot section of PVC in the middle of the street like he was Darth Maul in that same 30 minutes, and finally made it to the hotel which happened to be only a mile or so away from one of those crack houses, and had a ton of illegals hanging out in the parking lot. Yeah, it looked nice online. ALWAYS check google street view for the full story... Yes, the area was a little run down and dirty. It doesn't have shit on some of the stuff we saw in Atlanta though...
Once we got out of that area, it looked fine.
The USS Lexington was cool, and the beach was nice.
Every city has bad area. Some more than others. Being from the San Antonio area corpus is familiar and normal to me.