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Galena dropped from that mid-teens figure down to about 3,500 today (and it actually is no longer a "river town" since the Mississippi shifted and the town sits on what's little better than a creek). There's no "abandoned" areas in it, however. It remains very dense and occupied with scores of historic structures (in some ways, closer in style to Natchez and Vicksburg, but with some even older buildings, as it didn't suffer through a war). It remains close to 90% White (though Hispanics are up to 8%). The Black population is .5%, which means there's only about twenty(!) people in the entire town.
Cairo had a solid bloc of around 1/3rd Black up until the 1940s or '50s (best estimate), and they were treated very poorly (Cairo was closer to Mississippi in culture than Wisconsin). So you could figure from 1910 to the 1940s when it had a stable population, there was about 10,000 Whites and 5,000 or so Blacks.
When its location ceased to be as advantageous in the past and jobs were moving elsewhere, Whites started moving out, upsetting the prior balance, and then the civil rights era came, it started a rapid decline. From 1940-1960, it dropped from 15,000 to 9,000 people (numerically, might not sound like much, but when over 1/3rd of your population is lost that quickly, that's a bad sign). The most dramatic drop was during the 1960s when another 1/3rd moved away by 1970 (so it went from about 9,400 to 6,300). I estimate it was in that decade it became majority Black.
Curiously, it came close to stabilizing in the 1970s, losing only 350 people. But it began a substantial decline again, losing 1,100 more persons by 1990 when it dropped to 4,900. That was about when I visited there. The main street (Commercial), was still surprisingly intact. Numerous blocks of 19th century business buildings, albeit with modern veneers in a lot of instances, though most were closed and some were partially collapsing.
Unfortunately, I only took a few photos of the street. Had I known (which wouldn't have taken a rocket scientist to figure out) their soon-to-be fate, I'd have tried to document the entire street that was still intact. When the big Mississippi River flood of 1993 occurred, it altered our route home from Colorado (we were going to go through Central Missouri along the same named-river, but we changed our course to go through the Ozarks instead and crossed at Cairo), it brought us through town again, and I snapped a few more photos of what I missed the prior year.
A key block at Commercial that still had most of its buildings standing which I photographed were all demolished, and hence the whole central "downtown" ceased to exist. Looking at it today, and this in aerial photos just taken since I did a "tour" of it via Google Maps, one side of Commercial has only 4 or 5 buildings left along the east side on multiple blocks (and the few that stand are in poor shape). It's very likely the remaining buildings there will be gone before the decade is out on that small strip.
In 1992, there were still dozens of intact buildings. Cairo and Galena had roughly the same population by 2000, at around 3,500. While Galena is insulated from any rapid decline at this point, save a natural disaster, there's almost nothing left in Cairo to halt a decline to a triple-digit population. It shed almost another quarter of its population by 2010, dropping to 2,800. App. 72% Black, 29% White (curiously, the Hispanic population dropped, which isn't happening in most places -- .74% in 2000, .4% in 2010, in real numbers from about 25 down to 12 !). So now that figures to about 950 or so Whites, meaning more than 90% of the White population has fled Cairo since the 1940s. Even 3/5ths of the Black population has fled, too, in the same period, from 5k down to 2k.
I expect it will probably drop to just above 2,000 overall in 2020, which will make it lower than its population in 1860 when it became a "boomtown." A real enterprising person now could buy up whole swaths of Commercial Street today, if they had something positive to do with it. Start from scratch and build a 19th-century riverboat town-style theme park. I think someone even pitched the idea. If I had the money to do it, I might give it a shot. It certainly can't get much worse when almost all what was historic there is now just grassy fields. At least they have the common courtesy to trim them (when they get around to it).
“Cairo was closer to Mississippi in culture than Wisconsin”
Indeed. Some people in “Egypt” wanted to join the Confederacy if I’m not mistaken.. Worst was Gallatin County on the Indiana border. Almost entirely White, it still votes more democrat than it should. It was famously the only county to oppose Jim Edgar in 1994. Huge swing to Romney but it backed Obama in 2008.
We vistied Galena when I was a kid, in the winter. We were gonna toboggan and stuff. Unfortunately, I immediatly came down with pneumonia, exacerbated by my asthma and spent the entire trip in the hospital (actually a nursing home or something that offered emergency care).