Vice and Crime
FOR MOST AMERICANS, Five Points was the epitome of vice and lawlessness. The neighborhood “was, for years, the synonym for wretchedness, vice, and crime,” wrote a superintendent of the Five Points House of Industry. The Herald labeled the district a “nest of drunkenness, roguery, debauchery, vice and pestilence.” “If there is a spot in our city where vice reigns unchecked, and moral pollution is the unmixed atmosphere of immortal souls,” agreed a magazine writer in 1853, “surely all will admit it to be in that vicinity.” Could Five Points really have been so crime-ridden? Could prostitution, robbery, murder, and drunkenness—the crimes and vices for which Five Points was renowned—really have been so common? An analysis of the historical record reveals that some facets of the stereotype have been grossly exaggerated. But others, such as those concerning the pervasiveness of drunkenness and prostitution, were far closer to the truth than not.11
“EVERY HOUSE WAS A BROTHEL, AND EVERY BROTHEL A HELL”
There was no vice more synonymous with Five Points than prostitution. The reputed pervasiveness of the sex trade, the conditions under which the prostitutes supposedly worked, and the purported extent to which the young and innocent were forced into the business appear absurd to the modern reader. “Every house was a filthy brothel, the resort of persons of every sex, age, color, and nationality,” wrote a nineteenth-century historian of Five Points. George Foster agreed, writing in 1849 that “nearly every house and cellar is a groggery below and a brothel above,” while House of Industry founder Lewis Pease remembered that at his arrival there, “every house was a brothel, and every brothel a hell.” Bordellos were believed to be family-run businesses in every sense. “[I]t is no unusual thing,” insisted Foster, “for a mother and her two or three daughters—all of course prostitutes—to receive their ‘men’ at the same time and in the same room—passing in and out and going through all the transactions of their hellish intercourse, with a sang froid at which devils would stand aghast and struck with horror.” The tender age of Five Points’ courtesans also consistently shocked New Yorkers. The Evening Post reported that girls of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen were commonly “enticed” from their homes and taken to Five Points “dens, where they are kept until they are become so in love with the sin, that they can neither be persuaded nor forced to leave their wretched abodes.”12
The evidence reveals that many of these charges were not so farfetched. The New York District Attorney’s indictment records reveal that for the blocks radiating from the Five Points intersection, nearly every building did house a brothel. Bordellos operated in thirty-three of the thirty-five dwellings on Anthony Street between Centre and the Five Points intersection at some point during the 1840s and ’50s. Brothel proprietors were likewise prosecuted in twelve of the fifteen houses on Cross Street between the Five Points intersection and Mulberry, and in thirteen of the seventeen residences on Orange Street from the Five Points intersection to Leonard Street. In other sections of the neighborhood, prostitution was far less pervasive. In the same two decades, there were only two prosecutions for commercial sex in the eighty or so houses on Mulberry below Bayard, only two indictments for the sixty buildings on Bayard from the Bowery to Orange Street, and none on Mott below Bayard.13
Evidence also confirms the Post’s charge that young teenagers sometimes worked in Five Points brothels. In 1834, one charitable organization recorded the case of fifteen-year-old streetwalker Catharine Wood, who picked up customers on thoroughfares such as the Bowery and took them to Five Points houses of assignation (bordellos where women could bring men without prior arrangement). In 1849, police supposedly found an eleven-year-old girl working as a prostitute in Bridget Mangin’s brothel. Some of the cases of young prostitutes also involved family members of different generations working together, as Foster had described. County Tipperary native Bridget McCarty prostituted both her fourteen-year-old niece and a fourteen-year-old boarder at her homes at 57 Mott Street and 76 Mulberry. Henry Hoffman prostituted his own daughter in his Sixth Ward bawdy house. Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Dayton worked as a streetwalker, bringing customers back to the family bordello on Orange Street, where her mother also sometimes consorted with customers. By 1855, Mangin’s two daughters (age unknown) prostituted themselves at their mother’s brothel, then located above Crown’s Grocery at 150 Worth Street. Such cases were undoubtedly not the norm. A survey taken just before the Civil War found that the majority of prostitutes ranged in age from seventeen to twenty-two, and it seems unlikely that many mother-daughter teams could have worked in the neighborhood’s brothels. Nonetheless, the seemingly outlandish charges made by the press concerning such practices at Five Points “disorderly houses” were not entirely figments of their over-active imaginations.14
Worth Street (formerly Anthony) looking west from the Five Points intersection toward Centre Street, c. 1868. The appearance of the block had not changed much since the 1840s and 1850s, when virtually every building on the block housed a bordello. In the house at the corner on the left, Crown’s Grocery operated on the ground floor for many years, while Bridget Mangin ran the brothel upstairs. Collection of the New-York Historical Society.
Children did not often work as prostitutes in brothels, but they did more frequently live in bordellos run by their parents. “I found that the children lived in the brothels, and that as soon as the school was out the children returned to their residence,” reported an alarmed minister in the 1840s. In fact, a survey on the eve of the Civil War found that nearly half of New York prostitutes had children. Even more disturbing were the cases in which young children were put to work in such places. At 37 Baxter Street, Thomas Laughlin posted his seven-year-old stepdaughter Elizabeth upstairs late into the night to collect the prostitutes’ pay (or perhaps his cut if it was a house of assignation) while he minded the bar below. He became furious one evening in 1855 when she fell asleep and, in her words, “I did not watch the girls . . . that go out for company.” Having previously been struck in the head with a bottle by Laughlin, little Elizabeth feared a similar punishment and ran away to the House of Industry.15
The charge that Five Points brothel keepers forced young women into prostitution against their will is also borne out by contemporary evidence. The Times reported in 1859 the case of a woman who took a position to live and work as a “tailoress” at 82 Centre Street. After she moved in, she was given nothing to sew but asked to have a drink with a man, clearly for prostitution. She fled, but her “employer” would not return her trunk unless she paid five dollars for room and board during her brief residence. Only with the assistance of the police did she retrieve her valuables. Similar cases were constantly reported in the city press.16
The case of Mary O’Daniel illustrates the manner in which young women could be tricked or pushed into prostitution. The thirteen-year-old emigrated from County Waterford after the death of her father (her mother was evidently dead already). Arriving in New York in January 1851, she sought out her aunt, Bridget McCarty, a thirty-four-year-old widow living at 57 Mott Street with her six-year-old daughter. To her chagrin, Mary discovered that her aunt and cousin shared the one-room flat with three other “girls” who, according to Mary’s subsequent deposition, “had men come to see them, and . . . had sexual intercourse.” When one girl brought a man back to the studio apartment for sex, the others went outside until the couple had finished. Much to Mary’s relief, her aunt asked the other girls to leave about a month after her arrival. But McCarty then asked her niece “to go to bed with” a man, telling Mary “she would have a good life of it, and fine clothes, and plenty of money.” After what one might imagine were days or weeks of pressure, during which her aunt undoubtedly reminded Mary of how grateful she ought to be for having been taken in, Mary had sex with a man procured by her aunt, for which he paid McCarty ten dollars. Mary subsequently had intercourse with the man again, earning her aunt from one to two dollars per session. Soon Mary began going to bed with other men her aunt brought home. Before the end of the year, with the income generated by her niece, McCarty was able to transfer her household to a larger, two-room flat at 76 Mulberry Street.
In early December, a fourteen-year-old, Ellen Cable, moved into McCarty’s Mulberry Street apartment. Ellen had lived in the Fourth Ward on Roosevelt Street until her mother sent her to find work as a domestic servant. According to the girl, McCarty (who had once been Cable’s neighbor) asked her “to go to her house to do house work.” After a few days, McCarty began pressuring Ellen to sleep with one of her customers, telling her, as she later testified, that the sex trade “would give me a good living.” Ellen stated that she initially refused to prostitute herself, but was eventually “compelled” to do so. She got into bed with a man that first night but would not have intercourse with him, even though he promised her ten dollars (apparently the going rate for a virgin). The persistent customer nonetheless stayed in bed with her all night. The next evening, he returned, and McCarty helped undress him and put him in bed with the girl. This time he “succeeded in having sexual intercourse with Deponent and seduced her.” He paid Ellen four dollars, which McCarty then confiscated. The next day, a friend of the previous night’s customer came to the house and McCarty locked him in the bedroom with Ellen, “and said man forced Deponent to undress herself and go to bed with him, and staid with her all that night and had sexual intercourse with her four times that night.” In the morning he paid McCarty one dollar.
Ellen then went to the police, claiming that McCarty had forced her to have intercourse with these men against her will. McCarty denied the charges. “I work on shirts for a living,” she stated in her deposition, maintaining she had never had any female boarders or men come to her residences for sex. The combined testimony of Cable and O’Daniel effectively refuted McCarty, and she might have been convicted had Ellen not admitted under cross-examination that she had managed to tell her mother about the attempted seduction, and that her mother had told her to come home. Cable testified that she had nonetheless returned to Mulberry Street out of a determination to finish out her month of housework and receive the three dollars per month pay that McCarty had promised. After Cable’s mother confirmed this, Prosecutor A. Oakey Hall asked the judge to instruct the jury to acquit McCarty. The judge did so, and McCarty went free. Brothel keepers such as McCarty understood that although prostitution was illegal, they could avoid prosecution so long as they did not keep prostitutes in the bordellos against their will and did not disturb their neighbors.17
Bridget McCarty seems to have specialized in procuring young virgins for her clients. Five Points brothels varied enormously and featured a number of special attractions to lure customers. “Parlor houses” were the most expensive. These bordellos replicated the atmosphere of private residences, protected their clients’ anonymity, only accepted known customers or those with references from known clients, and charged as much as five dollars for a typical visit. They often limited their business to a particular type of customer, such as southerners, German Americans, or even visiting Philadelphians. Although few if any parlor houses remained in Five Points by the 1850s, a significant number probably operated there at one time. The bordello at 3 Franklin Street was a parlor house, situated on a relatively upscale block just three doors down from the ward’s police station. Helen Jewett, a highly paid twenty-three-year-old courtesan who became New York’s most famous prostitute after her grisly murder in 1836, resided in “Mrs. Cunningham’s” seraglio at that address until just three weeks before her violent demise.
Much more common in Five Points, however, was the “public house,” a relatively inexpensive establishment that did little to hide the nature of its business and opened its doors to anyone. Whether public or private, brothels did their best to satisfy their customers’ tastes and predilections. Some featured mulatto women (said to be preferred by all black and some white men), while others offered only Irish paramours. The brothel at 62 Mott Street featured “ropes and braces.” Still other Five Points sex establishments had no women actually in residence at all. Such “houses of assignation”—sometimes rooms behind or above saloons, in other cases apartments in tenements—were used by streetwalkers who did not have a steady clientele or did not want to pay a madam.18
One notorious form of brothel, the “panel house,” used the lure of sex as a mere subterfuge for robbery. The prostitute would lead her target to a windowless room with only a bed and a single chair and make sure he saw her lock the door. Once they were in bed and otherwise occupied, her accomplice, waiting in the next room, would slide a panel in the wall, reach into the bedroom to the man’s clothing on the chair, and empty his wallet while the prostitute made plenty of noise. When she subsequently asked for her payment, and the man discovered his money gone, he would claim to have been robbed, to which the prostitute would reply that this was impossible given the windowless room and the locked door. She and her partner would then chase the dupe from the brothel, threatening to have him arrested for refusing to pay for the sex if he should ever show his face in the neighborhood again. African-American Charles Quin, who was said to have lived in Five Points, operated panel houses in various parts of town, including one on Elizabeth Strreet. The Herald reported in 1841 that another “negro rascal” known as “Butcher Bill” and his partner Jenny Jones had robbed a man of $68 “by the stale trick of touch house.” Panel thieves tried to choose targets with lots of cash (out-of-town merchants visiting New York to buy wholesale goods or farmers who had recently sold agricultural products), those who appeared too upstanding to risk the embarrassment of complaining to authorities about having been robbed at a Five Points brothel.19
One oft-noted aspect of Five Points prostitution was the brazen manner in which the prostitutes openly solicited business. “As evening sets in,” reported Foster in New York by Gas-Light, “the inmates of the house, dressed in the most shocking immodesty, gather [and] the door is flung open wide, if the weather will permit it; and the women, bareheaded, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, stand in the doorway or on the sidewalk, inviting passers-by, indiscriminately, to enter, or exchanging oaths and obscenity with the inmates of the next house, similarly employed.” The Boston author and lawyer Richard Henry Dana Jr. toured Five Points in 1844 in the dead of winter, but he too observed that “at almost every door were girls standing, & whispering loud to me as I passed, ‘Come here,’ ‘Come here, dear,’ ‘Good evening,’ ‘Where are you going?’ & the like.” Nathaniel P. Willis also found that “women stood at every door with bare heads and shoulders . . . showing a complete insensibility to cold” and even quoting their prices.20
Those who ventured inside one of these bawdy houses found little variation from one to the next. Because they were not written expressly to shock the public, Dana’s diary entries (one written in 1843 and the other a year later) provide the most reliable portrait of a Five Points brothel interior and thus deserve to be quoted at length. Looking for a little excitement after an evening spent with New York social luminaries Theodore Sedgwick and William Cullen Bryant, the twenty-eight-year-old Dana put on his “rough coat & cap,” left his luxurious room at the Astor House, and walked to “that sink of iniquity & filth, the ‘Five Points.’” Heading east on Anthony Street, Dana found that “the buildings were ruinous for the most part, as well as I could judge, & the streets & sidewalks muddy & ill lighted. Several of [the] houses had wooden shutters well closed & in almost [each] such case I found by stopping & listening, that there were many voices in the rooms & sometimes the sound of music & dancing. . . . Grog shops, oyster cellars & close, obscure & suspicious looking places of every description abounded.” He peeked inside one saloon and saw “a dozen or so men & two women, the women cursing & swearing most dreadfully & using the most foul language I ever heard come fr. human lips.” Successfully working up the courage to enter one of these dives, Dana walked in and found “an old harradan [sic], with fat cheeks & a quick, sharp, devilish eye, standing at the door, & four girls, all young, & three of whom must have once been quite handsome.” None appeared older than seventeen. “There was only one man in the room, who had a girl in his lap”; “obscene prints” hung “about the walls to help excite [the] passions of the young who should drop into the house. Some sailors came in swearing & calling for drink, & I slipped out.”
On his second visit to Five Points, Dana found a brothel “removed from sight & in an obscure place, where no one seemed in sight.” Inside, he discovered two women,
one apparently old, probably the “mother” of the house, & the other rather young, as well as I could judge from her voice & face. They invited me to walk in & just say a word to them. . . . The room had but little furniture, a sanded floor, one lamp, & a small bar on which there were a few glasses, a decanter, & behind the bar were two half barrels. The old woman did not speak, but kept her seat in the door way. The younger one, after letting me look round a moment, asked me in a whisper & a very insinuating air, putting on as winning a smile as she could raise, & with the affectation of a simple childish way, to “just step into the bed room: it was only the next room.”
Dana feared that the woman might have an accomplice waiting to rob him, but was too curious to refuse her invitation:
The bed room was very small, being a mere closet, with one bed & one chair in it, the door through wh. we came & a window. There was no light in it, but it was dimly lighted by a single paine of glass over the door through which the light came from the adjoining room, in wh. we had been. The bed stead was a wretched truck, & the bed was of straw, judging from the sound it made when the woman sat upon it. Taking for granted that I wished to use her for the purposes of her calling she asked me how much I would give. I said “What do you ask?” She hesitated a moment, & then answered hesitatingly, & evidently ready to lower her price if necessary, “half a dollar?” I was astonished at the mere pittance for which she would sell her wretched, worn out, prostituted body. I can hardly tell the disgust & pity I felt. I told her at once that I had no object but curiosity in coming into the house, yet gave her the money from fear lest, getting nothing, she might make a difficulty or try to have me plundered. She took the money & thanked me, but expressed no surprise at my curiosity or strangeness.21
What circumstances could force women into such degrading lives? Foster contended that “female prostitution is the direct result of the inadequate compensation for female labor.” What little evidence exists on the subject seems to confirm his observation. In a survey of two thousand New York prostitutes conducted on the eve of the Civil War, Dr. William Sanger—chief physician at the hospital/prison complex on New York’s Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island—found that most courtesans had tried to support themselves through other means before turning to the sex trade. They reported earning $1.50 a week as a “tailoress,” $2 a week as a cap maker, or a dollar a week sewing shirts, and that only when they could find work. A domestic servant–turned–prostitute told Sanger that she had sent all her earnings to her mother, so that when she lost her position she quickly became destitute and turned to prostitution as a last resort. A police captain told Sanger that he saw many impoverished women live on bread and water in the streets before becoming prostitutes.
Sanger estimated that the average full-time prostitute earned ten dollars per week, though whether he meant net or gross income is unclear. Even if half of these earnings went to pay room and board to a madam or rent at a house of assignation, this still left a weekly income far above what a woman could expect to receive at needlework, domestic service, or any of the other “women’s trades.” Of the “wretched females” who work as New York prostitutes, the directors of the House of Industry asserted accurately that “a majority are dragged down or bred from birth to their trade of death by inexorable WANT; victims, not of guilty choice, nor of treacherous lust, but of absolute starvation and despair.”22
Destitution, however, was not the only factor driving women to prostitution. Although more women cited that cause than any other when asked why they had become prostitutes (525 of 2,000), the variety of answers provided by the others is both surprising and illuminating. Nearly as many women (513) attributed their circumstances to “inclination,” 282 reported being “seduced,” 181 cited “drink,” 164 ill-treatment by their parents, 124 called it “an easy life,” 84 blamed keeping “bad company,” and 71 were “persuaded by prostitutes” to take up the trade. One must read such evidence with caution and skepticism, yet certain revealing trends are apparent. Sanger noted, for example, that many of the cases of “inclination” involved women who left their husbands because their spouses refused to give them liquor or were abandoned by their husbands because they drank to excess. These cases, combined with those who specifically cited drink as the cause of their plight, suggest that liquor played a significant role in driving many women to prostitution. Some might argue that crushing poverty may have induced these women to drink, and that it all circles back to destitution, but as is the case today, many nineteenth-century women became prostitutes in order to finance an addiction to stimulants.23
Mary O’Daniel and Ellen Cable would have classified themselves among the next largest group, those claiming that they were “seduced” into the sex trade. But most women using this term referred to a different experience—that of having been impregnated and then abandoned by a boyfriend or fiancé. Foster contended that the “great source” of New York prostitutes was young women from the countryside who came to the city “to escape infamy” after becoming pregnant out of wedlock. The immigration experience also provided ample opportunity for young women (especially those traveling alone) to be seduced. Of the 282 women who attributed their lives as prostitutes to “seduction,” 16 specified that they were “corrupted” on immigrant ships and another 8 in New York’s emigrant boardinghouses (where newcomers stayed before finding a permanent home).24
Dr. Sanger found that nearly half of New York’s prostitutes had been so employed for one year or less, indicating that few courtesans spent years in the trade. In fact, contemporaries reported that many women worked only sporadically as prostitutes when all other means of earning a living were exhausted. Sanger found that many were “women whose trades are uncertain, and who are liable at certain seasons of the year to be without employment. Then real necessity force[s] them on the town until a return of business provides them with work.” Seamstresses, poorly paid and frequently unemployed, were often associated with casual prostitution, but Sanger found that many more former servants worked in the sex trade than did needleworkers.25
Over the course of the antebellum years, the ethnic background of the district’s sex workers changed. In the 1820s and ‘30s, most of the neighborhood’s prostitutes were native-born. By the 1840s, however, native-born courtesans (and their madams) had abandoned Five Points, moving either uptown or west across Broadway. Adeline Miller, for example, ran brothels at 32 Orange in 1822, 85 Cross in 1826, and 44 Orange in 1835, but by 1838 had relocated to the West Side, where she continued to operate bordellos until 1859. Brothel keeper Phoebe Doty, proprietor of establishments on Anthony and Orange Streets in the twenties and thirties, had likewise moved west of Five Points by the forties, as had Sarah Tuttle. As was often the case in Five Points, the Irish filled the vacuum left by the departing natives.26
The gender of the typical brothel keeper began to change as well. In the 1820s, women ran more than three-quarters of all Five Points bordellos; in the 1850s, in contrast, they operated just 37 percent. This transformation seems to have resulted primarily from changes in the Five Points population rather than in the sex trade itself, for in neighborhoods where native-born prostitutes still predominated (such as the area between Canal and Houston Streets and the Lower West Side), madams outnumbered male brothel keepers by a margin of more than five to one. As Five Points became more heavily Irish, men managed to capture an increasing share of the profits from prostitution.27
Despite the omnipresence of prostitution, residents did not hesitate to complain about a brothel when it disturbed the peace, especially when the bordello was located away from the Five Points intersection. In 1842, for example, neighbors filed a complaint about the brothel at 168 Leonard Street, where “dancing singing and carousing” went on “at late and improper hours of the night.” A year later, Robert Gordon of 10 Orange Street and Edward Blackall of 121/2 Orange pressed charges against John Donaho for keeping a house of prostitution in the basement of 12 Orange, where “persons of ill name & fame . . . are in the nightly practice of resorting until late and improper hours of the night to the great disgrace of the neighbourhood.” That same year, Thomas Flynn of 87 Mulberry, William Murkitrick of 85 Mulberry, and Bernard Kennedy of 76 Mulberry secured the conviction of John Jack for keeping a disorderly house of prostitution at 83 Mulberry. The “premises are a great nuisance and annoyance to the neighbours,” the complainants testified, “disturbances occurring there at late, and all hours of the night, persons complaining of being robbed in there, fighting and quarreling and disturbing the neighbourhood.” Prostitution may have been grudgingly tolerated by Five Pointers, but disturbing the peace was not.28
The penalties for those convicted in such cases—the charge was usually “keeping a disorderly house”—varied enormously. When in 1843, Five Points police officer William Nealis arrested seventeen “females of the Five Points, prostitutes and vagrants,” the judge sentenced each to four months in the penitentiary. A decade later, the Herald published a list of people, “mostly residents of the Sixth ward,” who had been convicted of operating unlicensed saloons that also served as “dens of prostitutes” and “resorts for thieves and vagabonds.” Their sentences ranged from two months to fifteen days in jail (the latter for the aforementioned Henry Hoffman for prostituting his own daughter) to fines of fifty dollars or less. But these were exceptionally severe punishments. The overwhelming majority of those found guilty of keeping a disorderly house of prostitution received just a judicial slap on the wrist. When Osman and Margaret Cutter were convicted of operating a disorderly house at 7 Elizabeth Street, the judge suspended their sentence on the condition that they vacate the premises. Likewise, when landlord John Devins of 24 Elizabeth Street was found guilty of the same crime (Devins lived in the basement while the prostitutes leased the upstairs), the magistrate suspended his sentence provided that Devins evict the prostitutes. Many other brothel keepers simply vacated their places of business when indicted, which they correctly surmised would lead to a dismissal of the charges. Ordinarily, only habitual offenders or those who tried to avoid paying their liquor license fees suffered a significant criminal penalty operating a Five Points house of prostitution.29
“CRIMES AND OUTRAGES ALMOST DAILY COMMITTED IN THIS NEIGHBORHOOD”
The first known press description of Five Points, from 1826, called the district “the resort of thieves and rogues of the lowest degree.” Another early newspaper account asked authorities “to put an end to the crimes and outrages almost daily committed in this neighborhood, which has become the most dangerous place in our city.” Antebellum police reports confirm that crime was endemic to the neighborhood. Hardly a day went by without the press announcing a number of arrests.30
One of the most common crimes was petty thievery. In contrast to the penalties for prostitution, those for theft could be quite severe. Mary Hoy of 83 Bayard Street, for example, charged her neighbor Margaret McCasken with stealing “some saucers and other crockery, worth fifty cents.” The judge found her guilty and sentenced her to two months in the penitentiary. Sometimes it seemed that the defendant’s status as a lowly Five Pointer motivated magistrates to impose particularly stiff punishments. Irish immigrant Mary White worked as a “housekeeper” for Ann Francis, “a negro woman, who keeps a sailors’ boardinghouse at No. 94 Park-street.” Francis supplemented her boardinghouse income by taking in clothes to wash, but after hiring White in 1857, she often found clothing missing. Her suspicions were confirmed when she noticed White wearing a frilled petticoat that had disappeared a few hours earlier. “I guess she stole the clothes,” declared the judge in rendering his verdict. “She’s no great shakes anyhow, to be housekeeper in a sailors’ boarding house kept by a nigger. We sentence her to the Penitentiary for two months.”31
Harsh sentences did little to deter many of Five Points’ more hardened criminals. In 1850, Peter Meehan caught Patrick Murphy coming down the stairs of the tenement at 6 Mulberry Street carrying clothes, cash, and other items from Meehan’s own apartment. Authorities had released Murphy from jail only two days earlier for a previous crime. Professional burglars such as Murphy often made Five Points their home. The Old Brewery and Cow Bay were especially renowned as dens of thieves, but police found criminals congregating throughout the district. In 1851, a “tail diver” (pickpocket) caught by Five Points policeman William Bell admitted during his interrogation “that No 71/2 Elizabeth Street upstairs was a resort for small thieves—a number of them lodged there.” On another occasion Bell discovered that “No. 15 Orange St. is the residence of a Gang of Thieves.”32
Juvenile thieves abounded as well. “I went in Orange St. to look for a piece of blue pilot cloth that was stolen from the express wagon of Charles Croft of 70 Maiden Lane,” Bell recorded in his logbook in February 1851. “On Wednesday evening last while standing in front of No. 11 Orange St. I learned that it was stolen by a boy and taken into a house in the neighborhood.” When the husband of a woman whose bracelets were stolen placed a newspaper advertisement seeking information about the crime, he received word that a Five Points boy living in the basement of the rear tenement at 74 Mulberry Street had taken them. For the most part, such thefts seem to have been crimes of opportunity, in which children stole items they found unguarded, but some Five Pointers actually trained children to pilfer. Thirteen-year-old George Appo, for example, learned to pick pockets from two thieves who posed as newsboys.33
Five Points adult thieves especially targeted naive visitors carrying large sums of cash. In 1847, a pickpocket stole $45 (the equivalent of about $720 today) from an English sailor patronizing a brothel at 156 Anthony Street. Police in 1849 arrested Caroline Goldsmith for luring “greenhorn” Francis Oschatz into the “house” (brothel?) of Mrs. Cook at 81 Bayard and robbing him of $33 (more than $500 today). Sometimes criminals could reap substantial sums by doping their targets. An Illinois merchant passing through New York on his way to Boston with a load of butter claimed to have visited Five Points so that he could write about it to his friends back home. While at the corner of Cross and Orange, a woman asked him to treat her to a glass of gin. He did. But she drugged his drink and when he regained consciousness the woman had disappeared with his coat and a hundred dollars. Although he might have recovered his money by reporting the crime to the police, the man refused to do so and risk his reputable standing back home, where he served as a steward in his Methodist church.34
Tough New York juries had little sympathy for out-of-towners robbed after overindulging in Five Points saloons. In 1850, “three Five Point thieves” lured Reuben Knox into “John Orpen’s [public] house, corner of Centre and Anthony streets,” where they got him drunk playing cards and then stole his watch and thirty dollars. Knox complained to the police, who arrested the crooks, but Officer Denis Dowdican found Knox “so intoxicated that I deemed it my duty to take him to the station house for protection.” At the trial, the defendants’ attorney seized upon this last remark, arguing that the drunken Knox had lost the money and watch in the card game. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The chagrined judge released the prisoners, lamenting that the habitual criminals had been lucky to escape conviction. One of the three—Patrick Murphy—was the one caught a few days later robbing Peter Meehan’s Mulberry Street flat.35
Some stolen goods, such as crockery and frilled petticoats, could be used by the thieves themselves. Coats and pocketwatches were disposed of through fences, many of whom operated in the locale. Patrolman Bell constantly sought leads on Five Points fences. By “pumping” Joe Hancock, a recently arrested criminal, Bell “ascertained that Meyer Blas [of] 361/2 Orange St. was a fence.” A few months later while interrogating an accessory to murder, Bell learned of three more fences, including one in “a little rum hole in Cross St. near Orange.” Despite Bell’s detective work, prosecutors found it difficult to win convictions against fences who ran secondhand shops, because the storekeepers could claim ignorance as to the origins of the goods. When police investigating the theft of forty-one silk parasols questioned Polish immigrant Harris Solomon at his second-hand clothing shop at 9 Orange Street in 1852, the thirty-year-old claimed to have none in his stock. In a search of his house, however, police found four of them in a bureau under some old clothes. Although Solomon claimed to have purchased those umbrellas in California, skeptical prosecutors charged him with possession of stolen goods. The outcome of Solomon’s case is not known, but the paucity of such indictments in the district attorney’s records suggests that few fences were punished for their crimes.36
Some Five Points robberies could be quite violent. Police in 1849 arrested African-American William Peterson who, along with “two other darkies,” knocked William Everson (also black) senseless in Cow Bay with a missile from a slingshot and then robbed him of a “five franc piece and a shilling.” Prosecutors in 1847 charged two other African Americans, Sam Rice and George Morgan, with assaulting a man from New Jersey while he walked on Orange Street, dragging him into an alley, and robbing him of eight dollars, his coat, and boots. Women could use violence to perpetrate crimes as well. Frances Wilson, a “colored woman,” lured a man into a building on Little Water Street, then knocked him down and took his coat and a five-dollar bill. The man tried to hide his sterling silver pocketwatch, but Wilson “bit his clenched fist to get it out of his hand.” The trial judge sentenced her to ten years in Sing Sing prison, probably because of the violence involved and her status as a repeat offender. In contrast, when Ann Gannon assaulted Bridget Fitzpatrick in front of 49 Mott Street and “knocked some of her front teeth out,” she merely received a suspended sentence.37
Violence against women seems to have been especially common in Five Points. James Adams stabbed fellow African-American Margaret Turner in the back at her home at 76 Orange Street in 1853 because he was jealous of the attention she paid to other men. In 1872, a drunken Bayard Street man shot to death his live-in “lover” of two weeks because she went out with friends despite his objections. The Times described the murderer as a habitual thief while the victim was a twenty-year-old “waitress in a low concert saloon on Chatham-street.” Their tenement at 61 Bayard was “a resort for the vilest type of low people.”38
Marriage provided no guarantee of safety from the opposite sex. Spousal abuse was apparently common, though it was almost never reported to the police. In one of the few such cases described in the press, the Tribune noted the arrest of both Lewis Vatty Sr. and Jr. Police found the son “beating the father without mercy” because he had discovered his father “beating the wife.” One Five Points girl insisted on leaving midway through Sunday school class each week to be sure her drunken father was not battering her mother again. He was finally jailed. A more common situation was probably the one a Times reporter found in the basement lodging house at 35 Baxter Street in 1859. The keeper of the establishment “had been ‘banging his wife, and hit [a lodger] a lick sideways that almost killed her.’ The wretch had kicked another girl so severely that she had gone to bed early in the day and not got up since.” Despite the violence directed against her, the man’s wife defended her husband, saying her “old man was a little wild when he was in liquor” but was otherwise a good mate. Given the utter dependence of Five Points wives (especially those with children) on the incomes of their husbands, most would have hesitated to press charges.39
Rape was another violent crime against women that was rarely recorded. Perhaps the close-knit nature of the Five Points community discouraged such a crime. Or, like spousal abuse, it may have gone unreported. The only two cases from Five Points found in a survey of antebellum New York newspapers and a sampling of indictment records both involved the rape of Irish-American women by non-Irish men. One involved Bridget Heney, a recently arrived Irish immigrant residing at 13 Mulberry Street. Heney had just lost her position as a live-in domestic servant and could not have been very happy as she tried to find her way back to Five Points on a Sunday evening in late January 1852. Her husband Patrick was still in Ireland, expecting her to earn money to pay for his passage to New York. According to her subsequent deposition, she was on Centre Street between Broome and Grand when she asked a passerby for directions to Mulberry Street. The young man, butcher John Holberton, convinced her to come inside and warm up before completing her journey. Holberton led Heney up a flight of stairs to the Centre Street Market militia drill room, where he threw her to the ground and raped her, telling her that he had plenty of cash and “would let her have some of the money” afterwards if she did not resist. When Holberton had finished, Heney (according to her own account) asked for the promised money. Holberton asked how much she wanted. Heney demanded two dollars, but Holberton refused to give her more than one. Holberton said he would give her the money downstairs, but before he could do so four or more of Holberton’s friends arrived, forced Heney back inside, and raped her as well, one after the other. The men then literally dragged her outside and left her on a doorstep.
Police made little progress in apprehending Heney’s assailants until a week later, when she told then that “she had received information” enabling her to identify five of them. The police immediately arrested the men and charged them with rape. They were native-born Americans ranging in age from seventeen to twenty-three, and all worked at the Centre Street Market (four as butchers and one as an oyster seller). Two of the five, twenty-three-year-old Jacob Evans and seventeen-year-old John Quitman, eventually pleaded guilty to lesser charges of assault and battery. Prosecutors dropped charges against a third. In late February, the Herald reported that Holberton and the fifth suspect would soon stand trial, but none was ever described in the New York press, and the indictment papers do not indicate a resolution.40
In rare cases, women were the perpetrators of serious crime. Incidents of infanticide, for example, occurred sporadically in Five Points throughout the antebellum period. In 1841, passersby found a newborn baby dead on Anthony Street. In 1849, the Herald reported the case of a lifeless baby girl discovered “in the sink at the dwelling house No. 6 Doyer street. From the appearance of the child when found, it was evident that foul means had been used, as, around the neck of the little innocent, a cord had been tied tight, causing strangulation.” The building’s residents told police that the mother was probably Eliza Rafferty, a thirty-year-old Irish immigrant with a husband and child living in Liverpool. On entering her apartment, the officers found Rafferty “sitting very composedly in a chair in her room, making a dress, that being her profession.” After first denying that she had given birth to the child, she then admitted it, but insisted that “the child was dead before it was thrown into the sink.” Police took Rafferty to jail to await an autopsy by the coroner, who ruled that the baby had been born alive and subsequently strangled to death.41
Much more common was child abandonment. In 1867, the Five Points Mission took in a one-month-old baby whose mother had asked a neighbor to watch it “for a few minutes” while she went to the store. The mother never returned. Three years later, a mother offered to buy kindling and food for an old woman if she would watch her baby while she shopped. This mother disappeared as well. In rare cases, parents even abandoned older children. Mary and Maggie Sherman were abandoned by their father at Mary McCarty’s boardinghouse at 54 Mulberry Street in June 1860. After hearing “nothing of him,” McCarty gave the children to the mission. In September 1856, a Five Points woman brought another abandoned child, eleven year-old William Morton, to the mission. He had lived in the rear tenement at 38 Baxter until the previous spring, when his parents had moved to California and left young William behind. Since his abandonment, William had “got his food by picking papers in the street and selling them at the junk shops. Slept in entries and carts.” Cases such as William’s were not common. For every child or infant abandoned in Five Points, there were dozens brought for adoption to the Five Points Mission and House of Industry by tearful mothers.42
Despite oft-told stories to the contrary, murder was—like infanticide and child abandonment—another rare crime at Five Points. The murder rate did rise dramatically in the prewar decade, however, as handguns became more widely available. As many New Yorkers were convicted of murder from 1852 to 1854 as had been found guilty of homicide in the entire 1840s.43
A significant number of murders involved the drunkenness of either the murderer or his victim. On June 12, 1853, for example, Patrick McNulty of Bayard Street and a number of fellow Five Pointers decided to go “skylarking,” a drinking binge in which the inebriated participants insult, harass, and create mayhem wherever they go. The group had already been drinking heavily, first at a saloon on Bayard Street, then at another on Mulberry, and then at a third on Centre before entering the bar of Herman Doscher, also on Centre Street. McNulty and his companions stood atop the bar demanding drinks and threatening the other customers. They also chased Doscher’s wife into her residence in the back of the house, forcing her to lock herself in a room and eventually to climb out the window to escape them. While the group ran amok, the least drunk among them announced that this was all innocent skylarking and promised to pay for everything the others drank and destroyed.
Doscher finally succeeded in chasing the rowdy gang out of his watering hole, at which point the revelers proceeded south to the Jenny Lind saloon, an oyster cellar at 48 Centre run by Doscher’s brother John. Although the establishment ostensibly specialized in mollusks, a neighbor testified that its proprietor primarily “sold liquor and kept girls.” The skylarkers arrived at John Doscher’s den around midnight, started a fight, and invaded the bedrooms in search of courtesans and their lovers. Apparently fearing for his safety and that of his wife, John Doscher found his pistol, and when the revelers refused to desist, he shot McNulty three times—once in the head. The hearty Irishman survived, leaving the hospital after only four days, but he began complaining of headaches a few weeks later and died soon thereafter. Doscher was charged with murder, but despite the testimony of McNulty’s friends that they had merely been engaged in some harmless fun, the jury found him not guilty.44
Although alcohol played a role in many Five Points murders, other killings involved love-related jealousies. When African-American Charles Thomas “saw his paramour in close conversation with another black man called Henry Ford” behind the tenement at 53 Orange Street in 1846, Thomas ran up and stabbed Ford, killing him “instantly.” Two decades later, twenty-one-year-old iron molder William Connell was accompanying two women into the Live and Let Live Saloon on the Bowery at Bayard when Richard Casey of 80 Mott Street shook some money under their noses, apparently in an attempt to embarrass Connell for consorting with prostitutes. When Connell complained of the insult, Casey knocked his hat into the gutter and then shot him as he stooped to pick it up. A jury found Casey guilty of second-degree murder, and the judge sentenced him to life in prison.45
Some Five Pointers needed little justification to kill a man, as the 1851 case of Aaron Stookey demonstrates. Stookey “kept a drinking cellar in Anthony street” near Little Water that was frequented, according to the Herald, “by the lowest grade of the male and female residents” of Five Points. On the night of April 17, Stookey and another man were passing in front of Crown’s Grocery when African-American Edward “Teddy” Moore of Broome Street bumped into Stookey’s friend. According to the testimony of one of Moore’s companions (an African American who lived in Cow Bay), Moore begged his pardon but Stookey exclaimed to his friend, “‘why don’t you kill the black son of a b——?’” Not waiting for a response, Stookey drew his own knife and stabbed Moore in the side. Moore died minutes later.
Given that Stookey had also pulled a knife on a black man a few days before, prosecutors today might label Moore’s killing a hate crime. But in the trial that took place just fourteen days after the slaying, Stookey’s attorney tried to play upon the presumed prejudices of the all-white jury, pointing out that all four prosecution witnesses—each a Five Points African American—were convicted criminals. The most damning testimony, the attorney noted, had come from a witness who had told the district attorney that he had never been in prison, when in fact he had served three terms on Blackwell’s Island and one at Sing Sing. The defense also suggested that Moore had bumped against Stookey to pick his pocket. A policeman testified that bumping was not a common pickpocket’s device, but he did admit that Moore was a known thief and “a very bad character.” To their credit, however, the jurors were not swayed by the defense tactics and returned a guilty verdict in just fifteen minutes. Stookey was hanged in the Tombs courtyard.46
Ethnicity, prostitution, and politics each played a role in the most talked about antebellum Five Points murder, the killing of brothel keeper Wilhelm Decker by aspiring politico John Glass. The twenty-three-year-old Glass was well known in the Sixth Ward, having served in 1858 as one of the district’s constables (an elected post equivalent to that of a ward sheriff) and as foreman of Engine Company No. 21. On the evening of January 16, 1859, just days after relinquishing his post as constable, Glass rang Decker’s doorbell at 21 Elm Street (now Lafayette). Accompanying Glass were twenty-four-year-old James Higgins (the Herald described the two of them as “active politicians”), twenty-two-year-old Constable James Loftus, and Glass’s brother James, who ran the saloon next door at 19 Elm. When Decker opened the door, the four men burst in and began smashing lamps and furniture. The assailants then rushed out, but when Decker closed the door, John Glass fired a shot through it, killing him. Meanwhile, Richard Owens, a Brooklyn resident passing by the crime scene, began scuffling with Higgins on the street, prompting James Glass to shoot Owens. Like Decker, Owens died at the scene.
“The excitement in the Sixth ward was intense,” commented the Herald, as word of the murders spread through the neighborhood. Yet despite the feverish speculation and various trials, no clear motive for the slayings ever emerged. Testimony established that John Glass had frequently visited the Decker house in the past, apparently in the company of prostitutes, and one witness implied that Glass attacked the house because Decker had turned him away earlier in the evening. Although such a rebuff hardly seems to justify murder, Glass was also known to have a violent temper. Prosecutors had previously charged him with assault on several occasions, which may have accounted for his expulsion from Engine Company No. 21 a few months before the murders. Or Glass and his accomplices might have been punishing Decker for failing to pay protection money for his brothel. Whatever the case, John Glass and James Higgins were convicted of manslaughter in the death of Decker and sentenced to twenty-year jail terms. James Glass, also found guilty of manslaughter, received a life sentence. Yet due to the Glass brothers’ political connections, John served only five years and James only six before receiving pardons from the governor.47
As the Glass case demonstrates, law enforcement officials were sometimes no more law-abiding than the criminals they were paid to pursue. Some policemen refused to search for stolen property without a prepaid reward. Others demanded payoffs from the owners of brothels and dance halls. A number of policemen were “said to have been engaged in a regular system of levying contributions on the keepers of disorderly houses in the districts they represent,” threatening indictment or arrest if they did not “fork over” a fifty- to hundred-dollar monthly payment. Officers became so brazen in their demands, reported the Tribune in 1855, that despite the risks of publicly airing their grievances, bordello operators in the Fourth Ward complained about the shakedowns to Mayor Fernando Wood. Some corrupt policemen must have extorted protection money from Five Points bawdy-house keepers as well.48
Police corruption resulted in part from the character of the men on the force. Some earned the coveted posts through party loyalty, but others snared a spot by bribing local political leaders. One Sixth Warder promised around midcentury that he could deliver a police appointment for twenty-five dollars, which he would convey to the appropriate aldermen. As a result, complained the head of the fire department, “convicts, freshly emerged from the dungeon cells of Blackwell’s Island, are appointed by Aldermen as policemen.” Others used elected law enforcement positions to extort graft. Writing in 1860, a newspaper columnist recalled the Fourth Ward’s infamous constable, “Porgie Joe,” who spent liberally to assure his nomination by all the district’s Democratic factions. “It would be a bad go for a dance house to refuse to send up to Joe his weekly allowance,” stated the reporter, “as a failure would quickly be followed up by an indictment, or a midnight arrest.” Although Joe’s authority ostensibly ended at the Fourth Ward’s borders, “on the Points he had his tools and spies” as well, “and I have no doubt, his receipts per day were often more than a hundred dollars.” The writer remembered, for example, a gang of young thieves with a “rendezvous . . . in Mulberry street, near Cross.” They robbed empty apartments while the inhabitants were at work, taking money and jewelry out of locked bureaus. If police captured one of the crooks, the gang summoned Joe, who would put “the officer making the arrest to sleep with a fifty,” receiving his quid pro quo “in a rake with the first good swag.”49
The extent of police corruption in Five Points is impossible to determine. The countless press accounts of neighborhood officers sustaining serious injuries attempting to apprehend crime suspects indicate that many (and probably most) took their work seriously, especially when violent offenders were involved. An 1849 Herald story reported that a Sixth Ward policeman, while taking a prisoner into custody, “was violently attacked by a Five Points thief, nicknamed Monkey, who gave him a blow with a sling shot in the mouth, displacing some of his teeth, and otherwise injuring him severely.” Yet after Five Points native Joseph Dowling rose through the Sixth Ward’s police ranks to become the district’s police justice, he complained from the bench that too many petty thieves escaped prosecution due to police payoffs, a charge a department veteran would not have made lightly. Police corruption—especially involving the vice industry—would remain a significant problem both in Five Points and citywide throughout the nineteenth century.50
One might imagine that the press exaggerated the extent of crime in Five Points in order to sell papers. But arrest records confirm that Five Points was particularly crime-ridden. Excluding the three downtown commercial wards, where there were few inhabitants and many warehouses to be robbed, the Sixth Ward led the city in per capita arrests. The arrest rate there was two to three times higher than in most other wards. Yet the rate for violent crime in Five Points was not drastically higher than in other parts of the city. Much of the Sixth Ward’s elevated arrest rate derived from three misdemeanors: public intoxication, vagrancy, and disorderly conduct. Some of those arraigned on the latter two charges must have been prostitutes, but women were arrested as often as men for all three crimes. Even in 1869, when the bulk of the sex trade had moved uptown, the Sixth Ward was still the only place in the city where police arrested virtually as many women as men.51
“IF YOU LIVED IN THIS PLACE YOU WOULD ASK FOR WHISKEY INSTEAD OF MILK”
From Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” in Georgian London to the crackhouses of late-twentieth-century American ghettos, the abuse of stimulants has plagued the Western world’s impoverished souls. Five Points was no different. Alcoholism destroyed the lives of hundreds of residents, impoverishing some, driving spouses and children away from others, leading many to jail, and countless others to their deaths through alcohol-related illnesses, injuries, or crimes. Given our appreciation of the anti-Irish bigotry harbored by so many Five Points charitable workers, it is tempting to disregard their many stories of drunkenness. Yet descriptions of alcohol-related crimes and tragedies appear throughout the documentary record—in sources written by Protestants and Catholics, by outsiders as well as Five Pointers themselves. The pervasiveness of alcoholism in Five Points played a significant role in shaping life there.
Drunkenness was everywhere. George Appo remembered that in the alley between the front and rear buildings at 14 Baxter Street where he lived as a boy, “it was a common sight to see every morning under the wagon sheds at least six to ten drunken men and women sleeping off the effects of . . . five cent rum.” Many of the neighborhood’s basement boardinghouses were filled with inebriates. When the wooden tenement across the street at 15 Baxter burned down in 1863, tenants stated that the three residents who perished could have escaped the burning building “had they not been under the influence of liquor.” As to who started the fire, the tenants’ list of suspects consisted of the drunken African-American couple on the ground floor and the drunken Irishwoman who lived above them, all of whom survived. Five Pointers’ complaints about their neighbors’ habitual drunkenness could be repeated ad infinitum. It is impossible to determine the exact extent of alcohol abuse, but it seems clear that hundreds of Five Points residents found it painful to go a day without a drink.52
Some area alcoholics asked workers at the mission and the House of Industry for help sobering up. “Harriet Bertram came in and said she wanted to reform,” wrote one of the mission’s employees in the group’s logbook in 1856. The thirty-five-year-old Indiana native “was in a state of intoxication at the time, and after being sent up to bed, had a very severe attack of the horrors.” After two weeks without liquor, the mission found her work as a domestic servant in Brooklyn. Others with similarly noble intentions left the charitable groups after a day or two, unable to cope with the physical and emotional symptoms of withdrawal.53
Children often suffered terribly due to their parents’ alcohol abuse. “Last winter, my father drank so hard that we [ran out of money and] had to leave our room and move into a stable just before the heavy snow fell,” eight-year-old Mary Jane Tobin told officials at the mission. The stable roof had large holes in it, “so the snow came down on us and we were almost frozen; but we wrapped us up in an old blanket and tried to keep warm the best we could.” Mary Jane’s older brother eventually took her to live with an aunt on Mulberry Street. Children without older siblings to care for them might fare even worse than poor Mary Jane. House of Industry agents found a small child starving to death in a rear tenement on Worth Street in 1859 because her mother spent almost every penny on liquor. The mother had pawned all the family possessions except a broken table. The House of Industry agents fed the girl and returned her to her mother, but a few weeks later a policeman brought her back because the neglect continued. A New York street urchin recalled frequently seeing “little children starving to death for something to eat, while their parents [were] lying dead drunk.”54
Alcohol abuse by adults forced their offspring to take on responsibilities no child should have had to bear. An eight-year-old Five Points boy once went as long as three days with only a bit of bread to eat as his alcoholic mother became increasingly ill. Each day, she sent him to pawn another piece of furniture or clothing so he could buy her more brandy. By the time she died, she was completely nude. The House of Industry magazine reported in 1857 that two youngsters living next door to Crown’s Grocery “came crying to the school—for mother was dead.” The two adult boarders sharing the apartment with them ought to have summoned the authorities, but one lay on the floor in a drunken stupor, while the other had recently been sent to prison for habitual public drunkenness. As to the deceased woman, she had died “from the effects of long-continued intoxication.” Some children paid the ultimate price for their parents’ alcoholism. One little girl was forced to steal to pay for her mother’s drinking habit. Police caught her one day, and while awaiting trial in the Tombs, where prisoners often had to build their own fires to keep themselves warm, the helpless girl apparently froze to death.55
Even children drank to excess in Five Points. The House of Industry discovered children drinking liquor to such an extent that it organized a temperance club exclusively for youngsters. “Little boys of eight have been found intoxicated in the infant class,” reported mission workers a decade later. Many children got their introduction to alcohol when asked to “rush the growler” for their mothers or fathers. This chore involved bringing a pail (the “growler”) downstairs to the nearest saloon and returning it filled with beer. Youngsters growing up in Five Points (especially in Irish families) were constantly surrounded by the sights, sounds, and smells of drinking and drunkenness.56
When a health official asked an inebriated rear tenement dweller why she drank, she replied that “if you lived in this place you would ask for whiskey instead of milk.” But such a response tells only part of the story. The Germans, Polish Jews, and Italians who lived in Five Points in equally squalid conditions did not suffer from alcoholism to the extent that the Irish did. Citywide statistics from later in the nineteenth century suggest that Irishmen in New York were 75 percent more likely to die of alcohol-related illnesses than their English and Welsh counterparts, while for women the ratio was three to one. There must have been cultural or genetic factors at work. The Irish were certainly aware of their propensity to alcoholism before they arrived in America, even though many had been too poor in Europe to afford liquor except on rare occasions. Recall that Palmerston immigrant Pat McGowan had warned in one of his first letters back home to County Sligo that because liquor was so cheap and plentiful in America, his countrymen who could not resist the temptation to drink should not join him in New York. The Irish journalist John F. Maguire likewise attributed the Irish propensity to drunkenness to the omnipresence of liquor in the United States.57
But circumstances other than Five Points’ concentration of Irish immigrants also account for the high rate of alcoholism there. Many alcoholics probably chose to live in Five Points. Its seedy saloons and groceries undoubtedly sold some of the most inexpensive liquor in town. Cheap rents in its run-down tenements allowed drinkers to devote every possible cent to buying liquor. Indigent inebriates could also probably find quiet, out-of-the-way alleys to sleep off binges more easily in Five Points than in other neighborhoods, where police would be more likely to awaken or arrest sleeping drunks. In addition, while newcomers without a propensity to drink could save money and move to better neighborhoods, alcoholic immigrants who could not work regularly were doomed to remain in Five Points indefinitely.
Five Points’ reputation as a hotbed of vice and crime gradually changed over time. In 1828, the city’s grand jury singled out the neighborhood as “a rendezvous for thieves and prostitutes.” A generation later, New Yorkers had begun to reconsider their perceptions of the notorious district. George Foster wrote in 1850 that Five Points was much safer than it had been ten or twenty years earlier. Many of his contemporaries agreed. When South Carolinian William H. Bobo toured the Points with a police escort a year or two later, the guide told him that there was no danger visiting the neighborhood anymore and that “the larger lights, in the way of stealing and other concomitant evils, have generally gone out [of the district], and are now hanging about Water-street.” Yet in the same year, the district attorney complained that more muggings occurred in Five Points than in any other portion of the city.58
It appears certain that in the 1820s and ’30s, lawlessness plagued Five Points as virtually no other section of the city. Fighting, prostitution, and violent assaults were rampant. By the 1850s, however, public demands that the police suppress blatant lawbreakers, combined with an increased neighborhood presence by religious groups, helped reduce the crime rate significantly. Five Points probably continued to outpace most other portions of the city in what would today be termed “quality-of-life crimes,” such as public drunkenness, public solicitation of prostitution, and petty theft. But in the category of violent crime—such as assault, rape, and murder—Five Points by the eve of the Civil War was no better or worse than other working-class New York neighborhoods.
Religious groups deserve much of the credit for the reduction in crime and suffering. Ever since the 1820s, religious activists had attempted to convert Five Points’ worst “sinners,” passing out tracts in saloons and tenements and even conducting Bible readings in front of the neighborhood’s most notorious brothels. Yet few Five Pointers had responded. Beginning in 1850, however, Protestant reformers tried a new approach. In addition to religious counseling, they would offer struggling Five Pointers job training and placement, hot meals and clothing, instruction in hygiene and disease prevention, and even a place to stay when the money ran out or an abusive spouse became too much to bear. The institutions these reformers created could not eliminate poverty in Five Points, and some of their methods—such as taking hundreds of indigent Five Points children from their parents to be placed in adoptive homes in the Midwest—seem heartless and cruel by today’s standards. Nonetheless, these innovative Protestant efforts, as well as the Catholic countermeasures they precipitated, significantly reduced suffering and crime in Five Points and played the key role in ending the neighborhood’s long reign as the city’s leading center of vice and lawlessness.
