The play follows generational cycles of immigration, during which a tenement "village" rises out of the tidal marsh just north of New Amsterdam. Native Americans who find food and refuge in the swamp are displaced -- or worse -- by Dutch settlers, whose farms are swallowed in turn by shipyards, ironworks, tobacco factories, sweatshops and tenements. Newcomers escaping the nightmares of pogroms, famine and war bring their dreams to this slice of the New World, another frontier village that in its own time is burned and ripped apart by cultural conflict.