Lowtown
Lowtown is the outermost area within Boomtown’s walls. It is separated from Midtown by the city’s second wall and bleeds into the Annex through the incomplete outer wall.
OUTER LOWTOWN
Near the gap, the buildings and streets are not in much better shape than those of the Annex. The wooden and brick buildings are crowded, the cracked and potholed streets are restricted. It’s as if they’ve stuffed as much of themselves inside as they can before the wall is completed.
We see a trainyard where men from the Annex do hard labor at least as early as sunrise. The smokestacks of industrial machines smog up the sky. Laundry and electricity lines run from building to building on the apartment blocks. Vendors line the already crowded streets selling breakfasts and cheap trinkets the working slummers can afford.
The gates leading from this blended area into the city proper are heavily guarded, situated as they are between the fortified area of the city and the rest of the planet. Papers are required to cross this threshold.
In Interlocation, we see an establishment called Z’s, outside of which two scantily clad employees appear to catcall Ricky.
INNER LOWTOWN
Though the area is still out of step with the modernity we see near the Black Pyramid, the conditions improve the deeper one gets into Lowtown. Streets become cleaner. Storefronts gain some appeal. A statue of The Stranger sits in a pleasant courtyard. The general hygiene of the populace improves.
Holman’s Press, the nondescript print shop where Ricky apprentices, sits tucked away on one of Lowtown’s winding streets.
When Ricky is looking for marks to whom he can safely distribute his pamphlet, he identifies Workhouse Laborers who “tested out of Academy.” Boomtown has an internal labor force in addition to the slummers here on a work pass.