Religion and Reform
BY 1850, the most common explanation for the widely perceived “moral corruption” in Five Points was the lack of religious influence in the neighborhood. “No church edifice lured the besotted denizens of the Points from their reeking, . . . filth-streaming rookeries,” commented one journalist as he looked back at the antebellum years. A minister in 1853 labeled Five Points an “idolatrous, Church-forsaken district.” The number of religious institutions that had abandoned Five Points in the years before 1853 was indeed shocking. As recently as 1846, the neighborhood had served as home to a Baptist church on lower Mulberry Street, an Episcopal house of worship on Mott Street, a Swedenborgian church on Pearl Street, as well as an African-American congregation on Orange Street and a Welsh Baptist chapel on upper Mott. By 1855, each had abandoned Five Points. Neighborhood inhabitants “have already, by their peculiar repulsiveness, driven several of our most respectable Christian churches out of their borders,” commented one minister in explaining the exodus. They “have never read or heard the Bible read, and know as little of its teachings as the most degraded heathen.”9
“NO MAN CAN BECOME A MEMBER
HEREAFTER WHAT WAS A RUSSIAN SUBJECT”
Of course, “Church-forsaken” was in the eyes of the beholder. If the Protestant churches abandoned ship, at least for a while, their Jewish and Catholic counterparts jumped aboard. For a time in the pre–Civil War period, more Jewish congregations met in the vicinity of Five Points than in the entire remainder of the city. The second, third, fourth, and fifth synagogues established in New York operated in the Sixth Ward during the 1820s, ’30s, and ’40s. The early history of the fourth, Shaarey Zedek, sheds light both on the tensions within New York’s early Jewish community and the difficult choices Eastern European Jews faced as they wavered between loyalty to their religious traditions and assimilation in a predominantly Christian nation.10
Shaarey Zedek was founded in 1839 by Polish Jews who felt uncomfortable in the city’s other synagogues, which were dominated by Jews of Western European origin. The congregation initially held services in an apartment on the top floor of the tenement at 472 Pearl Street, but within a year moved to a more spacious room above the New York Dispensary, a free medical clinic at the corner of Centre and White Streets.11
Shaarey Zedek was at first more receptive to intermarriage than New York’s other synagogues. When the city’s second oldest congregation, Bnai Jeshurun, refused to convert one member’s non-Jewish wife to Judaism, he tried to complete the process himself by sneaking her into its mikvah, a ritual bath for women. He was caught and expelled from the congregation. He joined Anshe Chesed, the city’s third synagogue, but it also refused to recognize his wife as Jewish. The desperate man then became a founding member of Shaarey Zedek. Its leaders declared his wife (as well as the non-Jewish wives of other founding members) officially converted and full congregation members. Yet even Shaarey Zedek’s relatively liberal congregation apparently felt pangs of guilt about its decision. Thereafter, the synagogue’s board declared, Shaarey Zedek would only certify conversions approved by a rabbi.12
The congregation also struggled with the observance of the Sabbath. Many of its members operated their businesses on Saturdays, a prime shopping day for most New Yorkers. The temple’s leaders tried to encourage members to keep the Sabbath holy, decreeing in 1841 that no member could become an officer of the congregation “if he keeps open his Shop on Sabbath.” But the Five Pointers who dominated Shaarey Zedek apparently valued business over religious fidelity, as a few years later the rule was no longer enforced. In fact, Shaarey Zedek had trouble attracting men to services at all. Like other New York synagogues, it resorted to hiring “minyan men,” Jews paid to attend synagogue to ensure that ten men—the minimum required under Orthodox law—appeared at each service. But not all men were welcome. In 1844, its board of trustees declared “that no man can become a member hereafter what was a Russian subject except which are members at present—they the Russians are allowed to be seatholders only.”13
New York synagogues relied so heavily on minyan men in part because ethnic rivalries and liturgical controversies continually prompted secessions from the existing congregations. In 1843, a group left Shaarey Zedek to form Beth Israel. In 1845, those seeking to exclude all Sabbath breakers from their midst created Shaarey Tefilah at 67 Franklin Street. Another splinter group founded Beth Abraham in the tenement at 63 Mott Street in 1850, the same year that Shaarey Zedek moved across Chatham Square to 38 Henry Street. In 1852, a dozen Russian Jews formed their own Five Points congregation, Beth Hamidrash, in an apartment on the top floor of the tenement at 83 Bayard Street. A year later, as membership increased (including German and Polish Jews), the congregation moved to 514 Pearl Street, paying twenty-five dollars per month to lease the top floor of Monroe Hall, Matthew Brennan’s saloon. Beth Abraham already occupied space in the same building. The last Five Points congregation created in the prewar years was founded in 1853, when Polish members of Beth Hamidrash seceded to form Beth Hamidrash Livne Yisrael Yelide Polin (“House of Study for the Children of Israel Born in Poland”), located by 1860 at 8 Baxter Street among the Jewish-run second-hand clothing shops. Though a number of congregations would remain in Five Points until the end of the nineteenth century, most Jews were beginning to settle east of the Bowery on the Lower East Side, and they brought their synagogues with them.14
“THIS IS EMPHATICALLY ‘MISSION GROUND’”
The rise of Judaism in Five Points did not herald a burst of reform, because these congregations were devoted to worship. “Reformers,” in those days, were almost always Protestants, especially members of proselytizing denominations. Beginning in the 1830s, a variety of evangelical Christian groups attempted to win converts in Five Points. The New York City Tract Society distributed its literature there, while members of the American Female Moral Reform Society handed out tracts, read Bible passages on the streets, and urged those entering brothels to repent.15
Almost from the start, a split between spiritual and worldly assistance rent the reformers. The American Female Moral Reform Society began giving out food and clothing in 1839, with their missionary, Samuel B. Halliday, sometimes seeking jobs for the unemployed and shelter for the homeless. But the Tract Society, in order to differentiate clearly between its religious and temporal work, in 1843 created a separate organization, the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP), to distribute aid to the needy. The AICP quickly became the most important and influential organization of its kind in nineteenth-century New York. Its executive secretary, Robert H. Hartley, believed that “the chief cause of [pauperism’s] increase among us is the injudicious dispensation of relief.” According to Hartley, “the most clamorous and worthless” beggars secured the lion’s share of New Yorkers’ charity, while “the most modest and deserving” received none. Consequently, he instituted an elaborate system for the equitable distribution of relief. Hartley divided the city into hundreds of relief districts, each with its own “visitor.” Anyone seeking charity from his organization had to submit to an investigation by a visitor, who would inspect the applicant’s home and query the neighbors about his or her employment history and drinking habits. Those passing muster would then be added to the association’s register of “worthy” poor, who could receive food, clothing, or fuel from one of its distribution centers. Hartley asked that any New Yorker hoping to relieve poverty should not give one cent to beggars on the street, but instead donate to the association, which would distinguish the frauds from the truly needy. Hartley’s methods were adopted by most charities in the Civil War era.16
Soon several charities emerged that focused their efforts solely on New York’s most infamous slum. Like the Tract Society and the Female Reform Society, these groups believed that religious renewal was the key to any temporal improvement in Five Pointers’ lives, and that any distribution of food or clothing should be rigorously rationed. The first was the Five Points Union Mission, so called because a coalition of Protestant denominations funded and operated it. Founded in the 1840s and located at 42 Orange Street, the Union Mission opened its doors for only a few hours each week.17
Recognizing that the Union Mission could not effect significant change in Five Points, the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church established in 1848 a continuously operating mission with a resident staff to offer religious services and seek conversions. The married middle- and upper-class women who ran the society did not live in their missions—paid “missionaries” assumed that role. But the “ladies” did occupy all the positions on the institution’s board of directors, serve as “managers” of their various missions, visit neighborhood residents in an effort to convert them to Methodism, and administer the various philanthropic programs eventually organized by the society.18
Although the society originally intended to locate its mission on Centre Street, it ultimately rented a former “gin shop” in the heart of Five Points at 1 Little Water Street, directly across from the Old Brewery and Paradise Park. “This is emphatically ‘mission ground,’” exclaimed the society optimistically when it announced its intention to create the Five Points Mission, which began operations in May 1850. During the mission’s first weeks of operation, its organizers were shocked by the neighborhood’s poverty, public drunkenness, and prostitution. One mission “lady” present at the group’s first Sunday service said of the motley adults and unruly children in attendance that it was “a more vivid representation of hell than [I] had ever imagined.” One year later it was proudly noted that the churchgoers could now be kept orderly “without the aid of the Police.”19
Luckily for the mission, its organizers had selected as resident missionary Lewis M. Pease, an innovative and persevering minister who was willing to go to almost any lengths to improve life in Five Points. Thirty years old in 1850, when he arrived in New York with his wife, Ann, and two-year-old adopted daughter, Pease had previously served as minister of a Methodist church in Lenox, Massachusetts. A year after his arrival, when Pease and the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society were feuding bitterly, its “presiding Elder” nonetheless conceded that “Mr. Pease is one of the most indefatigable and daring missionaries I have ever seen.”20
The dispute between Pease and the Missionary Society arose from a disagreement over the mission’s goals. The mission’s organizers sought merely to convert sinners to Methodism and expected Pease to utilize, in his words, only “the instrumentalities . . . ordinarily used in the awakening and conversion of sinners.” These included visiting potential converts, explaining to them the “errors” of Catholicism and the superiority of Methodism with its emphasis on the biblical “Word of God,” praying with them, cajoling them, even shaming them. Yet Pease found that these traditional methods of proselytism had little impact on Five Pointers. “When a Tract or a Bible was offered to these unfortunates, they would ask for bread,” Pease recalled two years later, “and when warned of the consequences of their lives, and urged to return to the path of honesty, sobriety, and virtue, they would reply: ‘We do not live this life because we love it, but because we cannot get out of it.’” Pease informed the society’s board that he could not convert Five Pointers unless the mission found some way, in the words of Pease’s subsequent benefactors, “to remove the compulsory alternative of vice or starvation, and make a virtuous life by honest labor possible.” The mission board replied that if Pease wanted to offer Five Pointers non-spiritual aid, he would have to do so on his own time and at his own expense.21
The headstrong Pease was determined to try. Locating a clothing manufacturer willing to supply him with material if he would vouch for its safe return, Pease hired destitute Five Points women to sew shirts for him. According to the ministers who later financed Pease’s efforts, the first thirty or so women appeared for work in the mission chapel “in all the filthiness and raggedness of their every-day condition, and what was worse, in the disorderly, drunken, profane and savage habits which none had ever taught them to lay aside.” Pease consequently established strict ground rules for his employees. He required them to come to work sober, to pledge to abstain completely from the use of alcohol while employed by him, and to “attend regularly some place of worship on the Sabbath.”22
Even with these restrictions, Pease later recalled, his workers’ “first efforts at the use of the needle . . . were truly discouraging. Many of the shirts were so poorly made that the slightest force would pull them to pieces; others had to be ripped and re-made.” In order not to humiliate his workers, Pease paid for the ruined shirts himself. Meanwhile, the mission board became increasingly resentful of all the time and effort involved, complaining, as he later recalled, that “it illy comported with the dignity of a minister, to be found in his shirt-sleeves, superintending a workshop—giving to such characters shirts and buttons.” But Pease pressed on, expanding his operation within just a few weeks to employ one hundred indigent women.23
Pease’s employees found it hard to abide by his rules when they returned home each evening to their saloon-infested tenements, so Pease next decided that the only way to isolate his charges from these degrading influences was to rent an entire building in which to lodge his workers and to exclude from it the bordellos and grog shops that flourished elsewhere. Finding no large tenements available, Pease secured the assistance of the district attorney and two police court justices, who agreed to arrest and evict the brothel keepers in two houses on Little Water Street adjoining the mission. In late August 1850, Pease chose thirty of his female employees—“mostly women of bad repute”—to live in the two houses, charging them $1.25 per week for room and board. The mission board refused to finance any of it. In the winter and spring of 1851, Pease’s personal financial burden increased still further when he rented additional houses (increasing his “family” of tenants to 120) rather than allow brothel keepers to occupy the three-story wooden tenements surrounding his own.24
He was a one-man employer and landlord—and school superintendent. Another dispute between the Missionary Society and Pease developed over the issue of a mission school. The mission operated a Sunday school, but Pease told the board in August 1850 that his efforts to uplift Five Pointers would fail unless the mission operated a non-denominational school on weekdays as well. Otherwise, argued the minister, destitute women with small children would not be able to work, while the older offspring of those who did work would succumb to the district’s immoral influences when left unattended. The mission’s board replied that it could not afford to operate a “day school,” which, in any case, lay outside its purview of promoting religion. Pease then sought outside funding, returning to the board a month later to ask if the city’s other denominations could have a voice in the operation of a mission day school if these outsiders financed it. Again, the board rejected his proposal, so the infuriated Pease started the school on his own. In late September, just as he was about to open a bare-bones classroom, Pease discovered an Episcopal woman who had raised $700 to start a school in Five Points but had never carried her plans to fruition. He used the money to buy slates, maps, a stove, furniture, and a much-needed new coat of paint. Sensing that Pease would succeed despite them, the Missionary Society members begrudgingly hired a “female assistant missionary” to work within the school, though after six months Pease financed her salary as well. He could soon boast an attendance of one hundred students each day.25
By this point, Pease and the mission had manifestly different agendas. In March 1851, when asked at the Missionary Society’s board meeting how many Five Pointers he had won over to Methodism, he could not cite a single conversion. But Pease did excitedly report that he planned to combine his various charitable projects into a single enterprise, to be called the “Industrial House for the Friendless, the Inebriate, and the Outcast.” When the National Temperance Society agreed in mid-1851 to finance it, Pease resigned his mission post to devote himself to his humanitarian endeavors, which his new backers renamed the Five Points Temperance House. The mission could save souls; he would provide schools, shelter, and employment opportunities. Only ten months later, however, a philanthropic takeover threw his work into jeopardy. The New-York City Temperance Alliance assumed control of the National Temperance Society and immediately withdrew its financial support for his operations. By then, he was so well known within reform circles that supporters were ready to step forward; the Rev. Gregory T. Bedell of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension (which had been financing Pease’s day school) mobilized New York’s philanthropic community to save his fledgling organization. Bedell found businessmen and ministers willing to fund Pease’s efforts and act as an informal board of trustees. In May 1852, they renamed his organization the Five Points House of Industry.26
Not wanting their former minister to upstage them, the mission’s leaders in early 1852 announced to the press their own bold plan—to buy the infamous Old Brewery tenement and make it the society’s headquarters. Sixteen thousand dollars seemed a small price to pay to eliminate from the neighborhood that “great landmark of vice and degradation, the haunt of crime and the home of misery.” After taking possession, however, mission officials found that the building could not be renovated economically, and instead decided to demolish it. Criminals from all over the city supposedly visited the deserted structure in the weeks before the wreckers arrived, hoping to find bulging sacks of stolen booty hidden by neighborhood thieves in the floors and walls. Thousands of law-abiding New Yorkers came to see the Old Brewery as well before its destruction, lighting their way with candles and torches provided by the mission. “Though the inmates had departed,” wrote one of the mission ladies, “the very ‘stones in the wall seemed to cry out’” with the “echoes of wailings and wild revelry” that had once occurred there. A number of artists recorded the scene for posterity.27
Though few city residents lamented the Old Brewery’s demise, controversy developed over the city’s financing of the project. In October 1852, the board of aldermen voted 13 to 1 to provide $1,000 of the $36,000 the mission would eventually spend to purchase the property, raze the Old Brewery, and construct a new building. A leading Catholic newspaper, the New York Freeman’s Journal, bitterly condemned the proposed expenditure, complaining that the need to improve living conditions in the neighborhood did not justify “establishing Methodism as the religion of the Five Points, at the public expense.” The Times replied that Pease’s work with the poor justified the municipal appropriation. “They have converted what has always been the very den of thieves and murderers and prostitutes,—the very fountain of every imaginable abomination and every form of vice and crime,—into a house of industry and order,” noted the Times. “. . . Can a sincere and right-minded Catholic so grudge them the chance of making a possible convert to their faith, as to denounce and oppose the unquestioned good they have done?” Journal editor James A. McMaster retorted that Pease was no longer associated with the mission, leaving it with only a religious function. Calling the mission “a proselyting-trap,” McMaster predicted that its operatives “will try to convert the degraded classes of the Points by the animal excitements of Methodism;—that is, by the preachings, prayings, roarings, rantings, cantings, groanings, yellings, and other yet more obscene fooleries and indecencies of this ignorant, degraded, irrational and unpatriotic sect.” When the Times discovered that Pease had indeed severed all ties with the mission, it reluctantly admitted that a city contribution to the project would not be appropriate. City fathers agreed. By a vote of 9 to 8, the board of assistant aldermen tabled the motion to grant funds to the mission.28
On June 17, 1853, the Missionary Society celebrated with pomp and circumstance the opening of a grand new, privately funded Five Points Mission building. The four-story facility covered three large lots and included a chapel that could seat five hundred worshippers, a parsonage for the missionary and his family, two schoolrooms, and twenty three-room apartments. All this on the very spot, boasted the mission, where a year earlier hundreds of the most degraded denizens of Five Points had lived amid wretched squalor and sin. “What no legal enactment could accomplish—what no machinery of municipal government could effect,” bragged the mission “ladies” in the book they published to commemorate the event, “Christian women have brought about, quietly but thoroughly and triumphantly.” By the time the new mission headquarters opened, the House of Industry had secured control of all seven of the three-story buildings on Little Water Street facing Paradise Park. Several years later, it relocated to its own large new headquarters on Worth Street directly across the park from the mission. In just a few years, the mission and the House of Industry had become an imposing presence in Five Points.29
Wary Catholics such as McMaster might claim that “there is not . . . a copper’s difference between the rivals at the Five Points,” yet they embraced two very different approaches to charity. The Missionary Society’s first annual report stated that until its workers could bring about “clear, undoubted conversions, we have no sure footing.” Catholics from the neighborhood were told that the Bible was the “‘one Mediator between God and man’ . . . the only guide to eternal life.” Typical of these proselytizers was a “Mrs. Cameron, a most indefatigable Bible Reader. She visits the people at their houses, makes herself their friend. She reads to them, talks with them, knows them by name. She exercises great watchfulness over them, questions them closely, and urges them with great success to persevere in the way of self-denial and industry.”30
Pease’s organization, by contrast, was much more radical. “Its object is the physical, social and moral reformation of its members, and likewise of the immediate community in which it is located,” he explained in 1852. “It aims, too, at the suppression of houses of infamy, and of the open lewdness of action, even in the Five Points. . . . Its instrumentalities for securing these objects are a bath-tub, a wardrobe . . . , a workshop, morning and evening devotion, prayer meeting, singing-school, a Bible-class, a Sabbath-school, and a regular Sabbath preaching. Likewise a Temperance meeting on Friday evenings.” The House of Industry clearly did teach that religion ought to play an important role in every American’s life, and its residents too were required to attend religious services. But whereas mission boarders were required to attend mission services, Pease allowed his tenants to go to other churches (or, in theory, synagogues) if they preferred. The “inmates of this Institution,” he pledged in 1853, “shall have the privilege of worshipping God according to the dictates of their own consciences, without being interfered with by any.”31
It is difficult to appreciate how radical Pease’s approach appeared to most antebellum Americans. Pease had not coined the phrase “House of Industry” and he was not the first to open one. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley had suggested in the early 1840s that the city start a “House of Industry” to teach job skills and thrift to the indigent. Like Pease, Greeley advocated protecting clients from their own intemperate tendencies by forcing them to reside within the institution. But nothing ever came of Greeley’s proposal. By early 1848, Episcopal minister Stephen H. Tyng and public health pioneer John H. Griscom had opened their own “House of Industry and Home for the Friendless” a few miles north and east of Five Points, but in its early years it functioned primarily as a shelter for homeless girls. Pease’s House of Industry was thus the first to implement Greeley’s ideas on a large scale. Charles Loring Brace, who founded his Children’s Aid Society a few years after the House of Industry was established, recalled that the change from a religious to a material emphasis in charity initially “met with great opposition. To give a poor man bread before a tract, to clean and feed street-children before you attempt to teach them religiously, to open work-shops where prayer-meetings used to be held . . . to talk of cleanliness as the first steps to godliness;—all this seemed then to have a ‘humanitarian’ tendency, and to belong to European ‘socialism’ and ‘infidelity.’” These were in fact the terms resentful Methodists used in condemning Pease and his innovations, calling those who advocated his ideas “rationalists, Socialists, Fourierists, &c.” Enmity between the two institutions would continue for many years.32
“THE CHILDREN OPEN THE DOOR FOR US”
The House of Industry and the mission profoundly altered life in Five Points. In the realm of job training, Pease quickly expanded beyond the sewing work that had launched his enterprise. By early 1851, before his split with the mission, Pease had added baking, shoemaking, and corset making to the vocational instruction offered. Basket weaving and hatmaking eventually became part of the curriculum as well. More than five hundred people worked at these trades in the House of Industry in 1854. Pease paid his workers for the products they produced during their training. “Dextrous” sewers, for example, could earn $2 to $2.50 per week—not much, but more than many needlewomen earned, and at least the work was steady. In about 1870, the mission opened its own sewing school. By the end of the seventies, the mission also trained its inmates for domestic service. “Moving harmoniously to the accompaniment of the piano,” noted the mission’s annual report with pride, “they wash and scrub, wait at the door, set the table, wash dishes, make beds, and sweep the floors.” The House of Industry’s extensive vocational training operation helped many Five Pointers find good jobs. In the twelve months ending in March 1857, for example, the House of Industry placed six hundred thirty of its trainees in workshops, factories, and homes all across the city.33
The “day schools” operated by the two Five Points charitable institutions also changed the lives of countless neighborhood residents. At first, it took quite some time for the teachers and students at the House of Industry school to adjust to each other’s needs. “The room so stank from their filth,” recalled Pease’s financial backers of those first students, “that bathing facilities for each sex had to be established.” Many children were distracted from their studies by hunger, so Pease opened a “soup-room” where the “poorest of the children” could eat. He eventually provided a hot lunch for all the children in the expanded facility’s dining hall. One might wonder why Five Points’ predominantly Catholic and Jewish parents would send their children to Pease’s school when public ones already operated there. Brace found that some children were “so ill-clothed and destitute that they are ashamed to attend” the public schools. Others may have chosen to send their children to a charitable day school because it provided its needy pupils with clothing and food. Still others may have selected Pease’s academy because it kept children later each day, operated year round, and accepted small kids too young to attend the public schools.34
The House of Industry and mission attracted even more students to their Sunday schools than their weekday classes. “The school is very full,” the mission board was told in 1856, so much so that “many sit on the desks.” Yet because of their more overtly religious nature, the Sunday schools came under sharp attack by Five Points Catholic leaders. Soon Catholics started their own neighborhood Sunday school, but when this failed to stem the flow of children into the two Protestant institutions, Catholics (sometimes “several hundreds”) began to congregate in front of the House of Industry on Sunday mornings in September 1853 to encourage Catholic children to attend Catholic religious schools instead. Protestant mobs soon began appearing to defend their institutions. Tensions mounted and tempers flared each Sunday until the Times feared that a “bloody riot” might ensue.35
The Freeman’s Journal claimed that Protestants in Five Points prevented Catholic teachers “from gathering up the children of Catholics to take them, according to the wish of their parents, to Catholic Sunday Schools. This kind of interference has been going on for some time.” Pease insisted that no children attended the House of Industry Sunday school “in opposition to the will of their parents.” He pointed out that “Catholics as well as Protestants are permitted to teach and preach the great common principles of our common Christianity in this Institution, if they will abstain from their peculiar dogmas.” Pease complained that Catholics had organized “to have our public services wantonly disturbed . . . our visitors stoned and beaten, and one of them . . . threatened with having his brains knocked out, and the regular children of our school driven from our door with horrid oaths and imprecations. If this be controversy then we have had it.”36
Pease had hoped that publicity would help prevent additional confrontations, but the situation deteriorated even further the following Sunday, October 9. According to a House of Industry Sunday school worker named Stonelake, “a prominent Catholic” confronted a child about to enter the charity, took a newly bound Bible from the youngster’s hands, tore out a page, ignited it, and lit both his cigar and the rest of Bible with it. He then gave the burning Bible to some boys, who threw it into the street and “commenced the work of kicking it about amidst curses, language the most blasphemous, obscene shouts of brutal laughter, and riotous conduct of the worst description.” Stonelake rescued the Bible in the gutter in front of Donnelly’s coal yard and brought it to Pease, “who still has it should anyone doubt the story.” When later that same morning Bartholomew Smith of the St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Church Sunday school tried to stop a teacher from bringing a Catholic child who lived in the House of Industry into its Sunday school, he was arrested for assault. The Journal claimed that the child was being forced into the House of Industry against his will.37
Tempers calmed after the Bible burning. Even the Times, which generally supported Pease, called the behavior of both Five Points groups “disgusting” and “disgraceful.” Sunday school attendance at both the House of Industry and the mission dipped for a while as Catholics organized and publicized alternatives. Yet charity continued to attract many Five Pointers to the Protestant institutions’ schools despite the scolding of their priests. When a local priest asked an Italian bootblack to come to his Sunday school, the boy’s response was: “Say, Boss, d’ye give clothes and shoes for goin’ to Sunday School same as at Five Poin’?”38
Initially, only those who either lodged in the House of Industry and mission or attended their schools were eligible to receive food or clothing from them. But soon the charities began to distribute these items more widely. The severe recession in the winter of 1854–55 seems to have first prompted the change. Pease set up a soup kitchen to meet the urgent demand for sustenance in the neighborhood and in just four months served 39,267 meals. The mission did not distribute food in such quantities, but instead complemented Pease’s efforts by collecting second-hand clothes for the poor. During a twelve-month period ending in early 1856, the mission gave away 17,569 pieces of clothing, 922 pairs of shoes, 355 quilts, 250 caps, and 150 bonnets, as well as 25 tons of coal.39
The mission characteristically scaled back its charity once hard times had receded, while the House of Industry continued to expand its operations. The Times reported in May 1866 that the House of Industry had served an astounding 422,461 meals during the previous twelve months, an average of 1,157 per day. Eventually, the mission’s largesse matched that of its neighborhood rival, as its workers by 1882 gave away 517,834 “rations” of food and 11,806 pieces of clothing to a total of 5,146 persons.40
There were limits, however, to the charities’ generosity. A destitute Jewish glazier asked a mission employee for “some clothes to make me look so as people will like me, and give me work.” The employee would not consider the request until after “first interrogating him on whether he believed that Jesus was his savior.” The employee did not record the man’s answer, but he did give him the clothes.41
In a similar case, a seven-year-old girl came to the mission one day asking for a quilt. According to the mission newspaper, “she was thinly clothed, and was accustomed to suffer from cold and hunger. The following conversation took place: ‘What is your name?’ ‘Mary.’ ‘Where does your mother live?’ ‘She is dead.’ ‘Where do you live?’ ‘With a woman.’ ‘What street and number?’ ‘I have forgot it.’ ‘What is your father’s name?’ ‘John.’ ‘Where do you go to school?’ ‘Nowhere.’ ‘Do you know your letters?’ ‘No.’ Of course we could not give her the quilt.” The missionaries did not send Mary away completely empty-handed. They gave her “a ‘boiling’ of potatoes” and told her they could give her additional assistance if she would attend the mission school. Otherwise, they would do little more to help her.42
The two charities generally did not assist children who did not attend school, and gave no food or clothing to adults who did not pledge to give up liquor. Both institutions made temperance efforts a cornerstone of their work. They held outdoor meetings in Paradise Park to attract attention to their movement and visited Five Pointers in their homes to check on their progress. The House of Industry also operated an “Inebriate’s Retreat” where alcoholics could seek shelter and assistance in “the cleansing and cooling process” that might lead to permanent sobriety.43
Most of the funds the Five Points charities used to finance their work came from private donations. Through press reports, their own monthly newsletters, and benefit concerts, the two groups raised the thousands of dollars necessary to support their myriad operations. Collectively, the publicity worked wonders. Although a resident of Ohio, the teenaged John D. Rockefeller nonetheless gave 12 cents from his $4 a week salary to the Five Points Mission. Children from all over the United States joined the mission’s “shoe club,” making small contributions earmarked for the purchase of footwear for Five Points youngsters.44 The House of Industry, especially, was the darling of the New York press, particularly during Pease’s tenure as its superintendent. “Mr. Pease is certainly in his way one of the ‘remarkable men’ of the City,” maintained the Times at the end of 1852. “He has the rather uncommon union of business talent and reforming talent. . . . There is a certain heartiness and manliness in him also,” which helped him win over “the class with whom he deals.” The House of Industry, the editorial concluded, was “one of the most carefully sustained and benevolent enterprises our City has ever beheld.” Photojournalist Jacob Riis proclaimed almost forty years later that the House of Industry nursery was “one of the most touching sights in the world.” But Riis lauded the mission as well, calling the two institutions “pioneers in this work of moral and physical regeneration.”45
Some New Yorkers were less pleased with the charities’ work. “I hate these canting scoundrels of the ‘Five Points Mission’ as much as I do the Inquisition,” wrote one correspondent to the Irish-American in 1854, “and I regard their ‘reformation’ of the most abandoned as even worse than the destruction from which they affect to save them.” The paper’s editors agreed, condemning the “bigotry and attacks on the religion of the Roman Catholic” found in the mission’s publications: “We cry shame upon the ladies of the ‘Five Points Mission’ who are not satisfied with the charities of the heart, but must cram down the throats of the relieved religious opinions to which they are averse!”46
Catholics criticized the Five Points charities, and the mission in particular, because their prejudice toward Catholicism was so palpable. Of a drunkard asking for assistance, a mission worker wrote that “he is a Catholic of course; But ‘doesn’t know the way to the priest’s house now’?” In contrast, when a Protestant mother of three whose husband was usually too drunk to work asked the mission for assistance, the secretary took pity on the “poor woman! She is ‘no five-pointer,’ but seems to have some intelligence.” The mission records constantly boast of the assistance offered to “Protestants and Americans,” as if Catholics, Jews, and immigrants were less deserving.47
“WE WOULD LIKE A LITTLE GIRL FROM THREE TO FIVE YEARS OLD”
Catholic leaders became even more hostile toward the Five Points Mission and the House of Industry when the two charities went into the adoption business. Hoping at first merely to expose Five Points children to life in the country, Pease in 1853 had the House of Industry purchase a sixty-four-acre farm sixteen miles north of Manhattan near the Westchester County village of Eastchester. He believed that the “quiet and beautiful country, with its pure air, wholesome food, and invigorating work, would do more toward reforming the vicious . . . than almost anything else.” The farm could accommodate only a few dozen youngsters and adults at a time, yet there were hundreds, even thousands, of Five Pointers who in Pease’s view would have benefited from temporary or permanent residence in the countryside.48
The charities began to consider adoption for Five Points’ children in part because they were giving up on their parents. “Living in filth, and the extreme of poverty, addicted to drunkenness and its kindred vices, sunk in ignorance and superstition, they seem inaccessible to any good influence,” lamented the House of Industry journal. “A large majority of these are Catholics, ignorant of the truth as it is in Jesus, and unwilling to listen to the teachings of any ministers but those of their own faith.” Whereas adults had comprised two-thirds of the institution’s “inmates” in 1854–55, by 1864 four-fifths were children.49
Why the mission and House of Industry began to put so many of these children up for adoption is not clear. We know that as word of the institutions’ work began to spread, Five Pointers and others began to bring abandoned and orphaned children to them. Believing that such children would be better off with a family rather than in an institution, the organizations started to seek adoptive parents for them on an ad hoc basis. Soon after its founding in 1853, the Children’s Aid Society had begun sending the dozens of children left in its charge to homes in the rural West, and this work may have inspired the two Five Points charities. Even without that precedent, most Americans in the antebellum period—even city dwellers—conceived of rural living as spiritually and physically superior to life in a congested urban center. After years of frustration, the charities’ workers became convinced that growing up amidst crime, alcoholism, and prostitution doomed the neighborhood’s children to fall prey to these vices as well. By the eve of the Civil War, finding adoptive homes in the countryside for Five Points children had become the two institutions’ top priority.50
Initially, prospective parents came forward voluntarily. Some were New Yorkers who could not bear children of their own. Others had lost a child to illness. Soon, out-of-towners began to look to the New York philanthropies as a source of adoptive children as well, both for family and charitable reasons. The House of Industry newsletter noted in 1857 that an Indiana merchant planning a business trip to New York “looks round among his customers to see who ‘wants’ to do good by taking a homeless boy or girl.” Some were grateful for any new addition to their family. A man in Wisconsin, in contrast, wrote to Halliday that “we would like a little girl from three to five years old, good-looking, light complexion, no freckles, darkish red or brown hair, with dark blue eyes or black, high forehead, pleasant disposition, smart and active, and an American child.” Halliday, who at that point in the late 1850s ran his own orphanage uptown, did not have a match, but found one for his picky correspondent at the House of Industry.51
Hoping to place more of their children in the West, the charities eventually transported children at their own expense. In November 1856, the House of Industry and the Children’s Aid Society sent an Iowa minister westward with thirty children in search of homes.52 The mission also organized its own western journeys for children needing adoption, placing Rev. W. C. Van Meter in charge. On days when Van Meter headed west, large crowds gathered outside the mission to see the children off. A former newsboy who accompanied Van Meter to Iowa on one of these journeys wrote that at each railroad station, the children would sing a song for those gathered to meet the train. At each stop, one or two of the children would be adopted, and Van Meter would continue westward until all his wards had been taken. The sense of rejection felt by the last children to remain in each of Van Meter’s groups must have been excruciating. Hundreds of neighborhood youngsters were transported to new homes outside New York as a result of the charities’ adoption efforts.53
Some of the orphans were brought to the charities by neighbors. Just after the Civil War, neighbors alerted mission workers to the case of three little girls, none older than ten, found in their “deep cellar on Baxter Street. The mother lay dead on the floor.” The woman had remained there since her death a day earlier because her children had not known what to do. Their father had passed away a few years earlier. The mission paid for the mother’s burial and found the children adoptive homes. Others asked to be adopted. An older sister brought nine-year-old Elizabeth Cline to the mission for adoption in November 1856. Their mother had died in 1849 and their father in 1853. Around the same time, Mary Ann Barr rang the mission’s doorbell. The Cow Bay resident, about twelve years old, had never known her mother and had not seen her father in two years. The mission sent her to a family in Burlington County, New Jersey.54
Yet the majority of children put up for adoption by the Five Points charities were not actual orphans; at least 60 percent put up by the mission had living parents. Anecdotal evidence from the Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry suggests that most of the children it sent to adoptive homes also had at least one living parent.55 A variety of circumstances prompted parents to give their children up for adoption. Alcohol abuse frequently played a role. One mother reeking of liquor brought her four-year-old daughter Mary Anne to the House of Industry, telling the workers there that she could barely support herself, much less a child. The mission in 1856 recorded the case of “Mary Hare—aged 9 years . . . brought to us by a drunken mother, and given up to the mission.” They had apparently been living in a brothel (the mission’s secretary called it “a bad-house”) for more than a year. The mother claimed, however, that she went out begging rather than prostitute herself. “She declares she is undefiled, though she has passed through the mire.” The mission sent Mary to live with a newspaper editor in upstate New York.56
The most famous adoption case from the two Five Points institutions also involved alcoholic parents. In 1853, the Tribune published a story by Solon Robinson entitled “‘Wild Maggie,’ of the Five Points.” Pease had apparently bestowed this nickname on a disheveled little girl named Margaret Reagan who lived in a basement on Centre Street near Anthony. Maggie came to Pease’s attention because of the way she relentlessly taunted and berated him. In a typical tirade, Maggie called Pease an “old Protestant thief. . . . I heard Father Phelan tell what you want to do with the poor folks at the Points; you want to turn them out of house and home, . . . and make them all go to hear you preach your lies.” After many attempts to lure Maggie into the House of Industry, Pease finally succeeded by offering to let her lay out the sewing work for the women he trained, a task she agreed to undertake only if he left the door open so he could not steal her and send her to “the Island.” She asked for more tasks of this sort and the apparently neglected girl soon began living at the House of Industry. At Pease’s urging, she convinced her parents to attend the organization’s temperance meetings. Despite their promise to reform, Pease convinced Maggie’s parents to allow her to remain at the House of Industry. They eventually consented to her adoption by a farming family living near Katonah in Westchester County. Her story touched New Yorkers deeply.57
The vast majority of non-orphans given up for adoption had lived not with alcoholics but with widowed mothers who simply could not earn enough to support their children. Elizabeth Welland, for example, had managed to sustain herself and her son Henry through needlework for four years after her husband, a painter, died of “painter’s colic.” But after a six-week hospital stay prevented her from working, she became destitute and gave Henry to the mission. Twenty-three-year-old Irish immigrant Mary Harrison became a widow just a month after the birth of her first child. Quickly “finding all means of support exhausted,” she asked the mission to locate an adoptive family for her infant.58
Some gave their children up to the mission soon after settling in New York because they found that earning a living there was much more difficult than they had expected. The widowed mother of twelve-year-old Hugh Reilly turned her son over to the mission just eight weeks after they arrived in America because she found that she could not support them both. A woman from Albany likewise moved to New York after both her husband and brother died because she thought she could earn more money downstate. Finding that seamstresses earned less than she had imagined, she brought her son James to the mission.59
Catharine Donahue managed to find a new spouse after her first husband died, but he “treated her so ill that she was obliged to leave him.” With no means available to support herself, she gave her eight- and five-year-old daughters to the mission for adoption. These women did not part with their children until absolutely forced to do so. The House of Industry newspaper described the case of one woman who, made a virtual widow by her husband’s ten-year sentence to the penitentiary at Sing Sing, surrendered her baby for adoption rather than “see it starve to death before my face.” When the widowed mother of ten-year-old George Leon left her son at the mission for adoption, “he did not wish to stay and his mother had to slip away slyly from him; he cried for an hour afterwards and had to be held and compelled to stay until his fretting was over.”60
Most adoptees were given up voluntarily by desperate parents. But when charity workers found children’s treatment or living conditions abhorrent, they sometimes took the youngsters forcibly. Pease usually tried to cajole these parents into parting with their offspring by describing the fresh air and material comforts their children would have in new homes. In one such case, Pease went to a tenement to determine why three sisters had stopped attending his day school. He discovered that their widowed mother had sent them out begging. The minister convinced the mother to let her two eldest daughters, Eliza and Maggie, live at the House of Industry, but she would not part with little Jane. “We felt that we could not give her up to a life of beggary and shame,” reported a House of Industry publication; so when a man came to the House of Industry a few weeks later looking to adopt a girl Jane’s age, Pease returned to see her. He found Jane eager to go, and because her mother that day was in the “state of inebriation characterized by good nature,” she granted her permission, swayed in part because the adopting father gave her “a bonus” which “kept her in good humor.” Pease saw no harm in brokering such deals if they removed youngsters from such miserable circumstances.61
On other occasions, Pease withheld assistance from desperate women and their children to force reluctant mothers to part with their offspring. His newsletter described one such mother whose husband had abandoned her “for the companions of the grog-shop.” After selling all her possessions to sustain herself and three children, she was evicted from her apartment, at which point she appeared at the House of Industry seeking shelter. She was told she could stay only if she would allow Pease to put her children up for adoption. At first she agreed, but as the day of their departure approached she changed her mind and took them away, insisting “she would sooner beg, or even starve with them, than be parted from her innocent babes.” Pease had once taken in and trained such women. By 1857, however, he had apparently concluded that the prospects for unmarried women with young children were so dismal that adoption was the best solution for both generations.62
In at least some instances, children initiated their own adoptions without the consent of their parents. The teenaged street peddler John Morrow took his repeatedly beaten half sister from his alcoholic stepmother and brought her to the mission for adoption. The woman went to court to try to have her daughter returned, but the justice ruled that her abuse of the child invalidated her claims. Van Meter sent her to adoptive parents in Illinois. Morrow’s full sister, tired of supporting her stepmother’s drinking habit, also put herself up for adoption at the mission.63
Another case in which a child chose to leave living parents involved seven-year-old Elizabeth Laughlin. Elizabeth was the little girl who ran away to Pease because she feared her stepfather would beat her after she fell asleep and failed to collect money from the prostitutes who used the rooms above his saloon. When Elizabeth’s father came for her the next day, Pease refused to release her. Laughlin returned with a note from the district’s police justice demanding that Pease hand her over, but he again demurred. The judge then summoned Pease to his courtroom, where the pastor once more insisted that he would not return Elizabeth to such a father. The infuriated police justice (possibly Matthew Brennan) called Pease’s conduct “one of the most high-handed, barefaced outrages I ever met with! I command you to deliver up the body of that child to her friends.” Pease asserted that only a higher court and a writ of habeas corpus could compel him to do so. The irate judge ordered his clerk to detain Pease and take a complaint against him from Laughlin, but the clerk said he had no right to do so, and Pease left.
The minister then consulted with District Attorney A. Oakey Hall, who advised Pease to take Elizabeth out of the city in case Laughlin bribed a judge to issue a summary ruling. The next day, a court officer served Pease with a writ of habeas corpus, claiming that he had seized Elizabeth from the street “for the purpose of proselytism, she being a Catholic.” In response, Pease provided evidence indicating that Laughlin had previously struck Elizabeth in the head with a bottle and that he regularly forced her to stay awake far into the night collecting fees from prostitutes. When the judge asked Elizabeth whether she would rather live with Pease or return to Laughlin, she chose Pease, and the judge consented. Pease eventually found her a permanent home in upstate New York.64
The handful of other cases in which Pease refused to return children to living parents who opposed their being adopted are more difficult to justify by modern standards. In one, he temporarily sheltered a twelve-year-old girl named Katy while her mother spent a night in jail for throwing bricks through the windows of the house inhabited by Katy’s father, who had abandoned Katy, her sister, and her mother, and moved in with another woman. When the father and his mistress left for California, Katy’s mother had trouble feeding her children and from time to time boarded Katy and her sister at the House of Industry. When Katy’s father returned from the West and reconciled with his wife, he demanded her back, but Katy (according to Pease) refused to go. Although the family hired a lawyer and sued for Katy’s return, Pease cited the husband’s behavior as evidence of the parents’ lack of morals. The judge ruled in Pease’s favor, and the minister eventually sent Katy to live with adoptive parents.65
An even more shocking case was that of “Lizzie D.” In 1854, Pease had found Lizzie’s widowed mother one of the most-coveted live-in domestic service positions—one in which the employer allowed the servant to keep her children with her. Despite her apparent good fortune, Lizzie’s mother appeared on Pease’s doorstep three years later, clearly having been unemployed for some time. She asked Pease to let Lizzie stay at the House of Industry and promised to return for her and pay her board once she found new employment. “The dirty and degraded appearance of the woman,” wrote Pease, “made me mentally resolve that she should never again have possession of the child, to which, as I suspected, and afterwards learned, she had forfeited all moral right.” Saying she had found a job, Lizzie’s mother came back for her a few days later, but Pease said he would not give Lizzie to her until she had been employed steadily for a month. Pease then sent an investigator to the mother’s Cow Bay home. He found that the apartment “had but two occupants, a [male] negro and Mrs. D.” This was all the proof Pease needed of her lack of fitness as a mother, and he immediately put Lizzie up for adoption. On the day set for her departure to Illinois, Lizzie cried that she did not want to go, but Pease sent her to the West anyway. The minister reported that “Mrs. D. made a great show of sorrow for the loss of her child, and sent a lawyer to threaten legal measures if she was not restored. We told him of the scene in Cow Bay, and he quietly took his departure.” Although interracial liaisons—especially between Irish-American women and African-American men—were not unusual in Five Points, most whites considered them so repugnant that even Mrs. D.’s own attorney concluded that such a relationship would make it impossible for Mrs. D. to win the return of her daughter.66
Not surprisingly, New York’s Irish Catholic community condemned the entire adoption system. The Irish-American insisted in 1859 that these “nominally religious and charitable” organizations were “really proselytising ‘societies’ . . . sinks of infamy, filth and corruption.” Noting that their adoption activities had become “more extended, more energetic and more successful,” the paper estimated that “at least five hundred children, the offspring of Irish Catholic parents, are proselytised, corrupted, and morally speaking, debauched, yearly, in New York, through their instrumentality.” The editors denounced all the Protestant agencies that engaged in adoptions for the purpose of proselytizing, but complained especially about “a fellow named Halliday at the head of the gang.” Considering himself a “special patrolman,” Halliday “prowled, like a reformation fox to kidnap children.” To prove its charges, the Irish-American described the case of a Fourth Ward woman named McInerny who was “not very careful or particular.” Halliday, “hearing that she was in the Tombs, strayed down to Cherry street . . . where he found one of [her] children on the stoop and gave him a penny, whereupon, having thus acquired a property in him, he took him all the way up to Judge Kelly, and there satisfied the judge by competent testimony, that the child ‘begged,’ whereupon Kelly . . . consigns the child to the affectionate care of ‘Patrolman’ Halliday.” The Irish-American claimed that the judge granted custody of the child to Halliday without the legally required advance notice, and that when the father attempted to win the child’s return, various magistrates used flimsy excuses to uphold the illegal proceedings. At each of these hearings, the newspaper noted ruefully, the “smirking” Halliday “appeared with two [photographic] portraits of the boy, one taken when in rags, and the other when clothed by the hand of charity,” which helped sway the judge to grant him custody. Most Catholic Five Pointers viewed the adoption programs with similar contempt.67
By the mid-1860s, Irish Catholics came to believe that the Five Points Mission and House of Industry sold orphaned children into virtual slavery. In November 1863, the Irish-American reported that Father Edward O’Flaherty, while visiting the Indiana State Fair several years earlier,
was horrified by the spectacle of thirty or forty children, boys and girls, all evidently of Celtic origin, penned up like so many cattle, for sale. Yes, the term is only too weak to express the reality of this outrage on humanity.... They were “children of the poor,” picked up in the lanes and streets of New York, congregated in a “Mission,” petted and supported by the canting admirers of African ebony, and finally, with altered names, and every clue by which their identity might be traced carefully destroyed, deported to the West, and, for sums varying from ten dollars to thirty-five, disposed of to non-Catholic buyers until . . . by reaching their maturity, they should become free from the bondage into which they had been sold. The same system is still at work.
Six months before the Irish-American leveled its charges, the Freeman’s Journal had announced that Catholics had retained attorney James M. Sheehan “to abolish the kidnapping and enslaving” of Irish children. Van Meter “has been bound over to answer, and is sure to be indicted, on the charge of kidnapping children for the purpose of reducing them to slavery. Mr. Sheehan is also putting a Mr. Barlow, of the Five Points House of Industry, into water of a most uncomfortably high degree of temperature” (Benjamin R. Barlow served as superintendent of the House of Industry from 1857 to 1864). Sheehan’s advocacy of Catholic children’s rights, the Freeman’s Journal bragged, would force such ministers to limit their mischief to “setting the negroes loose to become vagabonds.” The remarks in both journals tying the supposed enslavement of Irish Catholic orphans to the wartime emancipation of southern bondsmen suggest that rumors of children’s enslavement sprang largely from Irish Americans’ resentment of Republican efforts on behalf of African Americans. Yet stories of Irish slavery in rural America persisted into the 1870s.68
Others objected to the charities’ adoption programs for different reasons. In the post–Civil War decades, westerners came to believe that their reform schools and jails overflowed with juvenile delinquents from New York. By the 1890s, many western states had responded by enacting laws limiting, restricting, or regulating the importation of orphans.69
In New York, meanwhile, the threat posed by the Protestant charities had forced previously apathetic Catholic leaders to devote significantly more energy and attention to Five Points. Archbishop John Hughes’s decision to establish a parish there in 1853, even though two Catholic churches outside the neighborhood were not very far away, must have been intended at least in part as a defense against the proselytizing activities of the mission and House of Industry. Rather than undertake the time-consuming task of building a new church, Hughes purchased the recently vacated Zion Protestant Episcopal Church at the corner of Mott and Cross Streets. On May 14, he officially rechristened it the Church of the Transfiguration. The new parish quickly became one of the busiest in the city. By 1865, only six of the city’s thirty-two Catholic churches conducted more marriages and baptisms than Transfiguration. According to a leading historian of American Catholicism, it was “the most flourishing Irish parish on the American continent.”70
The New York Catholics also eventually began their own adoption service. It was launched in 1863—when mounting Civil War casualties began leaving hundreds of New York Catholic children without fathers to support them. In May of that year, Levi Silliman Ives established the Catholic Protectory, which sought to avoid sending children west by finding them adoptive Catholic parents within the city. But the number of children needing homes far exceeded the number of Catholic foster parents who stepped forward to claim them, so after Ives’s death, the Protectory began sending its charges to Catholic homes in the Midwest. Another organization, the New York Foundling Hospital, became an even more important force in the Catholic community. Founded in 1869, it transferred children who could not be placed in New York homes to predominantly Catholic communities in the Midwest.71
“THE TRANSFORMATION THAT HAS OVERTAKEN
THE ‘FIVE POINTS’ [IS] REMARKABLE”
Religious, humanitarian, and competitive forces all combined in the upsurge of Five Points charity work. The impact on the neighborhood was unmistakable, and nearly every commentator attributed the positive changes to the work of the Five Points Mission and the House of Industry. The demolition of the Old Brewery in 1852, most agreed, had marked the start of this transformation. “Perhaps in the entire annals of organized philanthropy,” maintained the Evening Post concerning the Ladies’ Missionary Society, “no more interesting incident can be found than the change by which the Old Brewery and its abominations yielded to the beneficent influences which these ladies have brought to bear.” “The day of its demolition deserves to be distinguished as a red letter day in the annals of our city’s history,” concurred a mission publication.72
By the end of the decade, the changes to the neighborhood seemed even more remarkable. The New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor asserted that the district had undergone a “social and moral renovation.” “The Five Points is not what it used to be,” agreed Harper’s Weekly in 1857, noting that “with its vice its romance has vanished. It has become Peasey and prosaic, and the old leaven of iniquity has nearly died out. . . . One has now to search for the bad places, whereas formerly the Five Points was one universal sore.” The Times also agreed. “Who shall persuade us hereafter that any condition of humanity is desperate beyond redemption,” it asked in reference to the House of Industry’s accomplishments as the charity prepared to dedicate the new wing of its headquarters. “The transformation that has overtaken the ‘Five Points,’” wrote the influential newspaper, was absolutely “remarkable.”73
How were the charities able to effect such apparently far-reaching changes in the notorious neighborhood? The imposing presence of their large brick buildings at the Five Points intersection scared away many of the thieves, prostitutes, and drunks who had previously concentrated there. Others found inspiration in the organizations’ home visits, temperance drives, and religious revivals, deriving the motivation they needed to stay sober, find work, or take better care of their families. Most of the tangible improvements, however, probably resulted from the unprecedented amounts of material assistance these charities distributed to neighborhood residents. For the first time, significant numbers of hungry, cold, and homeless Five Pointers could find food, clothing, fuel, and shelter. Some unskilled workers could even learn trades.
The Times noted in 1870 that Pease, by offering such services in his House of Industry, had adopted a “new principle” for helping the poor—one that emphasized “residence, sympathy and cooperation with ‘the miserables.’” In this sense, the House of Industry was the nation’s first “settlement house.” Chicago’s Jane Addams made settlements famous by establishing Hull House in the 1890s. Yet Pease’s House of Industry pioneered most of her standard operating procedures—including job training, distribution of food and clothing, and instruction in health and hygiene—decades earlier. There were differences between the two, of course; women with college degrees in nursing and social work did not staff the antebellum House of Industry. And though the mission was a female-run institution, its “ladies” did not live in the slums with their clients as typical settlement house workers eventually would. Still, the House of Industry was progressive before the word came to stand for an era.74
The Five Points Protestant charities, and especially the House of Industry, can also be credited with having organized the city’s (and perhaps the nation’s) first modern welfare program. Unlike New Deal– and Great Society–era government assistance programs, Five Points charities did not entrust their clients with direct cash payments. The institutions also required religious devotion as a condition for most forms of aid. Yet virtually all the hallmarks of the modern welfare system—food, shelter, job training and placement, substance abuse counseling, and foster care—were offered by the Five Points charities.
Historians commonly cite the private welfare system established by “Boss” William M. Tweed and Tammany Hall in the late 1860s as the earliest precursor of the modern welfare state; but House of Industry efforts (eventually subsidized by the state government) predate Tweed’s work by fifteen years. In fact, Tammany probably created its system in response to programs such as Pease’s. Throughout the 1860s, Catholics complained bitterly that the state subsidized the House of Industry while denying aid to their own charitable efforts (legislators justified this on the grounds that the House of Industry was non-sectarian whereas Catholics preached a specific variety of Christianity). When Tweed extended his power to the state level, he reversed this policy officially in some areas, such as education, delivering state funds to parochial schools such as the one at Five Points’ Church of the Transfiguration. In other realms, such as the distribution of coal and food, he instead used Tammany Hall as the conduit, in part to ensure that grateful voters thanked him and his organization on election day. While Tweed undoubtedly saw Tammany’s private welfare system as a means to attract voters, he must also have been motivated by the desire to placate New York Catholics who wanted alternatives to Protestant aid programs such as those offered in Five Points.75
Harper’s Weekly proved to be wrong in its nostalgic complaint that Five Points’ charities had brought a permanent end to its mystique. The “romance” of its dark-alleyed crime and misery would return with the next wave of immigrants. Meanwhile, the drama of Five Points politics became the talk of the town, first because its Irish-American citizens took the lead in fighting Republican and Know Nothing efforts to usurp important parts of the city government, and later because the neighborhood played a pivotal role in the electoral frauds that made the Tweed Ring possible.