Bayport Neighborhoods

[Well - good intentions or not, I have fallen behind - but not fatally! Let's get back at it, shall we?]

Bayport: let's pickup more or less where we left last time. This time, a quick (I hope) tour of Bayport's neighborhoods.

Imagine ourselves coming in from the west, into harbor. What do you see? in the distance,north and south, you see hills, but between, you see mostly flatland, with the city itself in the middle. The city as such is bounded on the north and south by canals and fortresses, but these run through fairly low land - maybe artificial hills for the forts. On the north side, however, there is a hill rising fairly sharply a couple hundred yards from the northern canal and a few hundred yards inland. The hill is fairly high in itself, but stands out prominently in the surrounding flat. It runs a good mile or so north-south - about half the total width of the city. The rest of the city is mostly built on lowlands, a lot of it reclaimed from the sea. (And surrounded by dikes and canals, to protect it from the sea and rivers.) All of it - the hill and lowlands - is covered with houses,most fairly old, ut a lot of newer, usually shabbier houses, especially in the south. Right now, let's take a quick tour of the major areas of the town.

1. The Old Waterfront:

The area by the sea, in the north, is the old Waterfront This is the first area to be reclaimed from the sea, a couple hundred years ago. It's bordered by the Magnus Canal in the north and east (where it breaks the waterfront from the higher ground beyond) and the Grand Canal in the south. This is the old port, and still a thriving seaport. The edge of the land is what you would expect - docks, warehouses, boathouses, workshops. Around it are the places catering to the sea trade - more warehouses and workshops and storage, plus inns and taverns and bars and restaurants, some shabby, but some quite posh - and much more besides. It is a mixed bag: large guild houses, ship owners’ houses, trade houses, commodity exchanges, banks, expensive hotels; innumerable dives, bars and flophouses, houses of ill repute, gambling joints, packed tenements. Ship owners mix with laborers and beggars, thieves and merchants. It has always been like this - in these boom times, it is three times as full. The neighborhood is built around one or two broad streets, designed for transportation - Water Street especially, running north-south, and Main and Pine streets, running east-west. These are wide enough for wagons and traffic - they are connected by a warren of alleys and side streets. The large houses are usually on the large streets - the back streets and alleys are slums indeed. Most of the buildings are a mix of stone, brick, mud bases and timber tops - all materials are easily obtained in this area. Buildings are crammed in tights, tops over-leaning the streets, and in recent years many new structures have been erected on top of the old, a kind of vertical shanty town. It is, of course, a fire trap, but there is a lot of water close at hand - and windmills and other pumping devices scattered around that can save the city from the worst dangers of fire. (And of flood, which is equally terrifying here.) This land is all reclaimed, some of it landfill - it is shielded from the sea by dikes, which are very effective - but nothing is perfect. Heavy seas can top the dikes and put it all under water. There are underground structures here - tunnels, cellars - usually framed and bricked in, lined with stone - but all susceptible to flooding. There are many dangers here. That obviously includes the people - there is a lot of money in the waterfront district but it is cheek by jowl next to the thieves and beggars and clip joints, and the old, big money is sometimes as dishonest and ruthless as any pickpocket. This is the most dangerous part of town, the closest thing it has to a traditional thieves quarter - even if a lot of the thieves are in the employ of "honest" trading firms.

2. The Old Downtown:

This is is on the east side of Magnus Canal, along the base of the hill. This the oldest part of town, where the early villages were built (they were waterfront before the canals were built and land drained), and where the first pieces of a town were built. This is a typical medieval town - narrow streets, houses built close to one another, stone and brick below, wood tops, jettied floors and so on. This is all above sea level, and is quite stable, physically. It is dominated by three main north-west streets: Canal street runs at the edge of the canal, a wide street, built for traffic, with room for wagons, and lined with warehouses and shops, more like the waterfront than the rest of the downtown area. East of this, the hill rises steeply, 20-30 feet, some of it quite sheer (though there are houses clinging to the edge). Broad street runs along the top of this ledge - this is the business center fo the hwole town, lined with shops and good hotels and banks and large trading houses and so on. The hill continues beyond Broad street, through an area that holds many of the towns large institutions - cathedrals, the university, and so on. Center street, near the top of the hill, is the demarcation for the downtown - it is more residential than the places lower down, but still features many inns and taverns, shops and stores and so on. This neighborhood generally is more prosperous and respectable than the waterfront, but it is, still a commercial district, and Bayport is a seaport - and a boom town - so it shares much of the atmosphere of the waterfront, albeit more respectably,and with better guards. It is easy for almost anyone to move through this part of town - thieves, adventurers and the like - there is ample employment for such characters here, there are many sketchy forces in the area - the thieves' guild is active, and as everywhere, the line between honest and dishonest commerce is blurry and often ignored. Still: this is the center of the city, the respectable center of the city. It is well protected by the town guards, at least well patrolled. There is a lot of pressure to expand the new population into this area - indeed, many of the old houses near the canal (row houses, town houses and the like) have been turned into tenements - but there is also resistance. Above Broad street there are places that have been opened to the newcomers - but also places where the old families have refused - and fight back against anyone who tries to turn an old house into a tenement. This creates a lot of tension. This creates a fair amount of violence at times.

Physically, this district is built on the side of the hill, steep in some places, less so in others. It is,though, an area dominated by large a number of large buildings - guild houses, churches, large private residences, the university, and so on. The regular buildings are also probably larger than in the waterfront - though the same style: stone/brick for a floor, then (usually) wooden upper floors, often jettied over the street. This part of town also features fairly significant few underground structures - a well made sewer and drainage system; tunnels, pipes, cellars and so on, not all of them well documented. There are large crypts under the city; during some of the past wars, refuges were dug under the city, some secretly, some less so - some have been sealed up; some are still connected to th sewers or the known underground. It is complicated.

3. The Old Hills:

This is the area at the top of the ridge, east of Center street. High Street and Ridge street are the main streets up here - High running more or less on the crest, and Ridge running on the edge of the steep drop to the east. This is a very old part of town, the first expansion of the ancient village, originally a place for small farms and estates. It shows its past - larger houses, many of them all stone, separate, sometimes even walled in, with small yards and fields and orchards. These old houses aren't entirely free of the doubling population of the city - many of them have been subdivided into tenements and rooming houses and hotels and taverns - but not as many as below Center street. There are also a number of old estates that are owned by rich merchants or companies, who have turned their outbuildings into factories or shops, or barracks for their workers and soldiers - this cause s a fair amount of distress among the old timers. Still - this is fairly safe, maintains as much of the illusion of the old ways as they can, the idea of a genteel neighborhood outside a bustling port city. But this is maintained at great cost, and not very well - and often by having private mercenaries patrolling the place, harassing anyone who doesn’t seem to belong. There is also the simple fact that even the rich people living on this hill owe their wealth to the trade of the city - they are part of the less reputable places, like it or not. Given that the richest people in town these days are not always the most ethical - there can be plenty of excitement up here.

5. The New waterfront:

Now we move south again, south of the Grand Canal, and split in half by the Harbor Canal. The canals and extensive dikes in this area were completed in the early 1500s, and the land south of the canal basically constructed fro scratch. This area is laid out on clean grids and dominated by row houses, some of the stone/wood construction used in the older parts of town, but others made all of wood. Once this was respectable and quiet - but it has filled up since the boom started, and is now a fairly rough part of town. The area is dominated by the port on the west, and by the Marina, in the middle, opening off the north side of the Harbor canal - a large anchorage, generally used for smaller craft, but itself a very busy waterfront. South of the Harbor canal is another large area, a shipyard, where most of the city's ship building occurs. The shipyard, in particular, gives the area around it a more stable, working class atmosphere - it is less transient than the old waterfront, or the new waterfront by the sea. The area between the canals, then, tends to be more dangerous, with plenty of vice to go around.

6. The Outer lowlands:

This refers to the areas south of the Grand Canal, and inland from the Marina, as well as everything inside the Fort Canals that ring the city. This area is very mixed - much of it was just drained marshland before the boom, though these areas have been developed since - though usually small,flimsy wooden structures, built as fast as possible. Indeed, much of this area could be called a slum - at least a shantytown. There are, however, other kinds of structures in this area - before the boom, there were farms and factories out here - obnoxious ones like tanneries and breweries, as well as mills of various sorts. There are large groups of windmills out here - used to pump out the drained land, used to power mills and so on. As people moved into the area,it created tension, competition for the land - a number of windmills have been taken over by people looking for housing, sometimes legally, sometimes squatters. This creates tension - and the city itself is nervous about who is here, as the canals and dikes and windmills are essential tot he survival of the city itself. (Especially these low lying areas.)

There are similar areas north of the hill - though these tend to be built on land that was in fact land before the drainage process started. This is an even more important area for wind mills - many of which line the northwestern highland, where they get the full benefit of the sea breezes. In this part of town, the mills are often connected to the underground - sewers and drainage tunnels - and can be the entry point for dangerous creatures coming into the city. This kind of intrusion is a source of great anxiety, and creates plenty of employment for adventurers willing to track down monsters in the sewers.

We can end there. Coming up - Demographics! some important locations and landmarks! and hopefully, a map!