Port Charles (city)

Port Charles, New York
Skyline as seen in the General Hospital: Night Shift opening. Notable in the skyline are General Hospital, ELQ, and the Metro Court Hotel
General Hospital The Young Marrieds Port Charles General Hospital: Night Shift location
Created by	Frank and Doris Hursley
Genre	Soap opera
Type	City
Notable locations	General Hospital The Metro Court Hotel The Haunted Star Wyndemere Castle Kelly's Diner Jake's (renamed The Floating Rib)
Notable characters	The Quartermaines The Cassadines The Corinthos family The Spencers The Scorpio/Jones families The Hardys and Webbers

Port Charles, New York, is the fictional setting of the ABC Daytime soap operas General Hospital and its spin-offs Port Charles and General Hospital: Night Shift. It was revealed that the Queen's Point setting of The Young Marrieds, a short-lived sister series to General Hospital that ran between 1964 and 1966, was a suburb of Port Charles. Locations within the town are described, below, using in-universe tone.

When the series first began, General Hospital was set in an unnamed city or town somewhere in the United States of America. Between 1964 and 1966, Queen's Point, the setting of the short-lived soap opera, The Young Marrieds, was considered to be a suburb of that same unnamed city, part of a plan to feature regular crossovers between the two shows which never materialized due to the cancellation of Marrieds. It was not until 1977 that the General Hospital setting was finally established as the fictional city of Port Charles, New York.

The early history of Port Charles is not extensively covered onscreen. Character dialogue indicates that the city once had an extensive milling industry, for which catacombs were built to divert water. The catacombs have played a role in numerous storylines; years later, in a 1985 plot, they were extended under the city's Asian Quarter.

During the Prohibition era, Port Charles was known to have ties to the mafia, which, as later recounted in an episode in 2002, operated at least one speakeasy in the city.

A storyline broadcast in 1985 revealed that, at some time in Port Charles' history, a large ghetto area known as the Asian Quarter was built to house the city's Asian population. Racial discrimination in the city has been a point of tension many times; minority residents were reportedly denied housing and bank loans in the mid-20th century, and one of Port Charles' first African-American council members, the character Bradley Ward II, faced racist opposition from his white counterparts in the 1970s (he was later murdered). Homosexuality became a topic after Bobbie Spencer's adopted son Lucas Jones was the victim of a gay basher. Other plots have dealt with issues such as the planned construction of a polluting incinerator near the city's ethnic neighborhoods.