Prohibition

Prohibition is not presented as a fully narrated historical period, but as a remembered condition whose effects remain embedded in New York City. Its decisive significance lies in the way illegal commerce produced concealed tunnels and private networks that later become useful to forces operating beneath the city’s visible institutions.

Criminal Wealth and Hidden Architecture

Setrakian’s investigation into the property associated with Gabriel Bolivar leads him to the history of a bootlegger and smuggler who made a fortune during Prohibition. The house had been raided repeatedly, yet authorities reportedly seized no more than a pint of illicit liquor on any occasion. Its protection was attributed to a network of tunnels and underground breweries, turning the building into more than a residence: it was a structure designed to frustrate surveillance and preserve clandestine activity.

Those tunnels were later expanded to accommodate underground subway lines. The historical account therefore links Prohibition-era criminal enterprise to the modern city’s subterranean infrastructure. What began as concealment for illegal alcohol became part of a larger underground system, allowing the past to survive materially beneath New York City rather than remaining only a matter of archival memory.

The Property’s Later Uses

Gabriel Bolivar purchased the property expressly because it had been an old bootlegger’s residence. He was also attracted by the claim that an earlier owner had been a Satanist who held black masses on a rooftop altar around the turn of the twentieth century. Bolivar renovated the building and combined it with the neighboring structure over the course of a year, creating one of the largest private residences in New York.

The property’s successive histories accumulate rather than replace one another. A site associated with occult ritual becomes a bootlegger’s fortified home, then a lavish modern residence connected to Bolivar. Prohibition supplies the crucial middle layer: it gives the building a practical history of secrecy, expansion, and underground access that helps explain why it can function as a concealed stronghold in the present crisis.

From Historical Memory to Present Threat

The history of Prohibition is discovered while Abraham Setrakian, Ephraim Goodweather, and Nora Martinez investigate the property and try to understand the infrastructure surrounding it. Setrakian’s visit to the New York Historical Society produces the information about the bootlegger, the raids, the hidden breweries, and the tunnel system. Nora’s findings confirm that Bolivar deliberately chose the property for its earlier criminal associations and that its renovation had enlarged its private scale.

This research changes the meaning of the building. Its secrecy is no longer an eccentric architectural feature or an isolated relic of organized crime. The old tunnels connect the property to the city beneath it, where hidden movement and concealed occupation are possible. Prohibition thus operates in the narrative as historical foreshadowing: an earlier underground economy has left behind the routes and spaces through which a new, far more dangerous power can work.

A Pattern of Concealment and Control

The era also belongs to a broader pattern in which official authority repeatedly fails to control what it cannot fully see. During the present outbreak, Ephraim Goodweather warns Everett Barnes that the crisis is approaching a worldwide pandemic and an extinction event, while arguing that New York City might still be contained by sealing bridges and exploiting the rule that Vampires cannot cross bodies of moving water. The proposed response depends on understanding geography, circulation, and hidden routes—precisely the kinds of systems that the Prohibition history makes legible.

The same subterranean logic appears elsewhere in the city. Vasiliy Fet identifies the abandoned old City Hall station beneath New York City Hall Park as part of the city’s rat-infested underground infrastructure and insists that everything connects underground in one way or another. In this context, Prohibition is not merely background history. It is one layer in a recurring urban structure: illicit activity, vermin, and Vampires all use spaces that official systems overlook or cannot easily seal.

Historical Echo and Narrative Significance

Prohibition gives the novel a material image of history that does not disappear when laws change. Its bootleggers are gone, but their tunnels, breweries, evasions, and accumulated wealth remain available for later occupants. The era therefore links social disorder to architecture: when power is forced underground, it does not necessarily vanish; it may build durable passages beneath the surface.

That legacy sharpens the contrast between visible institutions and hidden networks. Authorities debate jurisdiction and control while the city’s concealed infrastructure continues to connect properties, stations, nests, and lairs. Prohibition supplies the historical precedent for this subterranean world, making the later outbreak feel less like an intrusion into an orderly city than the latest force to inherit the city’s long-established habits of secrecy.