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.
I get off the bus in the Five Points, mid-19th Century. The buildings are ramshackle wooden tenements that probably burned down every week or so. I wouldn’t be surprised if a fire started while I was here, because that’s what’s in the City’s memory, and I’m just having that kind of day. They look like they’re ready to fall down any minute regardless.
Everything stinks. It’s high summer, and the smell of sweat, cesspools, animals, frying food, and rotting garbage gets all the way up into my sinuses where it’s going to linger for days. Because again, that’s what the City remembers. That and bitter deep winter. I’m not sure if I got lucky or unlucky.
Someone’s pumping water at the corner pump, and it’s coming out brown. Yay cholera.
Back when this place was real, cobblestones were for the rich parts of town, so the streets are filled with mud and worse. I’m glad I wear sneakers on the train and change my shoes in the office, so it isn’t my good shoes that are getting ruined, but this isn’t doing my clothes any favors either.
Hard-eyed people watch me as I walk through the ironically-named Paradise Square. Back in their day, they probably wouldn’t have known what to make of me. I’m wearing a pantsuit, after all. Still, as a woman and someone who clearly has a bit of money in my pockets, it would have been dangerous for me to be here alone. The gangs back then were Irish and American Nativist (not to be confused with Native American), and they had names that might sound silly today like the Dead Rabbits or the Plug Uglies, but they were still gangs. The first gangs in America, which is why they’re still in the City’s memory. And they ruled the Five Points.
I’m not too worried, though. There aren’t too many ghosts or other former humans here – things with enough free will to do something stupid. Would you want to spend your afterlife here? Other than that, there are a few spirits of violence, fire elementals, disease spirits, cockroach totems, and the like, but most of the “people” here little more than scenery.
And ALL of them take one look at me and know better than to mess with me right now. Yeah, I’m an economancer who’s just a few blocks from Wall Street. Try your luck and see what happens. There’s only one entity in this whole neighborhood who’s any kind of threat to me. So of course that’s the one that I’m going to meet with a message he’s not going to like.
That’s what I’m thinking about as I arrive at the one thing I’ve seen so far in this neighborhood that seems historically questionable. The sign on the door says “butcher shop”, but it’s huge. Like a livery stable…or a slaughterhouse.
The butcher shop of Bill the Butcher.