Why They Came
BY THE EARLY 1850s, the drama of life in Five Points so captivated Americans that tales of the famous neighborhood found their way into nearly every form of literary endeavor. Barnum’s Museum featured a play about its most infamous tenement. A best-selling novel depicted dissolute immigrants engaged in lives of crime and orgies of incest in overcrowded, squalid tenement buildings. A poet lamented the struggles of its inhabitants for dignity. The new pictorial newspapers published exposés of tenement life there, featuring lurid portraits of gruesome, thieving thugs and wizened, pipe-smoking old hags as typical Five Points residents. When an entirely new form of literature—the book-length, nonfiction account of urban crime and debauchery—made its way from Europe to the United States, the “sins” of Five Points served as a featured attraction. Yet many of the stories in these publications were obviously fictitious, or exaggerated, or simply recycled versions of a few shockingly lurid tales. Not every Five Pointer could have been a thief, a prostitute, or a drunk. What kinds of people really lived in Five Points? And how did they end up there?8
“EVERY NATIONALITY OF THE GLOBE”
In order to answer these questions, it is important to understand how dramatically the population of both Five Points and the city as a whole had changed since 1830, when the neighborhood had first become notorious. Immigration increased enormously after 1830, with most of the newcomers who settled in New York coming from Ireland and the German states. The foreign-born population expanded from 9 percent of the city’s total in 1830 to 36 percent in 1845. With the onset of the potato blight in Ireland, the pace of immigration accelerated further. By 1855, when the flood of immigrants had finally begun to subside, 51 percent of New Yorkers had been born abroad. The population of the city swelled tremendously in these years, more than doubling from 1825 to 1845 (from 166,000 to 371,000), and then increasing 70 percent more during the famine decade, to nearly 630,000 by 1855.9
Five Points became home to many of these newcomers. From 1830 to 1855, the population of the ward virtually doubled, from 13,570 to 25,562. The most dramatic increase came during the peak Irish famine years from 1845 to 1850, when it increased from 19,343 to 24,698. With immigrants pouring into the neighborhood and many natives leaving, the foreign-born accounted for 72 percent of Five Points’ population by 1855. Even this figure understates the immigrant presence in the neighborhood, however, because the vast majority of “natives” were the young children of recent immigrants. If only adults (those eighteen years of age or older) are considered, the foreign-born constituted a full 89 percent of Five Points residents. No New York neighborhood could boast a higher concentration.10
Observers believed that immigrants from all over the world settled in Five Points. “All the nations of the earth are represented,” stated the Five Points Monthly, a Methodist journal. A minister working there on the eve of the Civil War likewise found “a population that . . . represents every nationality of the globe.” Yet this perception was somewhat exaggerated.
In comparison to some modern New York neighborhoods, antebellum Five Points seems relatively homogeneous, as 91 percent of its residents were born in Ireland, the United States, or the German states. Of the other groups, only Italians and Poles lived there in significantly greater numbers than in the rest of the city. Five Points was far from the Tower of Babel many perceived.11
Most Five Pointers did not arrive in New York alone, but instead made the journey to America with at least one other family member. Among married couples who had had children in Europe, about three-quarters emigrated together (though, like Nelly Holland, they may not have all come on the same ship). It is impossible to determine how many of those who arrived in Five Points before marriage came to the United States alone. But a sampling of all Irish immigrants disembarking at New York during the famine years indicates that 56 percent traveled with at least one family member.12
Whether one arrived in New York alone or with family members, the immigrant was usually expected to send money back to his or her native land to finance the passage of others—a process known as “chain migration.” In cases in which a family with small children was divided, the husband typically went to America first and then brought the rest of his family over to Five Points. Laborer William Higgins, for example, emigrated from Ireland to New York in 1851. Only after two years of saving could he afford to bring over his wife Mary and four-year-old son James. Levi Abraham, a tailor, left his wife Amelia with their newborn son Abraham for four and a half years before they were reunited at the beginning of 1855. Sometimes, the emigrating husband brought a child with him and left his wife with the rest of their children.
In a surprising number of cases, husband and wife emigrated together and left the children behind. Michael and Bridget Conway left their four-year-old daughter Catharine in Ireland when they emigrated in 1850. She rejoined her parents two years later. John and Mary Hughes left four children—ranging in age from nine to one—in Ireland when they departed for America in 1850. They brought the middle children over a year later and the other two only in 1853. Their youngest child, Ann, by then four, undoubtedly had no memory whatsoever of her parents when they met her in New York. Even widows sometimes left children behind. When widow Margret McHugh embarked for America in 1849, she left five children ranging in age from twelve to two. She became a washerwomen in New York, and brought her twelve-year-old daughter Mary over in 1850, then two sons in 1852, and finally the two youngest girls, who she had not seen for four years, in 1853. It did not take most families this long to reunite completely, but even a relatively short period of separation brought anxiety to all involved and guilt to the immigrant who could not pay for the reuniting of the family as quickly as promised.13
The names of these immigrants reflect the Irish domination of Five Points. But other ethnic groups constituted nearly a quarter of the neighborhood’s adult population. Most numerous after the Irish were natives of the German states. The important distinction within this group was religion. The German community in Five Points was almost evenly divided between Jews and Christians. The Jews in Five Points may not have considered themselves “German”; they emigrated from what was then often referred to as “Prussian Poland,” the region of Poland annexed by Prussia in the eighteenth century. Yet if these Jews are counted as Prussian and therefore German, Jewish German families made up 53 percent of the neighborhood’s German population.14
One might imagine that these Christian and Jewish “Germans” would have too little in common to consider themselves a “community.” They do not, for example, seem to have come from the same regions of Germany. Most German states were represented in the Five Points population. But it appears that slightly more than half of the Christians were natives of two areas, Baden-Württemberg in the southwest and Hanover in the north. The remainder came mostly from Bavaria, Saxony, and Westphalia.15 In contrast, the Jews in Five Points came overwhelmingly from a single place: Poznan. Referred to in the nineteenth century as “Posen” and located midway between Berlin and Warsaw, Poznan was a Polish duchy that Prussia had occupied since the eighteenth century. At least 70 percent of the Jews living in antebellum Five Points were natives of this single Polish region.16
After the Irish and the Germans, no other ethnic or racial group made up more than 3 percent of the Five Points population in 1855. The size of the Italian contingent is somewhat surprising, even at 3 percent, given that large numbers of Italians did not begin immigrating to New York until the late nineteenth century. At this point they were concentrated almost exclusively on two blocks—Anthony Street east of Centre and Orange Street north of the Five Points intersection. A final group of Five Pointers—African Americans—merits discussion because their presence in the neighborhood was declining rapidly in these years. In 1825, African Americans constituted 14 percent of the Sixth Ward’s population. In 1855, however, only 4 percent of the ward’s residents were black, and they made up only 3 percent of the neighborhood’s population in that year. It is possible that the 1855 census undercounted the black populace. The 1855 census taker, for example, does not seem to have ventured into many of the infamous tenements in the part of Little Water Street known as “Cow Bay” (so called because the street was supposedly laid out over a path that stockmen once used to reach the Collect to water their cattle). As recently as 1849, one news report had claimed that six hundred blacks lived in Cow Bay, more than the census recorded in the entire ward in 1855. On the other hand, a black exodus had begun in the late 1830s after the anti-abolition riot. Observers noted blacks moving from Five Points to the West Side of Manhattan throughout the antebellum period. Those African Americans who remained had one thing in common with their white neighbors: few had been born in New York. Seventy-one percent of Five Points blacks were not native New Yorkers. Yet only a few—21 percent—were natives of slave states or island slave territories. Most had been born free in other mid-Atlantic states. So while Five Points still had “a full sprinkling of blacks” in the 1850s, it was no longer a focal point of the city’s African-American community.17
IT IS POSSIBLE to re-create block-by-block, even house-by-house, an ethnic map of the neighborhood. Ethnic and racial groups concentrated on certain blocks, and sometimes even in certain buildings. Germans were especially numerous on Centre Street at the western edge of the district and on Mott and Elizabeth Streets in the northeast corner of the neighborhood. Jews congregated at the foot of Orange Street and on upper Mott Street. Although most of the African-American strongholds in the ward had become Irish by 1855, several large clusters still existed on Cross Street between Orange and Mott and on Little Water Street. The Irish lived everywhere in the neighborhood, but especially dominated Orange Street above the Five Points intersection and Mulberry Street from Chatham Square all the way to Canal Street.18