After nearly two years of effort by Wayne Enterprises, the renovation of Gotham's East End had reached the halfway point. However, the main focus had been residential areas, while many commercial streets controlled by Mafia families had yet to see any construction begin.
Nightclubs, casinos, shopping malls, and even crowded markets all had tangled networks of interests that took time to sort out. Besides, apart from some old buildings that had never been renovated since Gotham's founding and were structurally unstable, the commercial towers built later had become iconic parts of Gotham's skyline. They were not suitable for being torn down and rebuilt wholesale like those run-down homes.
Gotham was chaotic, but it was not poor. The East End was the clearest embodiment of that fact. It had densely packed, low-end housing districts like the former Living Hell, where the poor struggled to survive, but it also had rows of skyscrapers and the brightly lit Golden Beach at night.
Golden Beach lay by the sea, south of the East End's Dock District. It consisted of a beach roughly twenty miles long, Golden Goblet Square on the only road leading to the beach, and four main streets arranged roughly in a grid. It was the East End's most prosperous commercial center.
It included the Golden Goblet Bar, Golden Goblet Nightclub, and Fine Wine Casino built by the Golden Goblet Group, which was controlled by the Falcone family; the Gulili Commercial Street controlled by the Spencer family; Chinatown, occupied by the Chinese Mafia; and the Golden Beach Market, controlled by the Lawrence family and located at the very center of the grid.
Golden Beach Market was the largest underground market in the world, as well as the only semi-public black market. Things available there included, but were not limited to, stolen goods