Manchester, New Hampshire: The City

The Granite Setting is primarily in Manchester, New Hampshire. It is known as the "Queen City" and also is the largest city in the state. It is an industrial town on the banks of the Merrimack River and was known, in the latter 19th and earlier 20th Centuries as a center for textiles and similar industrial activities.

Recession. overseas competition from the Pacific Rim, and domestic competition from the Carolinas took away much of the glory of the city, leaving behind empty factory buildings and displaced workers trying to eek out a living in the wake of the departures. A modest prosperity returned with the banking and light industrial expansions of the 1980's and 1990's, only partially marred by the banking collapse in Boston during the S&L crisis.

Where our story picks up is the year 2000, when a combination of national welfare reforms and innovative governmental financing reforms were pushed through the State Legistlature along with "value added" taxation on those things that were taxable by state law. The same year, a devastating run on landslide took half of the main island of Hawaii into the Pacific Ocean, causing tidal waves that wiped out vast portions of the industry of the Pacific Rim. This brought demand for certain types of textiles and advanced fibers back to the Northeast during a period when the rest of the United States seems to be poised at the edge of civil, social, and racial meltdown.

Manchester itself is a mixed bag of typical New England City, with old brownstones, colonial mansions, and Victorian era "Painted Ladies" on treelined streets. In other places the dilapidated buildings have been cleared away to make room for the highrises representing "Progress." In the older ares of town and the projects, life is more crowded, more squalid, and more dangerous.

We have made a serious attempt to bring the feeling of the actual city to our game grid and are providing weblinks so that our players may try to better acquaint themselves with the city and thereby come to enjoy the game more, by feeling more in tune with city itself.