Old Town
Pre-Collapse Identity
Chinatown was the oldest in North America — generations of community banking, dim sum parlors, and herbal medicine shops packed into narrow streets that climbed steep hills. North Beach was the Italian quarter, the Beat Generation's home, and Nob Hill was where railroad barons built mansions to look down on everyone else.
Current Character
Old Town is the Sprawl's living memory — the one sector where pre-Cascade architecture still stands in density, where the streets are too narrow for corporate demolition vehicles and the hills too steep for efficient redevelopment. Good Fortune Financial occupies the heart of Chinatown from the Fortune Pavilion on Grant Avenue, weaponizing the community banking traditions that built these streets into a predatory lending empire that reaches into every desperate corner of the Sprawl. The neighborhood resists corporate homogeny not through ideology but through geography and stubbornness.
Terrain & Atmosphere
Steep hills dominate — Nob Hill rises to 115 meters, and the narrow streets between buildings create natural canyons that predate the bay floor's artificial ones by a century. Dense pre-Cascade architecture crowds every block: fire escapes tangle overhead, signage layers upon signage in three languages, and alleys lead to alleys that lead to places that don't appear on any map. Every block is a fortress if you know the terrain.
Corporate Presence
Good Fortune Financial's influence radiates from the Fortune Pavilion — a narrow tower squeezed between historic buildings, its LED facades displaying real-time financial data where prayer flags once hung. Their control is financial rather than territorial: they don't need armed guards when they have contracts, and defaulting on a Good Fortune loan triggers consequences enforced through social structures older than the Sprawl itself.
Key Locations
The Fortune Pavilion (Good Fortune HQ), The G-Nook (hidden speakeasy and information broker haven), The Insomnia Wards (Tenderloin-adjacent district of clinics, stim dealers, and night workers that never closes), Parish Prime (syncretic temples and digital cathedrals on Nob Hill).
Sensory Detail
The smell of frying oil and synthetic ginger competes with incense drifting from Parish Prime's temples. The sound is human — haggling, argument, the clatter of mah-jongg tiles in back rooms, prayer chants broadcast from rooftop speakers. Neon signage in Cantonese, English, and machine-pidgin casts red and gold light across wet stone steps.
Daily Life
In Old Town, everyone owes someone something, and Good Fortune always remembers the balance.