“FIVE POINTS! . . . The very letters of the two words, which mean so much, seem, as they are written, to redden with the bloodstains of unavenged crime. There is Murder in every syllable, and Want, Misery and Pestilence take startling form and crowd upon the imagination as the pen traces the words. What a world of wretchedness has been concentrated in this narrow district!”
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, August 16, 1873.
FIVE POINTS was the most notorious neighborhood in nineteenth-century America. Beginning in about 1820, overlapping waves of Irish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants flooded this district in what is now New York’s Chinatown. Significant numbers of Germans, African Americans, and Eastern European Jews settled there as well. All but forgotten today, the densely populated enclave was once renowned for jam-packed, filthy tenements, garbage-covered streets, prostitution, gambling, violence, drunkenness, and abject poverty. “No decent person walked through it; all shunned the locality; all walked blocks out of their way rather than pass through it,” recalled a tough New York fireman. A religious journal called Five Points “the most notorious precinct of moral leprosy in the city, . . . a perfect hot-bed of physical and moral pestilence, . . . a hell-mouth of infamy and woe.”1
While Americans may have considered Five Points repulsive, they found it fascinating as well. Tap dancing originated in its raucous dance halls. The neighborhood was a playground for “Bowery B’hoys” and “sporting men,” two of nineteenth-century America’s most colorful street cultures. Its residents squared off in some of the most talked-about bare-knuckle prizefights of the century. Many of the city’s most renowned gangs were headquartered there. It was also the epicenter of rough-and-tumble Tammany politics and some of the most infamous riots in early American history.
Touring Five Points became an international attraction, drawing such notables as Charles Dickens, a Russian grand duke, Davy Crockett, and Abraham Lincoln. “Londoners know it as well as St. Giles; and strangers ask to be shown to it before they visit Fifth Avenue or the Central Park,” commented one authority. Indeed, the American concept of “slumming” was probably invented there. 2
In its heyday, Five Points was very likely the most thoroughly studied neighborhood in the world. Journalists chronicled its rampant crime, squalid tenements, and raucous politics. Religious magazines detailed missionaries’ efforts to “save” the district’s residents from sin and perdition. Many of nineteenth-century America’s best-known writers published accounts of their visits, and popular novelists from Ned Buntline to Horatio Alger set their stories there.
Yet those who saw Five Points firsthand believed that written words could never convey what life there was really like. “I have never seen any thing which has been written about this noted place, that gave any idea of it,” observed one author in 1852. Nor could the dozens of prints of Five Points that appeared in Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper truly communicate the crowding, the suffering, and the crime that seemed so overwhelming in person. Jacob Riis’s famous photos of the neighborhood from the late 1880s finally gave Americans some sense of the wretched conditions in its tenements and drove the city to raze a sizable portion of the neighborhood. Five Points, for generations one of the most talked-about districts of the city, quickly faded from public consciousness. 3
Few historians devoted much attention to Five Points in the early years of the twentieth century. Academic historians concerned themselves primarily with politics and the law. Slums, immigrants, crime—none of these subjects seemed important enough to merit scholarly analysis. A few popular historians did study Five Points. The neighborhood figured prominently in Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York in 1928 and Alvin F. Harlow’s Old Bowery Days in 1931. But Asbury and Harlow were imbued with many of the same prejudices against the neighborhood’s Irish, Jewish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants that had colored contemporary accounts of Five Points, and this led to many distorted depictions of the district and its inhabitants. In addition, they tended to accept as fact virtually anything found in nineteenth-century newspapers, even though the press of the day was hardly reliable. Many of the most sensational stories about Five Points in The Gangs of New York and Old Bowery Days are patently untrue. 4
Thirty years ago, with the advent of “social history,” academics began to pay more attention to Five Points, though few devoted more than passing interest to its fascinating story. Only recently has Five Points bubbled back into popular consciousness, in popular histories of the city such as Luc Sante’s Low Life and prominent novels such as Caleb Carr’s The Alienist. An archaeological dig commissioned by the federal government in 1991 led to significant media interest in Five Points, as did Martin Scorsese’s screen adaptation of The Gangs of New York, which he set in Five Points and began shooting in the fall of 2000. Yet many of the recent accounts of Five Points continue to perpetuate the most egregious myths about the neighborhood. The two most important works on the history of New York published in the 1990s, for example—The Encyclopedia of New York City and Gotham—both misidentify something as simple as the streets whose confluence created the five-cornered intersection that gave the neighborhood its name. 5
Five Points, it is hoped, will set the record straight by providing the first detailed history of this fascinating immigrant enclave. Drawing on bank ledgers, court records, real estate documents, government reports, marriage and adoption records, newspapers, diaries, and manuscript collections, I hope to show that Five Points was more than a degraded object of fascination. The Five Points story is the quintessential immigrant saga, full of striving and—contrary to the neighborhood’s reputation—both misery and achievement.
Politics offers just one example. Five Pointers played a vital role in reshaping New York’s political landscape. They were key players at virtually every turning point in nineteenth-century New York’s electoral history. The district’s residents were among the first working-class New Yorkers to snatch political power from the hands of the old elite that had governed the city for centuries. They perfected the rough-and-tumble style of politics that, when eventually adopted citywide, would make the city’s Democratic machine, Tammany Hall, so infamous. In 1857, when state authorities attempted to hamstring Tammany by usurping many of its patronage prerogatives, Five Pointers made the city’s most dramatic statement of protest by fomenting a bloody riot. In the late 1860s, when the Tweed Ring was at its height, many of its most audacious acts of electoral fraud were perpetrated in Five Points. Many Irish Catholic Five Pointers excused these excesses, viewing the political system as a route to prestige and financial security.
Yet this history in no way denies that squalor dominated the lives of most Five Pointers. Recent scholarship on the neighborhood has tended to argue that conditions there could not have been as awful as previous generations have insisted. The myriad prejudices that observers harbored toward Irish Catholics, Italians, and the poor generally, these critics argue, must have significantly colored their depictions of the neighborhood. 6
These revisionists have vastly improved our understanding of Five Points, forcing us to recognize that much of what was written by contemporaries was simply not true. Yet in their well-intentioned efforts to identify prejudice, these writers have, I believe, lost sight of some unpleasant truths. Even if one considers only the statements of Five Pointers themselves, rather than the biased views of outsiders, one finds a neighborhood rife with vice, crime, and misery. Brothels were everywhere. Alcoholism was omnipresent. Habitually drunken men beat their wives and children. The neighborhood’s many female alcoholics neglected their sons and daughters, producing some of the Five Points’ most heart-rending tales of abuse and suffering. Upwards of 1,000 Five Pointers at any given time lived in filthy, overcrowded, disease-ridden, tumbledown tenements whose conditions are unimaginable to modern Americans. Previous generations of writers may have exaggerated certain aspects of life in Five Points, but the truth is that conditions there were quite wretched.
Nearly two centuries ago, New York City officials decided to extend Anthony Street east to the already-existing, X-shaped junction of Orange and Cross Streets, creating a five-cornered intersection that became known as Five Points. By the 1830s, it had become a concentration of vice, disease, crowding, and bloody conflict unparalleled in American history. But the neighborhood was far more than a collection of pathologies. Some Five Pointers were dragged down by the district’s crime, poverty, and misery, but most survived and eventually thrived, establishing more prosperous lives for themselves and their families than would have been possible back in Ireland, or Poland, or Italy, or China. From their struggles to endure the neighborhood’s brutal tenements, to their desperate efforts to find and keep work to support themselves and pay for the immigration of additional family members, to their eventual success in creating brighter futures for themselves and their children, Five Pointers’ stories are as old as America itself, and yet as contemporary as the current waves of immigrants that continue to reshape our society.