SYNOPSIS

Paradise Square is set in New York City in 1863 as the Civil War raged on, an extraordinary thing occurred amid the dangerous streets and crumbling tenement houses of the Five Points, the notorious 19th century Lower Manhattan Slum. The amalgamation between the communities to its most exuberant form with raucous dance contests on the floors of the neighborhood bars and dance halls. It is here in the Five Points where tap dancing was born, as Irish step dancing joyously competed with Black American Juba. An accidental society held the promise of what

This is a galvanizing story of racial harmony undone by a country at war with itself, we meet the denizens of a local saloon called Paradise Square: Nelly Freeman, the indomitable Black woman who owns it; Annie O’Brien, her Irish-Catholic sister-in-law and her Black minister husband, Rev. Samuel Jacob Lewis; Owen Duignan, a conflicted newly arrived Irish immigrant; Washington Henry, a fearless freedom seeker; Frederic Tiggens, an anti-abolitionist political boss, and Milton Moore, a penniless songwriter trying to capture it all. They have conflicting notions of what it means to be an American while living through one of the most tumultuous eras in our country’s history.