So that’s the story of my grand adventure. I’ve certainly had other adventures, and I’d be glad to tell you about them if you’re interested, but unlike a certain chain-smoking London street wizard, I don’t save the world every other day.
So what actually happened, there at the end?
La Guardia would have been a match for either Bill the Butcher or Bill Tweed – the spirit of New York’s violence and the spirit of its corruption – but not both at the same time.
So Fiorello LaGuardia took me back to his office in the City Hall at the center of New York City’s soul.
It’s a weird day when you can write that sentence.
It was a corner office, as you might expect – or you might expect if you live New York, anyway – and its windows each looked out over a different vista of the City, views that changed each time you looked out the window. First look: Civic Center, like you might see from City Hall in the real world. Second Look: Central Park, looking up from the South, you can see all the way to the Sheep Meadow before it becomes just a mass of trees. Third look: looking out over Batter Park and the Harbor, Lady Liberty lifting her torch in the distance. Fourth look: Times Square at night, showing off its brightest colors.
And so on. This really is the Heart of New York. But then, New York has a lot of hearts.
So last time, I tried to deliver an eviction notice to Bill the Butcher, New York’s personal spirit of violence, on behalf of Boss Bill Tweed, New York’s spirit of greed. It’s exactly as ridiculous as it sounds and it was not my idea. Much to my entire lack of surprise, Bill the Butcher wasn’t having it and kicked me straight out of his headquarters in the Five Points and into the Collect Pond, which was the same place but about 100 years further into the past. Frankly, I counted myself lucky. Still, to get where I needed to be, I would have needed to take two horse carts, a carriage, a streetcar, and a subway, which would have taken time I just don’t have.
So I tapped my emergency stash. I used the power from a gold double-eagle coin from Bill’s time to power my way up through all those layers of New York City’s memory. It got me where I needed to go, but as will happen when you have an emergency and have to spend whatever it takes, I’m completely tapped out. The coin is still worth millions in the physical world, but it won’t buy me a cup of coffee here in the City’s Soul.
Previously on The Economancer, my morning commute was hijacked into the Soul of New York City by Boss Tweed, the City’s own personal spirit of greed. He tricked me into accepting a job to evict Bill the Butcher, the closest thing the City has to a war god, from his home in the memory of the Five Points. Unfortunately, since he basically kidnapped me, I didn’t have a chance to properly equip myself for the job.
So now here I am in the Five Points, facing Bill the Butcher with my good luck charm, a gold double-eagle coin from his day, which was worth twenty dollars in his day (which of course bought a lot more than twenty dollars does now), is worth a lot more today, and in my hands is basically a nuke, which is why I carry something that valuable around with me.
I’ve just given him his eviction notice. He’s just metaphorically torn it up and thrown it back in my face.
Bill the Butcher’s place was probably something he wanted to have when he was alive. Powerful ghosts tend to do that to any spiritual real estate they control. That made me think that the human man William Poole was in there somewhere, and not just the NYC version of a god of war. He could still want things.
It was huge, the size of a modern warehouse. Probably too big to exist in the Five Points in the mid-19th century. It was a combined slaughterhouse and butcher shop, and I don’t think I need to go into any more detail than that. It neither looked nor smelled pretty.
Bill is hanging out near the door with a few of his buddies, all sitting on barrels and boxes and rickety wooden chairs. I don’t need to guess or ask which one of them is Bill the Butcher. I recognize him the same way I recognized Boss Tweed, which is the same way they recognize me, for that matter: there’s a sense of power that you just can’t mistake for anything else. Some of the “men” in this group are ghosts, while others are just spirits that cling to a predator like Bill like they were remoras. Bill doesn’t look any different than the others, just a 19th century working man in a leather apron and a handlebar mustache, but just beneath the surface is a thing made of hate and blades.
I took another bus downtown to the Five Points. Of course, when you’re down in this layer of the Soul of the City, a “bus” is actually a horse-drawn trolley. Oddly enough, it didn’t take a whole lot longer than a bus with a motor would have taken. Travel isn’t about distance from Point A to Point B here.
As if to drive that point home, we pass through a Beatnik-era East Village and a 1920’s Little Italy to get there. I mean, how does that even happen? Little Italy and the Five Points occupied a lot of the same physical…never mind.
Bill the Butcher is a lot like Boss Tweed himself. There was a real person by that name once. In Gangs of New York, they called him “Bill Cutting”, which is juuuuust a bit too on-the-nose. I mean, it’s like calling the evil family in a certain famous chainsaw-based horror franchise “Sawyer” or “Hewitt”. The real person was named William Poole.
Interesting factoid: both real person and fictional character are actual, buy-your-brisket-from-‘em butchers, in addition to the other kind.
But even more than Tweed, the legend has almost nothing to do with the person, and it’s almost impossible to know if the human man William Poole has anything to do with the thing that now wears the name “Bill the Butcher”.
“Gentlemen!” he says to the things circling in the air above. “I need a moment alone with Miss Jessalyn, please.”
Then the things are just men in suits, filing out the door. Some of them are leering at me as they go, while others are just blank-faced. That’s one way to tell which of them used to be human and which never were: the ones who used to be human can feel things other than greed.
Tweed sits down behind his desk, sets his axe down on the floor, and leans it up against the desk within easy reach.
I step through the door into a Tammany Hall that never existed.
The real Tammany Hall was a place where rich and influential men met to discuss political and economic strategy. Those men might not have actually been very respectable or refined, but they tried to look it.
This Tammany Hall is a parody of hoopty-do politics out of political cartoons and old movies. It looks more like the inside of a barn than the marble building outside. Straw and sawdust is spread on the wooden floor. There are brass spittoons here and there (okay, the real Tammany Hall probably had those), but nobody bothers to use them. A man in a cheap suit stands on a rickety wooden stage, hoarsely haranguing the crowd, but I can’t hear him over the shouting and laughing and cheering. The crowd includes men from every social class, high society to roustabout, but they are all men, and they’re all white. By the standards of the 1870’s, not today. Not an Italian among them, and very few Irishmen.
Unlike outside, they’re all in-period. I’m getting close to the center of Boss Tweed’s power, his literal comfort zone, so of course it looks like the time and place when he was most comfortable.
