WAREHOUSE DISTRICT
WAREHOUSE DISTRICT
History
Although much of Hub City’s welfare-- even during its earliest incarnations-- based itself on trade from the sea, Hub City’s Warehouse District did not really come into its own until the shipping booms of the mid to late 19th and early 20th century. For a good portion of the city’s growth period, ships bringing import were moored to makeshift docks at the mouth of the St. Mary River, and their goods would be offloaded to flatboats for further travel up the river to the actual city proper.
Part of this was by design from the city founders. Hub City’s inland location made the city slightly better-protected from coastal raiders and storm damage than some other coastal settlements. Also missing from Hub City was the outbreaks of diseases and the general stink that were associated with pre-refrigeration storage of goods and the lack of disposal of goods that had gone... well, bad. So in other words, Hub City was quite happy with the inland settlement, and thought nothing of having merchants settle up their accounts at the coast to have their goods barged up the St. Mary River, or driven overland. Fort Grayson, in fact, was first a by-the-way outpost called Grayson’s Rest (after Micah Grayson), which marked the halfway point between the coast and Hub City before Midtown began to crop up.
By the mid 18th century, with equipment like the steamboat and railroad becoming more and more commonplace, it was becoming apparent that offloading to barges was not a particularly efficient way to do business. Before long, storehouses and small businesses were beginning to crop up nearer to the sea, new docks were being built, and Hub City began to grow into the shipping giant it would be in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Whaling grew and died, canneries slowly moved inland, and the Warehouse District turned from a few shanty docks into a thriving industry, importing textiles, mineral ore and raw material.
The only unfortunate side effect of all this growth was that not everywhere in the Warehouse District could keep up with the growth of the major money-makers. And so today, while the Warehouse District has many storage facilities that are up-to-date and computerized, there are warehouses and plants that have fallen to near-ruin and are constantly skirting EPA regulations. Many of these are in and around an area of the Warehouse District known simply-- for some time-- as "The Shades." Once a red-light district known as the place for the rough and tumble sailors to gather while on shore, it never quite kept up with the progressive state of most of Hub City, and was always considered a sort of black hole. Today, it's still one of Hub City's seediest places, and gang violence and far worse horror stories seem to crop up there on weekly basis.
Although much of the Warehouse District, like the rest of Hub City, is a progressive, forward district, it is probably one of the more rougher-edge districts in the whole city. Lined with wharfs, docks and dockside plants and warehouses up and down its borders, its people are largely blue-collar and the district on the whole is lower income than most. Because of the amount of readily available work-for-hire, the Warehouse district is one of the most ethnically diverse of Hub City, boasting fairly large African-American, Irish-American and Eastern-European-American neighborhoods that have remained such since the turn of the 20th century, when immigrants tended to centralize themselves. There has been a recent influx of Hispanic-Americans to the Warehouse district, as well, and it's hardly surprising to see a Polish family store that has been in the family for generations, next door to a new bilingual grocer. Most Warehouse District citizens are justifiably proud of their hard-working, dirt-under-the-fingernails status, and that often breeds mistrust of businessmen, real-estate speculators, white-collar types, and to some extent, costumed heroes and police officers, among others.
As such, the tightly-packed neighborhoods and crammed old storage houses of the Warehouse District tend to attract a great deal more street crime than some districts. Drug deals are fairly common in the miles of warehouses and docks, and rumors have trickled around about slave rings running in some of the seedier docks. In Little Orient, some shops and even one or two entire neighborhoods still pay a tithe to the protection racquets of the Asian Mafia, and even among the ethnically centralized neighborhoods, gang warfare is hardly an uncommon occurence. Although many 'super' villains inhabit and work out of the Warehouse District, due to the lax security of some docks and warehouses, there is very seldom 'superhuman' crime cropping up in the majority of the Warehouse District, as there isn't all that much profit in it.
The Warehouse District breaks down into the following sections:
THE WHARFS (6)
While it is nowhere near the bustling center of commerce it once was during the height of canneries and shipping in the mid-20th Century, the Wharfs are certainly not Main Street in a ghost town, even now. Hub City has a thriving import industry, and a great deal of the less 'technological' or 'stylish' imports that come by sea make their way into town through the Warehouse District, namely, the Wharfs. If Coastway, Noveauburg and the Northshore District deal in the higher-class 'desserts' of Hub City's future-forward industries, the Wharfs deal in the meat and potatoes. Chemicals, raw materials, foodstuffs, items to be stored, and other, less elegant imports tend to be the norm of what is processed through the Wharfs on any given day. Some areas in Hub City survive based on their commerce and marketability; the Wharf would very likely thrive even without housing or the few stores that are scattered throughout it, provided ships could still dock there.
Much of what makes its way through the Wharfs ends up in the immense array of warehouses, storage facilities and processing plants that take up the greater part of the Wharfs' area. Smokestacks still jut to the sky over the seascape, belching out clouds of smoke that make the Warehouse District one of the dirtier sections of Hub City. Although housing exists in scattered pockets in the Wharfs, most of those are at best low-income. Even the gritty blue-collar workers in the Wharfs tend to come from other sections of the Warehouse District. One of the two surviving public middle schools in the Wharf was closed last year, during budget cuts, and it made very little difference to most people. People don't tend to live in the Wharfs unless they have no other choice.
Not every bit of business
that comes through the Wharfs is vital to Hub City's vitality, however.
Besides unsubstantiated rumors of a slave ring, the police that patrol the
Wharfs are all but positive that black market sales of drugs, illegal weapons
and other accessories survive in the Wharfs, despite the HCPD's best attempts to
break up any such rings.
HABINGTON POINT (7)
Habington Point was once named North Point, and represented the northernmost tip of Hub City for the better part of the city's existence. Much of the land around North Point was purchased by the Habington family, a well-to-do family in the 18th century.
FORT GRAYSON (8)
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"THE SHADES" (9)
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LITTLE ORIENT (10)
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RIVERVIEW (11)
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