Buildings: Entrances to Shadow City
South Street Seaport
- 279 Water St.
- 273 Water St.
- 2 White Street
- 139 Green Street
- 326 Spring St.
- Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral
(On the first floor of this building is what’s said to be the oldest restaurant in Manhattan. In the 19th century there were rooms for rent on the upper floors. It was here that hundreds of innocent travelers were robbed of their valuables by thieves who entered their rooms in the middle of the night through secret passageways connected to the Shadow City.)
(This was once a tavern owned by the infamous scoundrel Kit Burns. A huge pit in the basement of the building hosted regular “rat baiting” exhibitions in which specially trained dogs would fight to the death against hundreds of rats. Spectators would arrive through a passage that linked the basement to the Shadow City.)
Tribeca
(Since the day it was built almost 200 years ago, the shop on the ground floor of this building has always sold liquor—though now it only sells it in fancy glasses. During the 1850’s, a concealed dumbwaiter in the building’s basement was used to deliver refreshments to a popular Shadow City dancehall more than 60 feet beneath the street.)
SoHo & Nolita
(The entrance inside this building received a great deal of traffic during the years when the neighborhood that’s now called SoHo was the city’s red light district.)
(Rumored to have been built by a former slave in 1817 when the neighborhood was still swampland, this building eventually became the primary entrance to the Shadow City for violent neighborhood youth gangs such as The Spring Street Fencibles and the Boodle Gang.)
(The catacombs underneath this church were linked to the Shadow City in the 19th century. They’re also reputed to be haunted and are generally avoided by the Irregulars.)