Doom City was an underground district on planet Coruscant.[1]
Geography
Doom City was located about a hundred kilometers from the Ambassadorial Sector, beneath an area known as The Pits. A relatively well-known district, accessable from other areas of Galactic City by automatic subway or air taxi, its street frontages were covered in garish neon signage, which lit narrow lanes busy with streetwalkers and hawkers, while the air was heavy with loud music and a general smell of grease.[1]
The Black Hole was considered the best cantina in the district, and served as a meeting place for smugglers, mercenaries and bounty hunters. There were around one hundred and twenty-five other establishments in the district, with names like Chez Norric, Betelgeuse 23 and The Blurps, offering food and drink, sports on holoscreens, live dancing girls, and music of generally low quality; some had two or three rooms for hire, with resident hostesses. During the reign of the Galactic Empire, the Palladium bar was the base of the Borga the Hutt, who dominated the betting scene on Coruscant.[1]
There were also more conventional gaming establishments, combining noisy, colourful electronic and holographic games with activities such as slot machines and professional sabacc tables. These generally had long queues and charged entry fees.[1]
The shops of Doom City were said to sell anything and everything. Prices were variable, and negotiable, as the sellers were all to some degree pawnbrokers and fences - and would advance loans to buyers at the "modest" rate of 5% per day. Cynagard was a well-regarded Sullustan equipment-seller, while Weggit Self-Defence was a weapons shop.[1]
Somewhat different from the average Doom City boutique was Club 69, a sex shop which counted numerous members of the Coruscant élite among its clientel.[1]
Doom City also contained a spice market, a deceptively ordinary-looking area of street stalls in a quiet part of the district, where where traders openly sold illegal narcotics - andris, carsunum, glitterstim, ryll, and purple lotus were all available, as well as other less-well-known spices and chemical compounds. The seemingly normal atmosphere was strictly enforced, however - anyone suspected of being a mere addict would be promptly removed by muscular enforcers.[1]
Short-stay accommodation was provided by comatoirs, which offered tube-shaped sleeping chambers and sonic showers.[1]
Behind the scenes
Doom City appears in Il faut sauver Miss Pickalho, a French-language scenario for Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game which appeared in Casus Belli magazine in March 1999. The text compares the area to real-world red-light disticts and the vice district on Mars in the film Total Recall.
As Casus Belli material does not seem to have been approved through the Lucas Licensing process, it is thus considered non-canon by Lucasfilm. However, the Doom City section of this scenario is notable as the first appearance of Borga the Hutt. Subsequently, Borga was depicted as the overal leader of the Hutt Cartel around 25 ABY in three licensed English-language novels, beginning with The New Jedi Order: Agents of Chaos I: Hero's Trial, published in August 2000.
A number of the French-language descriptions in the source seem idiomatically ambiguous and hard to translate precisely. Some of the bars or cantinas are said to have chambres with associated hôtesses d'accueil; this could mean simply "bedrooms" with "female receptionists", but the context suggests an euphemism for private rooms with hostesses.
Similarly, the French term salles de jeux can be applied to both gaming and gambling establishments, and the description of the relevant locations suggests that they contain both video arcades and casinos, but the text leaves open the possibility that the arcade-style elements are also games of chance, and the resemblance to a real-world arcade is simply stylistic.
