Time-travel using AI. Click to zoom.
Morning: Boarding House on Vine Street
You wake on a thin straw mattress in a cramped third-floor room shared with five other men. The December cold seeps through gaps in the window frame. Outside, the dawn breaks gray over the city, and already you hear the clatter of drays on cobblestones, the distant whistle of steamboats on the Ohio River. The landlady shouts up the stairs that there’s coffee and cornbread for a penny. Your fellow boarders—a German immigrant, two Irish laborers, a colored porter, and an old man who coughs through the night—are pulling on their boots. The room smells of unwashed bodies, coal smoke, and the privy out back. You have thirty-seven cents to your name.
Fifth Street Market
The market is already roaring with activity. Butchers hang pork carcasses from iron hooks—Cincinnati slaughters a million hogs a year, and the city reeks of it.
