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Jokertown is a fictional neighborhood in the Wild Cards anthology series.

In the Wild Cards universe, it is an area of New York City corresponding loosely to the real world Bowery region. After the wild card virus was released over New York in 1946, many jokers, those deformed by the virus, began to filter into this largely abandoned area, which was nearly depopulated in the wake of the outbreak. During the remainder of the '40's and '50's and into the early '60's, the jokers went unseen, living in isolation, shame, and abject poverty in the former Bowery. The denizens of Jokertown wore masks and other disguises on the streets to hide their deformities, and no nats came into this neighborhood except to beat up a few "freaks" for kicks.

Starting in the mid-1960's, however, Jokertown began to become a true home for its citizens, developing its own customs. A number of jokers started their own businesses. Nat tourists started coming to gawk at the natives and partake of the seamier side of life, often "blending in" by wearing cheap dime-store masks that fooled nobody. Most importantly, Dr. Tachyon returned and opened the Blythe van Renssaeler Memorial Clinic, colloquially referred to as the Jokertown Clinic, to treat the various, often exotic, medical needs of the poverty-stricken jokers.

New York's Jokertown is the single largest Joker community in the Wild Cards world. It is the home of the Jokertown Clinic, the Church of Jesus Christ, Joker (home of Father Squid), the Crystal Palace (a bar belonging to information broker Chrysalis), the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum (where the largest collection of wild card artifacts - such as the Turtle's old shells and the Astronomer's skeleton - are on display), several tourist-oriented clubs such as Freakers and The Funhouse, and some very non-tourist places like Squisher's Basement. Police presence is usually limited and scarce (unless a nat tourist is involved), and the jokers who live here have learned to watch out for themselves.

The criminal community operates in Jokertown mostly unrestricted, held in check only by rival gangs and the occasional wild card vigilante, such as the Oddity or Black Shadow. Major joker gangs include the Werewolves, Cannibal Headhunters, and Demon Princes. Adjoining Chinatown on one side, Asian gangs such as the Immaculate Egrets also exert pressure on Jokertown. From the 1980s onward, the Italian Mafia is little in evidence New York's underworld. Instead, a fusion of Asian and joker street gangs under the umbrella title of Shadow Fists came to power following a bloody gang war.

In real life[]

The neighborhood of Manhattan known as the Bowery was a slum district since at least the time of the civil war, and by the 1890s it was infamous for cheap taverns, brothels, and flophouses. This extended beyond the 1940s in real life, though in the Wild Cards universe history diverged after 1946. It was essentially Manhattan's Skid Row - an infamous slum district in Los Angeles, which came to be a byword for slums in general. In the immediate aftermath of Wild Card Day most Jokers ended up congregating there because it was the absolute bottom of the social ladder and nowhere better would have them.

Physically, the real life "Bowery" district is a hazily defined border region in the middle of lower Manhattan set between more well-defined and notable neighborhoods: it is bounded to the southwest by Chinatown, to the west by Little Italy, to the northwest by Greenwich Village, to the north and northeast by East Village, and to the east by the Lower East Side. To the south are mostly dockside areas and bridge off-ramps such as Two Bridges. Officially the core of the "Bowery" neighborhood is Bowery St. itself, though this also forms the western edge of the neighborhood, and with spillover from Chinatown. In the first Wild Cards book, Hunter S. Thompson defines Jokertown as roughly consisting of Bowery St. and Chrystie St. (which is the next street to the east). Several major joker establishments are located as far south on Bowery as Chatham Square, which is the southern terminus of Bowery St. (and the border with several other neighborhoods). The northern limit of Jokertown is unclear but locations have been mentioned up to Broome St. and (one block north of that) Delancey St. In the third Wild Cards book, the corner of Bowery and Hester St. is referred to as "the heart of Jokertown" - which is one block up from Chatham Square and two blocks down from Broome. Jokertown extends beyond this down to South Street on the East River, where the Jokertown Clinic is located.

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