The Keel is built inside the inverted hull of a Great Lakes freighter that was dragged ashore during Old Harbor's reconstruction and never moved. The ship — the MV Apostle, a bulk carrier that last sailed in 2149 — lies upside down on the waterfront, its keel pointing at the sky like a blade, and someone cut doors into the hull and put a bar inside. The interior is curved, ribbed with the ship's structural framework, and lit by strips of LED pressed into the gaps between hull plates. Drinking in the Keel feels like drinking inside a whale — if the whale were made of riveted steel and served whiskey that tastes like it was distilled in an engine room. The whiskey was, in fact, distilled in an engine room. The Apostle's old machinery spaces have been converted into a distillery, and the house spirits carry a distinctive metallic note that regulars insist is iron from the hull leaching into the condensation. They are probably right.

The Keel is Old Harbor's unofficial union hall. The dock workers, fishermen, and canal maintenance crews who keep the district's waterfront economy functional have been meeting here since the bar opened in 2168, and the curved interior walls are covered with hand-painted records of labor agreements, wage disputes, shift schedules, and the occasional declaration of collective action that the corridor's corporate employers prefer not to acknowledge. The barkeeper, Osei Johannsen-Diallo, is a former fisherman who lost three fingers to a winch accident and pivoted from catching fish to serving the people who catch them. He runs the Keel with the organizational precision of a ship's officer and the patience of a man who has heard every complaint the waterfront can produce.

Freelancers visit the Keel for two reasons. The first is the distillery — the Apostle's engine-room spirits are genuinely good, in the way that things made with care in improvised conditions are often better than things made with resources in sterile ones. The second is access to the waterfront's labor network. A dock worker who trusts you — and trust in the Keel is earned slowly and lost instantly — can get you onto any cargo vessel in Old Harbor, open any warehouse door, and provide a first-hand account of every shipment that's passed through the district in the last year. The Keel's labor records, painted on the walls in plain sight, are also a surprisingly detailed economic database of Old Harbor's trade flows, if you know how to read them.