Iron Point

“Hellish desolation” adequately sums up the composition of the Iron Point neighbourhood, and it’s a striated Hell not unlike that of Paradise Lost, with the first circle abutting the Purgatory of the Yards and the ninth circle dragging The Narrows into its environs. With a minimum of residential space, most of Iron Point is industrial. It’s all a stinking metal-and-concrete sprawl steadily clawing its way up the slopes towards Blackridge, with nothing higher than three stories except a few sterile office parks closer to the water. A handful of dive bars scatter the area, where beer is cheaper than fresh water.
It chugs down copious amounts of raw materials alongside a steady stream of blue-collar workers from the nearby residential districts. Its many workshops and factories, each louder than the other, churn and grind and fuse parts together, and then regurgitate them over to another facility for the next step of the production line. Its tall chimneys and winding pipelines spew out fumes, smoke, and waste, while congested roads slowly push out tired employees and draw in fresh ones. The entire district is one massive, lumbering, industrial engine, with those that work there just cogs in the machine.
Most of the time, the air is thick with the smells of choking chemicals, though other times it might be a strong aroma of tires burning or the nose-searing perfume of acrid smoke and steam. It’s all grey. It’s all dirty. Cranes loom. Haze grips the air. Everything is steel, asphalt, rubber—and a lot of it suffers from a sheen of dark oil and a peppering of black grit.
During the day, the places swarm with people—workers in yellow hats or protective gear hauling beams or cleaning out chemical tanks or pouring ladles of liquid fire into a cast iron pit. At night, the lights come on, and the whole place is cast into a hazy orange or jaundice-yellow glow—a hellish, bleary light that washes out every star in the sky. Even then, while the ranks are cut by almost two-thirds, the district is never without its workers—men and women doing endless scutwork.
As one moves down the ridge towards the edge of the harbour, they are greeted by a sea of lights. Mercantile freighters are docked here, each one a small galaxy of fixed and blinking lights. Something is always being loaded or unloaded, it seems. Unaccountable quantities of commodity come in and are shipped out of this port every day, not all on record. Shady deals are closed with a handshake; money then exchanges hands, goods get loaded onto the back of a lorry, and off you go. This godforsaken land at the edge of the neighbourhood is the perfect venue to conduct illegal business, and many mobsters and gang leaders have sent their enemies to swim with the fish off these piers.
As one moves closer to the smell of the sea comes across the concrete like a dirty sailor. It carries with it the scents of fish and gulls, foodstuffs from around the world and other, stranger commodities, all of which mixes with the choking chemical fumes and reeking garbage from the nearby plants to create something that would cause even the toughest to hurl.
Meanwhile, dockworkers and crewmen yammer at one another, cussing and cursing, sometimes in English, sometimes not. Just outside of a small dive bar, a fistfight breaks out. No one pays it any mind.