Follows an orphaned teenage girl, an aging magician, a lunatic scientist, a Victorian occult detective, and the stalwart sidekick, Joe Golem-a man whose strange dreams hint of a history he has forgotten-as they struggle for the fate of an alternate 1970s lower Manhattan. In this vision, lower Manhattan sank into the water during a catastrophic earthquake in 1925, leaving those unwilling or unable to abandon it to make a new life in streets turned to canals.