Five Points

To avoid needless repetition, and because almost every newspaper cited in these notes was published in New York, I have left off the place of publication from all New York newspapers. Most of the following references to newspapers date from the Civil War period, so I have followed the customary mode of citation for those papers by listing the date only. In about 1880, however, the size of American newspapers expanded significantly, making reference to page numbers more important. So for most newspaper citations after 1880, I have included the page numbers as well. Finally, all emphasis found in quotations in Five Points is contained in the original source.

1. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August 16, 1873): 363; J. Frank Kernan, Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies (New York, 1885), 41; Church Monthly (March 1858), quoted in Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 2 (June 1858): 34-35.

2. Junius H. Browne, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New-York (Hartford, 1869), 272.

3. [William M. Bobo], Glimpses of New-York City, by a South Carolinian (Charleston, 1852), 93.

4. Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of The Underworld (New York, 1928), Alvin F. Harlow, Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street (New York, 1931).

5. Carol Groneman, “The ‘Bloody Ould Sixth’: A Social Analysis of a New York City Working-Class Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1973); George E. Pozzetta, “The Mulberry District of New York City: The Years Before World War One,” Robert F. Harney and J. Vincenza Scarpaci, eds., Little Italies in North America (Toronto, 1981); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana, 1982); Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York (Ithaca, 1990); Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York, 1992); Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore, 1996); Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York, 1991); Caleb Carr, The Alienist (New York, 1994); Times, June 15, 1991, p. 11; May 7, 1995, sect. 13, p. 2; J. A. Lobbia, “Slum Lore,” Village Voice, January 2, 1996, pp. 34–36; Rebecca Yamin, “New York’s Mythic Slum,” Archaeology 50 (March/April 1997): 44–53; Yamin, “Lurid Tales and Homely Stories of New York’s Notorious Five Points,” Historical Archaeology 32 (1998): 74–85; Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven, 1995), 414–415; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 392.

6. See especially Groneman, “‘Bloody Ould Sixth’”; Lobbia, “Slum Lore”; and Yamin, “Lurid Tales.”

1. Lewis Tappan, The Life of Arthur Tappan (New York, 1871), 194–95; Paul O. Weinbaum, Mobs and Demagogues: The New York Response to Collective Violence in the Early Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor, 1979), 21–24; John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 24 vols. (New York, 1999), 5: 527–28 (Cornish), 21: 311–12 (Tappans).

2. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1978), 9; Garth M. Rosell and Richard A. G. Dupuis, eds., The Memoirs of Charles G. Finney: The Complete Restored Text (Grand Rapids, 1989), 354.

3. Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York, 1970), 115–16; Sun, July 7, 1834. For Cox’s opposition to colonization, see American National Biography, 5: 630.

5. Evening Post, July 10, 12, 1834; Tappan, Life of Arthur Tappan, 209–15, 420; “Old Sports of New York,” Leader, June 16, 1860 (quotation).

9. Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill, 1988), 167; Tappan, Life of Arthur Tappan, 214–15; Richards, “Gentlemen of Property,” 141–45, 150–54.

10. William Duer, New-York as it Was During the Latter Part of the Last Century (New York, 1849), 13–14; The Old Brewery and the New Mission House at the Five Points, By Ladies of the Mission (New York, 1854), 16; Alvin Harlow, Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street (New York, 1931), 86, 106–10, 120–21, 142; Rebecca Yamin, ed., “Tales of Five Points: Working-Class Life in Nineteenth-Century New York” (draft report of the Five Points archeological project), 14–23. The Collect covered the area bounded by modern-day Worth, Lafayette, Franklin, and Baxter Streets.

11. Isaac N. P. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island: 1498–1909, 6 vols. (1915–28; New York, 1967), 1: 396–97; Duer, New-York as it Was, 13–17; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 125–26.

12. Yamin, “Tales of Five Points,” 23–31; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 106–10, 114.

13. Charles H. Haswell, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian, 1816–1860 (New York, 1897), 84. Yamin, “Tales of Five Points,” 27, dates the extension of Anthony Street to 1809, based on an undated map in the New-York Historical Society labeled “Opening of Anthony Street.”

15. I have grossly simplified a very complicated process. For the nuances of this transformation, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984).

19. Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Investigate the Health Department (1859), quoted in Edward Lubitz, “The Tenement Problem in New York City and the Movement for Its Reform, 1856–1867” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1970), 95–96.

20. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York, 1992), 31; indictments of October 7 and 10, December 25, 1820, February 13, March 14, May 16, July 16, 31, August 28, December 5, 1821, May 8, June 21, 1822, June 30, 1823, in boxes 7436 and 7437 of the Police Court Papers and in the District Attorney’s Indictment Papers, both at the New York Municipal Archives. Gilfoyle kindly brought these indictments to my attention.

23. Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784–1831, 19 vols. (New York, 1917), 17: 587, 652, 760; 18: 19 (quotation).

24. Evening Post, May 13, 1830; Minutes of the Common Council, 17: 760; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 172–76.

25. Minutes of the Common Council, 18: 11–12 (“great rent”), 19–20, 632; Haswell, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian, 264; John J. Post, Old Streets, Roads, Lanes, Piers, and Wharves of New York (New York, 1882), 72, 76; Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 5: 1720; Mirror, May 18, 1833, in Frank Moss, The American Metropolis, 3 vols. (New York, 1897), 3: 50–51.

26. Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years (Chicago, 1962), 41–42; “A RESIDENT OF THE VICINITY” to the Editors, Evening Post, July 23, 1832.

32. An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (Philadelphia, 1835), 48–49; Mark Derr, The Frontiersman: The Real Life and the Many Legends of Davy Crockett (New York, 1993), 214–20.

34. Evening Post and Sun, April 11, 1834; The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851, Allan Nevins, ed. (New York, 1936), 123.

37. Ray Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (Chicago, 1938), 70–76, 122–25; Commercial Advertiser, September 29, October 4, 1834, January 5, March 18, 1835, in Weinbaum, Mobs and Demagogues, 55.

39. Graham Hodges, “‘Desirable Companions and Lovers’: Irish and African Americans in the Sixth Ward, 1830–1870,” in Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore, 1996), 115; Michael Kaplan, “The World of the B’hoys: Urban Violence and the Political Culture of Antebellum New York City, 1825–1860” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1996), 78; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 293; Evening Post, June 22, 1835; Sun, June 23, 1835.

41. Sun, June 23, 1835; Courier, July 2, 1835, in Kaplan, “The World of the B’hoys,” 83.

43. Sun, June 24 and 25, 1835; Evening Post, June 25, 1835; Hodges, “‘Desirable Companions and Lovers,’” 115; Herald, February 25, 1836.

44. Herald, March 4 and 5, 1836 (quotation from March 5); Asa Green, A Glance at New York (New York, 1837), 49; J. Frank Kernan, Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies (New York, 1885), 39.

45. Herald, April 14, 1842 (a “bloody and riotous” ward); Tribune, April 12, 1848 (first known description of the ward as the “Bloody Sixth”).

47. The Prose Works of N. P. Willis (1845; Philadelphia, 1849), 582–83; Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York, 2nd ed. (New York, 1844), 26; Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 3 vols., trans. Mary Howitt (London, 1853), 3: 409; Clipper, October 3, 1868, p. 204 (for Dickens’s role in popularizing slumming).

48. Evening Post, January 30, 1846; [George G. Foster], New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver (New York, 1849), 22; Times, April 7, 1856; Lyman Abbott, Reminiscences (Boston, 1915), 33; Herald, April 12, 1842; Old Brewery, 34.

49. [William A. Caruthers], The Kentuckian in New-York, 2 vols. (1834; Ridgewood, NJ, 1968), 2: 28; [William M. Bobo], Glimpses of New-York City, by a South Carolinian (Charleston, 1852), 97; “Slavery and Freedom,” Southern Quarterly Review 1 (April 1856): 80; John S. C. Abbott, South and North (New York, 1860), 78 (not quoted); unnamed congressman quoted in Francis W. Kellogg, Speech of Hon. Francis W. Kellogg, of Michigan, in the House of Representatives, June 12, 1860 (Washington, DC, 1860), 14. Though Caruthers’s work is a novel, his service as a doctor in Five Points makes his views noteworthy, even though expressed through a fictional character.

50. Kellogg, Speech of Hon. Francis W. Kellogg, 14; Hinton R. Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South (New York, 1860), 170–73.

1. William Bennett, Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland (London, 1847), 127–29.

2. Gerard J. Lyne, “William Steuart Trench and the Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare to America, 1850–1855,” Journal of the Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society 25 (1992): 72, 97; Ira A. Glazier, ed., The Famine Immigrants: Lists of Irish Immigrants Arriving at the Port of New York, 1846–1851, 7 vols. (Baltimore, 1983–86), 6: 629 (composition of Holland’s family). My belief that Ellen Holland must have been in the workhouse by late 1849 is based on the Lansdowne agent’s later statement that he chose as the first emigrants those who had been in the workhouse the longest. Because Holland was one of the first to leave under Lansdowne’s emigration program, she was probably in the workhouse by 1849.

3. Descriptions of famine conditions in this prologue are based on the sources listed below in notes 34–36 and 47–48.

4. Herald, March 17, 1851; Lyne, “Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare to America,” 102–4.

7. Accounts 5479 and 9445, Test Books and Account Ledgers, Emigrant Savings Bank Collection, New York Public Library.

8. Advertisement in Tribune, March 18, 1854; Ned Buntline, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (New York, 1848), 84; “A Voice from Cow Bay,” Vanity Fair, January 21, 1860, in Edward Lubitz, “The Tenement Problem in New York City and the Movement for Its Reform, 1856–1867” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1970), 73–74; New York Illustrated News (February 18 and 25, 1860): 216–17, 233; George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light (1850; Berkeley, 1990).

9. Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 (1949; Port Washington, NY, 1965), 20; Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York (Ithaca, 1990), 72.

10. Citizens’ Association, Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health (New York, 1865), cxxi; Ernst, Immigrant Life, 193. My figures on Five Points’ immigrant population come from a random sample of families taken from the 1855 New York State manuscript census. Approximately one in ten families from the Five Points neighborhood was sampled. I defined the Five Points “neighborhood” as the area bounded by Centre, Canal, Bowery, Chatham, and Pearl Streets. The total number of individuals in the sample is 1,407, of whom 400 were born in the United States. Of those eighteen or older, 97 of 851 were born in the United States. I utilized city directories to determine which portions of the 1855 census covered those blocks. Given that it is sometimes difficult to determine exactly when the census taker has left or entered the neighborhood, a few families may have been inadvertently included in or excluded from my sample. All the statistics in the following paragraphs are taken from this sample unless otherwise noted—1855 New York State manuscript census, Old Records Division, New York County Clerk’s Office.

11. Five Points Monthly (December 1864), in Pamela Haag, “The ‘Ill-Use of a Wife’: Patterns of Working-Class Violence in Domestic and Public New York City, 1860–1880,” Journal of Social History 25 (1992): 455; Times, April 11, 1860 (“every nationality”).

12. I have assumed that if both husband and wife had lived in New York for the same number of years, they emigrated together. The percentage of married couples that emigrated together can be determined because the 1855 census takers asked New Yorkers how long they had lived in their city of residence. Some immigrants, however, might have reunited someplace else in North America before coming to New York. But comparing the dates of emigration listed in the Emigrant Savings Bank records to the “years in New York” answer in the census for families documented in both sources, I found that in 95 percent of these cases, the “years in New York” figure matched the date of emigration. For the percentage of immigrants arriving with other family members, see Glazier, Famine Immigrants, passim.

13. Families 62, 66, 73, 101, 151, 284, 292, 329, and 680, second division, third electoral district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census; marriage of James Tucker, August 7, 1860, marriage register, Church of the Transfiguration, 29 Mott Street, New York.

14. Religion is not listed in the census, but I determined the subjects’ religion by examining their first and last names. In most cases, the names were quite distinct. Jewish families tended to name their children Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Yetta, Sarah, and Deborah. Christians chose names such as Christian, Christine, Frederick, Catharine, August, Hildebrand, etc. Surnames such as Levy, Cohen, Isaacs, and Abraham were considered indications of Jewish roots, whereas names such as Von Glahn were considered indications of Christian ties. In cases where neither the surnames nor the given names indicated the religious background with certainty, these persons were classified as “unknown.” The religious background of six families out of forty-five could not be determined by this method.

15. Accounts 924, 2130, 2281, 2487, 3527, 3626, 3847, 5367, 5948, 6199, 6709, and 7242, 8440, 9414, and 9569, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books.

16. Accounts 450, 451, 1245, 1723, 2501, 2608, 2723, 2725, 3135, 3173, 3191, 3538, 3580, 3616, 3652, 4260, 4740, 4780, 5134, 5192, 5230, 5731, 6077, 7171, 7204, 8970, 9263, 10021, and 10864, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books.

18. Dwellings 63–74, 82–87, first division, third electoral district, dwellings 6–73, second division, third electoral district, dwellings 16–26, fourth election district, dwellings 135–61, fifth election district, dwellings 94–113, sixth election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census.

19. I refer to Irish Catholics rather than all Irish because the source for my Irish nativity figures is the marriage records of Five Points’ Roman Catholic Church of the Transfiguration, which from 1853 to 1860 recorded the place of birth of virtually every person married at the church. My figures probably approximate the county origins of all Five Points Irish fairly accurately, because although there were undoubtedly some Irish Protestants in the neighborhood, there were not many. This is confirmed by an analysis of the Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books, which also list place of birth and whose depositors included Protestants and Jews as well. Of the Five Pointers in the Transfiguration register, 173 were from Sligo, 142 from Cork, 141 from Kerry, 59 from Galway, 56 from Limerick, 52 from Tipperary, 42 from Mayo, 36 from Leitrim, 40 from Roscommon, 30 from Waterford, 27 from Kilkenny, 19 from Dublin (city and county), 17 from Tyrone, 16 from Donegal, 15 from Fermanagh, 15 from Clare, 15 from Longford, 14 from Meath, 14 from Louth, 13 from Queen’s, 12 from Westmeath, 12 from King’s, 12 from Cavan, 10 from Monaghan, 9 from Wexford, 9 from Armagh, 9 from Derry, 8 from Kildare, 7 from Carlow, 3 from Down, 3 from Wicklow, and none from Antrim.

20. Accounts 1005, 2661, 3787, 5419, and 6433, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books.

21. Eighty-seven of the 173 Sligo natives listed in the Transfiguration marriage register for 1853–60 had been born either in the parish of Ahamlish (Palmerston’s estate) or Drumcliff (the parish owned almost exclusively by Gore Booth). Seventy-nine percent of the Kerry natives married there in those years were natives of Kenmare, Tuosist, or Bonane parishes, all owned primarily by Lansdowne.

22. Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers, “Colonies, Canada” series (Shannon, 1969), 17: 469–70 (hereafter cited as IUP-BPP, Colonies, Canada); David Fitzpatrick, “Emigration, 1801–70,” in Ireland Under the Union, 1: 1801–70, vol. 5 of A New History of Ireland (Oxford, 1989), 592.

23. House of Commons, “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix D, Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Earnings of Labourers, Cottier Tenants, Employment of Women and Children, Expenditure,” Sessional Papers, Reports from Commissioners, 1836, 31: 13, and supplement p. 38.

24. Commons, “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix D,” 31: 13–14, 77, 85, 95; “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix F, Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Con Acre Quarter or Score Ground, Small Tenantry, Consolidation of Farms and Dislodged Tenantry, Emigration,” Sessional Papers, Reports from Commissioners, 1836, 33: 6–7, 41–42, 224; Evidence Taken Before Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of the Law and Practice in respect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland [Devon Commission], No. 616 (1845), 20: 203–8, 223–25.

25. House of Commons, “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix E, Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Food, Cottages and Cabins, Clothing and Furniture, Pawnbroking and Savings Banks, Drinking,” Sessional Papers, Reports from Commissioners, 1836, 32: 7–8.

26. Ibid., 32: 7; “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix D,” 31:108 (Christmas); Evidence Taken Before her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry, 20: 919.

27. Jonathan Binns, The Miseries and Beauties of Ireland, 2 vols. (London, 1837), 1: 50; “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix D,” 31: 13–14. Binns was an “assistant agricultural commissioner” involved in the 1836 Irish Poor Inquiry.

28. Binns, Miseries and Beauties of Ireland, 1: 49–50; “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix E,” 32: 7–8, 25, 58, supplement p. 213; Kevin Danaher, The Year in Ireland (Cork, 1972), 163–66 (“hungry July”).

29. William S. Trench, Realities of Irish Life (London, 1868), 112–13; Lyne, “Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare,” 66; Commons, “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix D,” 31: 52 (quotation); Henry D. Inglis, Ireland in 1834: A Journey Throughout Ireland During the Spring, Summer, and Autumn of 1834, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1835), 1: 209–13.

31. Inglis, Ireland in 1834, 209–13; Michael Doheny, The Felon’s Tracks (1849; Dublin, 1951), 244; Binns, Miseries and Beauties of Ireland, 2: 333–34; Commons, “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix E,” 32: 58, 90, supplement p. 213.

33. “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix F,” 33: 148 (“extremely wretched”); “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix D,” 31: 15 (early marriage); Trench, Realities of Irish Life, 112–13 (early marriage); Evidence Taken before Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry, 20: 912 (early marriage), 919 (“face of the globe,” not Lansdowne’s fault); Binns, Miseries and Beauties of Ireland, 2: 336–37.

34. [Sixth] Marquis of Lansdowne, Glanerought and the Petty-Fitzmaurices (London, 1937), 127; Trench, Realities of Irish Life, 113–14; Kenmare Relief Committee to the Lord Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Treasury, August 22, 1846, in Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers, “Famine” series (Shannon, 1970), 6: 94–95 (hereafter cited as IUP–BPP, Famine).

35. Mr. Gill to Mr. Russell, February 25, 1847, in IUP–BPP, Famine, 7: 550; Bennett, Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland, 132. For more on conditions in Tuosist, see IUP–BPP, Famine, 2: 835, 838, 843–50, 852; 3: 336; Lyne, “Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare,” 124–25.

36. O’Sullivan Diary, c. March 1847, in Lyne, “Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare,” 125; O’Sullivan to Trevelyan, “February, 1847,” in IUP–BPP, Famine, 7: 524; Bennett, Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland, 127–29.

37. James R. Stewart and Joseph Kincaid to Palmerston, December 24, 1845 (BR 146/7/57), February 6, 1846 (BR 144/10/30), Broadlands Papers, University of Southampton. See also [Stuart] Maxwell to Stewart, November 5, 1845, Widow O’Farrel to Kincaid, November 10, 1845, Dr. West to Stewart or Kincaid, n.d. [March 1846], in Desmond Norton, “Landlords, Tenants, Famine: Letters of an Irish Land Agent in the 1840s,” manuscript in the possession of the author (hereafter cited as Norton manuscript). The letters quoted from Norton’s manuscript are apparently in his possession, and I sincerely appreciate his sharing their contents with me.

39. Sligo Champion, March 20, 1847; Captain O’Brien to Lieut.-Colonel Jones, March 2, 1847, in IUP–BPP, Famine, 7: 204.

40. Captain O’Brien to Lieut.-Colonel Jones, March 2, 1847, in IUP–BPP, Famine, 7: 204 (block quotation); undated newspaper clipping (“a waste”) in BR148/3/17/2, Broadlands Papers; letter with illegible signature to Sir Robert Gore Booth (“actually starving”), January 13, 1847, reel 1, microfilm 590, series H/8/1, Lissadell Papers, Public Records Office of Northern Ireland; S. H. Cousens, “The Regional Variation in Mortality During the Great Irish Famine,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 63, section C, no. 3 (February 1963): 130; Joel Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved (London, 1983), 267. Just about the only thing that Cousens and Mokyr agree upon is Sligo’s status as one of the leaders in excess mortality during the famine years.

41. Michael and Mary Rush to “Dear Father and Mother,” September 6, 1846, in IUP–BPP, Colonies, Canada, 17: 100–101. Although the Rushes did not live on either the Palmerston or Gore Booth estate, their desperate situation must have been similar to that of Ahamlish and Drumcliff residents.

42. Lynch to Kincaid, December 18, 1846, Norton manuscript; Kincaid to Palmerston, March 23, 1847, BR146/9/3, Broadlands Papers. A much more detailed account of the Palmerston emigration program can be found in my “Lord Palmerston and the Irish Famine Emigration,” The Historical Journal (June 2001).

43. Marianna O’Gallagher and Rose Masson Dompierre, Eyewitness Grosse Isle 1847 (Sainte-Foy, Québec, 1995), 349, 352, 357–58; A. L. Buchanan to S. Wolcott, June 11, 1847, BR146/9/8/2 (wreck), copy of letter from Chief Emigrant Agent at Québec enclosed in Lord Elgin’s Despatch No. 76 “of 11th Aug. 1847,” BR 146/9/10 (emigrants well supplied), “Passengers Sent out from Lord Palmerston’s Estate to Quebec April 1847,” BR146/9/4, Broadlands Papers; John C. McTernan, Memory Harbour: The Port of Sligo, Its Growth and Decline and Its Role as an Emigration Port (Sligo, 1992), part II, 32; IUP–BPP, Emigration, 10: 15 (overall mortality rate); IUP–BPP, Colonies, Canada, 17: 471–77 (Palmerston and Gore Booth mortality).

44. M. H. Perley to John S. Saunders, September 2, 18 (quotation), 1847, Dr. W. S. Harding to [the Lieutenant-Governor?], September 13, 1847, in IUP–BPP, Colonies, Canada, 17: 300, 318, 321–22; Sligo Champion, September 11, 18, 1847; New Brunswick Courier in McTernan, Memory Harbour, part II, 30; Adam Ferrie, Letter to the Rt. Hon Earl Grey . . . Embracing a Statement of Facts in Relation to Emigration to Canada (Montreal, 1847), 7–11.

45. Stewart and Kincaid to Palmerston, December 3 and 16, 1847, in IUP–BPP, Colonies, Canada, 17: 351–53; Stewart to Kincaid, n.d. (marked “1847”), Norton manuscript; Gore Booth testimony, June 2, 1848, in IUP–BPP, Emigration, 5: 266; testimony of Joseph Kincaid, June 21, 1847, in ibid., 4: 143–66.

46. Letter of Michael Brennan, et al., October 27, 1847, in New Brunswick Courier, November 6, 1847, in Elizabeth Cushing, et al., A Chronicle of Irish Emigration to St. John, New Brunswick, 1847 (St. John, 1979), 50; Gore Booth emigrants quoted in Fitzpatrick, “Emigration, 1801–70,” in New History of Ireland, 5: 597.

47. Lansdowne, Glanerought and the Petty-Fitzmaurices, 127; Ommanney to the Commissioners, March 5, 26, April 1, 1848, in IUP–BPP, Famine, 3: 335, 339–40.

48. Unknown writer to “My dear William,” February 27, 1849, O’Sullivan to Poulett Scrope, April 30, 1849, The Nation, December 12, 1857, all in Lyne, “Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare,” 72, 97, 100–101. The mortality figure is based on Lansdowne, Glanerought and the Petty-Fitzmaurices, 128–29, which cites Trench as saying that 5,000 had died in the Kenmare “union” (relief district) by the time he became agent in early 1850. The Lansdowne estate made up about one-third of the Kenmare union, thus my upper estimate that about one-third of that figure had died.

50. Ibid., 124–25; Lyne, “Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare,” 89 (poorhouse figures), 102–3 (Cork Examiner), 136–37.

51. Lyne, “Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare,” 136–37; Trench, Realities of Irish Life, 124–26. For some of the Lansdowne ships, see Glazier, Famine Immigrants, 6: 619–20, 626–27, 662–63, 644–49, 7: 16–19, 84–85.

52. Lyne, “Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare to America,” 104–5, 112–13; Maxwell to Stewart and Kincaid, November 27, 1847, in IUP–BPP, Colonies, Canada, 17: 353–54 (food supply).

53. Tribune, March 19, 1851; Herald, March 22 (Robert Peel’s arrival), 23 (editorial), 1851.

54. Dublin Review, n.s., 12 (January–April 1869), 4–17, Tralee Chronicle, February 26, 1869, Eugene O’Connell to the Freeman’s Journal, November 20, 1880, in Lyne, “Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare to America,” 120–22; Charles Russell, “New Views on Ireland,” Or, Irish Land: Grievances: Remedies, 3rd ed. (London, 1880), 47; Lansdowne, Glanerought and the Petty-Fitzmaurices, 129.

1. The Old Brewery, and the New Mission House at the Five Points, By Ladies of the Mission (New York, 1854), 43; National Police Gazette in Edward Van Every, Sins of New York as “Exposed” by the Police Gazette (1930; New York, 1972), 282–83; Solon Robinson, Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated (New York, 1854), 209.

2. National Police Gazette in Van Every, Sins of New York, 282–83; Old Brewery, 49; “The Five Points,” National Magazine 2 (1853): 169.

3. Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (New York, 1928), 15–16, 19; Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2 vols., trans. Mary Howitt (New York, 1853), 2: 602.

4. Tribune, June 19, 1850; unidentified newspaper quoted in Old Brewery, 48; Joel H. Ross, What I Saw in New York (Auburn, NY, 1851), 96; The Prose Works of N. P. Willis (1845; new ed. in one vol., Philadelphia, 1849), 582–83.

5. Dwellings 23 and 24, Sixth Ward, 1850 United States manuscript census, National Archives. Dwelling 24 must be the Old Brewery because one of the inhabitants listed, John Burke, is described as a longtime resident of the building in Ross, What I Saw in New York, 92–94. That dwelling 23 was also part of the Old Brewery, perhaps with a separate entrance, is based on my comparison of its residents listed in the census with the 1850–51 New York City directory.

6. Ross, What I Saw in New York, 92–94; Bremer, Homes of the New World, 2: 602.

7. The Eleventh Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (New York, 1854): 23.

8. “Manhattan Record of Assessment,” Sixth Ward, 1860 (which describes height and dimensions of buildings), and blocks 161–65 and 199–202, “Block and Lot Folders,” New York City Housing Department Papers, both at New York Municipal Archives; William Perris, Maps of the City of New York. Surveyed under the Direction of the Insurance Companies of Said City (New York, 1853 and 1857).

9. [George G. Foster], New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver (New York, 1849), 23; Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Investigate the Health Department (1859), 31, in Edward Lubitz, “The Tenement Problem in New York City and the Movement for Its Reform, 1856–1867” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1970), 95–96; John H. Griscom, The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York (1845; New York, 1970), 8; Citizens’ Association, Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health (New York, 1865), 77.

10. Times, July 1, 1859; Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, January 13, 1847; Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Investigate the Health Department (1859), 31, in Lubitz, “The Tenement Problem,” 95–96.

11. Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Investigate the Health Department (1859), 31, in Lubitz, “The Tenement Problem,” 95–96.

12. Election districts 3–6, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York State manuscript census, Old Records Division, New York County Clerk’s Office (percentage of brick tenements and proportion of Five Pointers living in them); “Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Examine into the Condition of Tenant Houses in New-York and Brooklyn,” Documents of the Assembly of the State of New-York, Eightieth Session—1857 (Albany, 1857), doc. 205, pp. 17–18; Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis (New York, 1990), 13.

13. “Report . . . into the Condition of Tenant Houses in New-York and Brooklyn,” 18–19; Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Investigate the Health Department (1859), 66, in Lubitz, “Tenement Problem,” 63–64; Lawrence Veiller, “Back to Back Tenements,” in Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem, 2 vols. (1903; New York, 1970), 1: 293.

14. Harper’s Weekly 1 (February 21, 1857): 114–15; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 2 (November 1858): 150.

15. Tribune, June 5, 1850; Sixteenth Annual Report of the New York Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor (New York, 1859): 37; Lubitz, “Tenement Problem,” 541. The figures on inhabitants per apartment were derived by surveying the Perris insurance maps and New York City Department of Housing “Block and Lot” records to identify buildings most likely to have the neighborhood’s standard two-room apartments, and then determining the number of residents by consulting the 1855 New York State manuscript census in conjunction with the city directories.

16. Thirteenth Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1866): 28; John Morrow, A Voice from the Newsboys (New York, 1860), 39.

18. George Ellington [pseud.], The Women of New York; Or, The Under-World of the Great City (New York, 1869), 600–603 (“same bare floors”); Times, June 20, 1859. This Times story, which describes tenements in the First and Fourth Wards, is the only one I know of that details antebellum tenement decoration. Many tenements in those wards, especially the Fourth, were as bad as those at Five Points, which is why I believe it is a useful source despite its lack of reference to Five Points itself. For the archeological items found in Five Points, see the project’s Web site: http://r2.gsa.gov/fivept/fphome.htm, and Rebecca Yamin, “Lurid Tales and Homely Stories of New York’s Notorious Five Points,” Historical Archaeology 32 (1998): 74–85. The artifacts are currently stored in the basement of the World Trade Center, but their ultimate destination, in a museum or archive, has not yet been determined.

19. Second division, third election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census. The 1855 census taker for this portion of the neighborhood distinguished between boarders and lodgers in his enumeration. Females accounted for just 35 percent of boarders but made up 60 percent of the lodgers.

20. Account 4739, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books, New York Public Library; families 140 and 156, second division, third election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census.

21. Account 3307, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books, dwelling 54, second division, third electoral district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census; dwelling 288, p. 215, Sixth Ward, 1850 United States census.

22. The Tribune (June 5, 1850) did not state precisely what proportion of these Sixth Ward cellar dwellers lived in the Five Points neighborhood. Given that the Five Points district made up about one-third of the ward, and that it was the most impoverished portion of the ward with the largest population of poor people likely to seek cellar accommodations, it seems reasonable to estimate that half of the cellar population lived in Five Points.

23. Samuel Prime, Life in New York (New York, 1847), 179–80; Times, July 1, 1859; Tribune, June 5, 13, 1850; Griscom, Sanitary Condition, 10.

24. Times, July 1, 1859; Tribune, June 13, 1850; family 63, fourth election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census; [James D. Burn], Three Years Among the Working-Classes (London, 1865), 5–6.

25. Twenty-third Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society (1867): 28; Herald, September 18, 1892, p. 11; “Report . . . into the Condition of Tenant Houses in New-York and Brooklyn,” 23; “Tenement Evils as Seen by the Tenants,” in DeForest and Veiller, eds., Tenement House Problem, 1: 394 (not quoted). Many of the quotations in this section are from the late nineteenth century rather than the Civil War era. I have used such quotations in this section because many aspects of tenement life, especially from the perspective of the tenant, were not recorded in the antebellum years.

30. Tribune, December 15, 1848, June 5, 1850, September 19, 1865; Report of the Council of Hygiene, 76.

31. Owen Kildare, My Old Bailiwick (New York, 1906), 227; DeForest and Veiller, eds., Tenement House Problem, 1: 388, 394–95.

33. Ibid., 1: 294; Report of the Council of Hygiene, 80; Eugene P. Moehring, Public Works and the Patterns of Real Estate Growth in Manhattan, 1835–1894 (New York, 1981), 96; Sixteenth Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, 50; Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Investigate the Health Department (1859), 66, in Lubitz, “Tenement Problem,” 64–66.

35. DeForest and Veiller, eds., Tenement House Problem, 1: 387; Griscom, Sanitary Condition, 18; Report of the Council of Hygiene, 73. The green fluid quotation describes a yard at 49 Elizabeth Street, a half block north of the area I have defined as Five Points, but typical of yards in the Five Points district as well.

36. Philip Wallys, About New York: An Account of What a Boy Saw in his Visit to the City (New York, 1857), 63; Report of the Council of Hygiene, 77; Sixteenth Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, 50, 52; Annual Report of the City Inspector (1842), 188–97, (1856), 157, in Carol Groneman, “The ‘Bloody Ould Sixth,’: A Social Analysis of a New York City Working-Class Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertion, University of Rochester, 1973), 182.

37. Subterranean, February 13, 1847, in Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana, 1982), 58; DeForest and Veiller, eds., Tenement House Problem, 1: 390–94; Owen Kildare, My Mamie Rose (New York, 1903), 19.

38. [Burn], Three Years Among the Working-Classes, 302–3; James D. McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life (Philadelphia, 1872), 403; Kildare, My Mamie Rose, 15, 23, 38–39; Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work Among Them, 3rd ed. (New York, 1872), 204–05.

39. Voice from the Old Brewery: The Organ of the Five Points Mission 1 (August 1, 1861): 29; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (June 1857): 64 (“cried and cried”); Five Points Monthly 3 (February 1856): 24–25; Tribune, November 23, 1864.

40. Kildare, My Mamie Rose, 15; Harper’s Weekly 23 (August 9, 1879): 629; 27 (June 30, 1883): 401, 410; 29 (August 1, 1885): 491, 496; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August 12, 1882): 390 (quotations), 392–93; (July 23, 1887): 373.

41. Lubitz, “Tenement Problem,” 217; Times, February 4, 6, 7, 1860; Harper’s Weekly 4 (April 7, 1860): 211.

44. William F. Barnard, Forty Years at the Five Points: A Sketch of the Five Points House of Industry (New York, 1893), 2; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (January 1858): 219; Robinson, Hot Corn, 209, 307. Maps of the Collect Pond seem to show that water covered the ground that would eventually become Cow Bay, so the story describing the origin of its name may be apocryphal.

45. Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (May 1857): 20, 22; (June 1857): 68; (October 1857): 165; (January 1858): 225; Commercial Advertiser, August 23, 1849; George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light (1850; Berkeley, 1990), 125; Robinson, Hot Corn, 209, 307; Ross, What I Saw in New York, 96; dwellings 105–15, pp. 26–28, Sixth Ward, 1850 United States census; dwellings 82–87, third election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census. Although neither the 1850 nor the 1855 census takers appears to have entered all of the Cow Bay tenements, the census does accurately reflect the continuing African-American exodus from the neighborhood.

46. Old Brewery, 199; Express in Samuel B. Halliday, The Lost and Found; or Life Among the Poor (New York, 1859), 211–12 (this tour is also described in the Times, July 1, 1859).

48. Ibid., 212–13; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (June 1857): 70.

49. “Report . . . into the Condition of Tenant Houses in New-York and Brooklyn,” 18; Evening Post, May 17, 1849.

50. “Report . . . into the Condition of Tenant Houses in New-York and Brooklyn,” 18. I cannot document that Honora Moriarty and her daughters were Lansdowne immigrants, but their surname and residence in a building particularly dominated by emigrants from that estate make it likely that the identification is accurate.

51. Times, July 1, 1859; Express in Halliday, Lost and Found, 207–8; New York Illustrated News (February 18, 1860): 216; account 6524, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books; Ira A. Glazier, ed., The Famine Immigrants: Lists of Irish Immigrants Arriving at the Port of New York, 1846–1851, 7 vols. (Baltimore, 1983–86), 6: 647; family 227, p. 136, second district, Sixth Ward, 1860 United States census.

52. Dwelling 31, second division, third electoral district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census; accounts 4983, 5800, 6773, and 7504, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books; wedding of Daniel Haley, October 14, 1857, marriage register, Transfiguration Church.

54. Dwellings 12–30, fourth election district, dwellings 45–57, 117–31, fifth election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census; dwellings 24–52, third district, Sixth Ward, 1860 United States census.

55. Dwelling 39, second division, third election district, dwellings 67 and 68, fourth election district, dwellings 83–87 (Cow Bay), 138–40 (Park Street), 147–49 (Mulberry Street), fifth election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census.

56. Marriage register, Transfiguration Church; William Bennett, Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland (London, 1847), 129–30; 119 of the 185 residents identified on these blocks in the Transfiguration marriage records were natives of Kerry. Ninety-four of those 119 had been born on the Lansdowne estate.

57. Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books; marriage register, Transfiguration Church.

58. “Report . . . into the Condition of Tenant Houses in New-York and Brooklyn,” 17–18, 28; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 3 (March 1860): 248–49; 4 (April 1860): 12–14; Robinson, Hot Corn, 212–13.

59. Tribune, April 1, 1856, November 29, 1864; DeForest and Veiller, eds., Tenement House Problem, 1: 408; Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Investigate the Health Department (1859), 31, in Lubitz, “Tenement Problem,” 32–33, 133; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 3 (March 1860): 248–50; Times, November 8, 1853 ($8.50), July 2, 1871; 1860 and 1870 Manhattan Records of Real Estate Assessment, New York Municipal Archives.

61. Times, March 31, 1856. In 1847, two Five Points property managers, the Osborn brothers, paid $35 in taxes, $6.50 in insurance, $26 for painting, $35 for masonry work, $50 for carpentry, $21 for wallpapering, and $7 for glass installation at 70 Mott. Other miscellaneous repairs brought the total expenses for the year to $200.66. This left a net income of less than $100, which if the property was worth $3,000 or so, represented a 3 percent rate of return, not an outrageous profit. Expenses, however, did not usually consume so large a proportion of the landlord’s income. At 79 Orange Street, for example, the Osborns recorded just $5.38 spent on repairs in 1847; they also spent $41.84 for taxes and insurance, $13.56 to evict a tenant, and $15.74 in commissions to the carpenter they hired to collect the rents. Subtracting these figures from the $437.65 in rent collected leaves $361.13. Of that total, the Osborns took $200 for managing the property for the year, leaving the owner, Cornelius Van Rensselaer, $161.13 in profit for the year. If the property was worth $3,000, that amounted to a return on assets of about 5¹/₂ percent. If the owner still paid mortgage interest on this property, then these profits would be reduced further—Charles F. Osborn Account Book, George L. Osborn Account Book, New York Public Library.

62. Charles F. Osborn Account Book, George L. Osborn Account Book; Doggett’s New York City Directory for 1848–49 (New York, 1848), 182, 408; Doggett’s New York City Directory for 1849–1850 (New York, 1849), 149, 231, 302; Doggett’s New York City Street Directory for 1851, 262; 1850 United States manuscript census, Sixth Ward, pp. 204 (McDermott), 221 (Trainor), 225 (Hall). The Osborn account books refer to this building first as 66 Mott and later as 70 Mott because the block was renumbered sometime in late 1848 or early 1849.

63. Tribune, April 7, 1856, April 15, 1859; Express in Halliday, Lost and Found, 214. See also the Courier and Enquirer in Times, December 1, 1851.

65. Isaac N. P. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, 6 vols. (1915–28; New York, 1967), 5: 1859; Times, March 9 and October 13, 1853; Express in Halliday, Lost and Found, 212.

1. For a list of working-class New York memoirs, see Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York (Ithaca, 1990), 279–83. The closest thing to a Five Points memoir, though it says very little about Five Points itself, is the autobiography of pickpocket George Appo in the Society for the Prevention of Crime Papers, Columbia University, much of which was reprinted in Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Autobiography of George Appo,” Missouri Review 16 (1993): 34–77. For Appo’s story, see Chapter Thirteen.

7. Ibid., 61–85. Johnny’s memoir does not mention the House of Industry in connection with Willie’s adoption, but for the links between the two programs see Chapter Eight.

10. Notes on the back of a photo of the gravestone of John Morrow, Box 16, Peter J. Eckel Newsboy Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Record of Deaths in the City of Brooklyn, 1861, p. 66, New York Municipal Archives.

11. John McCormack, for example, who had toiled as a laborer in County Tipperary until his emigration in May 1851, held the same menial status in Five Points five months later. See account 1247, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books, New York Public Library; Ira A. Glazier, ed., The Famine Immigrants: Lists of Irish Immigrants Arriving at the Port of New York, 1846–1851, 7 vols. (Baltimore, 1983–86), 7: 193.

12. My calculation of the current value of Healy’s $700 in savings is based on John J. McCusker, “How Much Is That in Real Money?” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 101 (1991): 327–32, which suggests a multiplier of 16 to convert dollar amounts from the 1850s into 1991 dollars. All subsequent estimates of the current value of nineteenth-century monetary figures are based on McCusker’s work.

14. All percentages have been rounded to nearest whole number except those under one, which are rounded to nearest tenth of a percent. Five Points employment statistics are based on my 1855 census sample, whose composition is described in Chapter Two, note 10. “All New York” categories adapted from Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 (1949; Port Washington, NY, 1965), 214–18, and Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 92.

The occupational categories are made up of the following vocations: “Professionals” includes physicians, clergymen, lawyers, and architects. “Business owners” includes manufacturers, merchants, hotel and boardinghouse keepers, restaurateurs, “proprietors,” clothiers, dry goods dealers, shopkeepers, wine merchants, grocers, and food and liquor dealers. It is impossible, through the census, to determine whether a “grocer” or “saloon keeper” actually owned his or her own business or merely worked in someone else’s. For the sake of consistency, all grocers and saloonkeepers have been placed in this category. “Petty entrepreneurs” includes peddlers and ragpickers. “Lower-status white-collar workers” were overwhelmingly clerks, but this category also includes a few salesmen, government workers, actors, and male teachers. The “Skilled workers” category is composed of assayers, bakers, blacksmiths, bleachers, boilermakers, brass workers, brewers and distillers, bricklayers, burnishers, butchers, cabinetmakers, carpenters, carvers, caulkers, chandlers, coach and wagon makers, confectioners, coopers, coppersmiths, dyers, factory workers, furriers, glassmakers, glaziers, guilders, gunsmiths, hatters, ironworkers, jewelers, leather workers, locksmiths, masons, mechanics, musical instrument makers, oil, paint, and paper makers, painters, plasterers, plumbers, polishers, potters, precious metal workers, precision instrument makers, printers, refiners, roofers, sailmakers and riggers, sawyers, shipbuilders, shoemakers, stonecutters, tailors, textile workers, tobacco workers, turners, upholsterers, varnishers, and weavers. “Unskilled workers” are defined as cartmen, chimney sweeps, hostlers and grooms, laborers, policemen (so classified because people from any occupational category took these jobs when offered), porters, sailors, waiters, and watchmen. Finally, “Difficult to classify” includes adult students, authors, conductors or other railroad employees, drovers, expressmen, farmers, financiers, fishermen, florists, gamblers, gardeners, gentlemen, hunters, scavengers, speculators, superintendents, and undertakers. For the women, “Needle trades” include cap makers, dressmakers, mantilla makers, milliners, seamstresses, “tailoresses,” vest makers, and wigmakers. “Servants” includes servants, cooks, and nurses. Some better versed in the nuances of the antebellum trades or labor history in general may quibble with my placement of certain workers in certain groups, or even the categories themselves. I believe, however, that these groupings suffice for the purpose of drawing general comparisons between Five Pointers and the rest of the New York population.

17. The Eighteenth Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (New York, 1861): 21–23; Tribune, July 9, 1845; Carol Groneman, “The ‘Bloody Ould Sixth’: A Social Analysis of a New York City Working-Class Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1973), 99; Edith Abbott, “Wages of Unskilled Labor in the United States, 1850–1900,” Journal of Political Economy 13 (June 1905): 363.

Deposits in Five Pointers’ Bank Accounts by Month, 1852–54

diagram

Source: Accounts 300, 319, 347, 375, 396, 450, 451, 461, 472, 528, 572, 643, 685, 710, 722, 738, 740, 776, 789, 817, 866, 897, 906, 924, 927, 945, 987, 1015, 1017, 1022, 1024, 1049, 1063, 1104, 1185, 1235, 1245, 1247, 1258, 1270, 1310, 1314, 1319, 1322, 1333, 1360, 1373, 1380, 1387, 1400, 1444, 1445, 1669, 1710, 1760, 1875, 1885, 1935, 2072, 2075, 2116, 2165, 2250, 2260, 2265, 2270, 2281, 2287, 2320, 2332, 2335, 2378, 2403, 2405, 2406, 2440, 2464, 2467, 2639, 2661, 2663, 2674, 2709, 2723, 2977, 2978, 2995, 3035, 3067, 3093, 3155, 3204, 3424, 3461, 3543, 3580, 3597, 3651, 3666, 3735, 3805, 3830, 3914, 3976, 4069, 4120, 4134, 4137, 4163, 4188, 4191, 4201, 4203, 4205, 4228, 4248, 4255, 4260, 4277, 4336, 4344, 4382, 4383, 4386, 4408, 4409, 4427, 4454, 4456, 4497, 4516, 4525, 4529, 4536, 4542, 4544, 4572, 4592, 4602, 4617, 4654, 4735, 4737, 4738, 4739, 4740, 4745, 4751, 4774, 4780, 4808, 4820, 4838, 4873, 4888, 4960, 4976, 4983, 5036, 5098, 5115, 5134, 5137, 5138, 5152, 5155, 5172, 5192, 5209, 5225, 5230, 5240, 5243, 5245, 5249, 5266, 5276, 5286, 5290, 5303, 5304, 5354, 5360, 5367, 5394, 5403, 5409, 5419, 5433, 5454, 5479, 5514, 5583, 5607, 5612, 5631, and 5649, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books and Account Ledgers. See also Cormac O’Grada, “Immigrants, Savers, and Runners: The Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in the 1850’s,” Center for Economic Research Working Papers Series (1988), no. 2.

21. Virginia Penny, The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman’s Work (Boston, 1863), 110; Greeley, Recollections, and Five Points Monthly Record in Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 112–17, 164 (quotations); “Report of the Committee to Examine into the . . . Commissioners of Emigration,” Documents of the Assembly of the State of New-York, Seventy-fifth Session, 1852 (Albany, 1852), doc. 34, 176–77; Harper’s Weekly (July 4, 1857): 418–19.

23. British Mechanic’s and Labourer’s Hand Book and John White, Sketches from America, in Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 128, 131–32, 140; [James D. Burn], Three Years Among the Working-Classes in the United States During the War (London, 1865), 11.

24. United States Senate, Committee on Education and Labor, Report of the Senate Committee Upon Relations Between Labor and Capital (Washington, D.C., 1885), 1: 413–14; Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 140; Groneman, “‘Bloody Ould Sixth,’” 105.

25. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984), 119; Tribune, September 26 (“pot boiling”), November 15, 1845, July 26, 1850 (“half-starved”).

26. Tribune, June 10, 1850, March 20, 21, 29, 31, 1854; Herald, July 23 and 25, November 14, 1850, October 3, 1853; Robert Crowe, Reminiscences of Robert Crowe, the Octogenerian [sic] Tailor (New York, 1901), 26.

27. Tribune, September 5, 9 (quotation), 1845, May 8, 1850, May 27, 1853; Ernst, Immigrant Life, 79, 215.

28. Dwelling 57, third electoral district, second division, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census; J. D. Eisenstein, “The History of the First Russian-American Jewish Congregation,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 9 (1901): 68.

29. [William M. Bobo], Glimpses of New-York City, by a South Carolinian (Charleston, 1852), 118 (“suspenders”); Alvin F. Harlow, Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street (New York, 1931), 173–74 (“sha-a-d”); account 1828, Emigrant Saving Bank Test Books and Account Ledgers; Hyman Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654–1860 (Philadelphia, 1945), 411.

30. Ernst, Immigrant Life, 86; Junius H. Browne, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New-York (Hartford, 1869), 98–99; William H. Bell Diary, October 9, 1850, New-York Historical Society.

31. Browne, Great Metropolis, 277; George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light (1850; Berkeley, 1990), 126; “Autobiography of George Appo,” typescript, pp. 1–3, Society for the Prevention of Crime Papers, Columbia University; Evening Post, January 21, 1854; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 377.

32. Tribune, May 8, 13, 14 (quotation), 1850; John F. Maguire, The Irish in America (London, 1868), 232–33. For neighborhood construction accidents, see Tribune, December 4, 1850; Herald, November 5, 1853.

33. Irish-American, July 30, 1853 (Coogan quotation); Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 102, 120; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (June 1857): 61; 2 (April 1959): 274; Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society (1868): 8; entry of December 15, 1856, Adoption Case Histories, Five Points Mission Records, United Methodist Church Archives, Drew University.

34. Herald, June 11, 1853 (Mulberry Street shirt sewer); Tribune, June 8, 1853; Times, March 1, 1855.

35. Wirt Sikes, “Among the Poor Girls,” Putnam’s Magazine, n.s. 1 (April 1868): 433; accounts 1875 and 12057, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books.

36. Accounts 3652 and 4542, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books; Tribune, March 27, 1851.

39. Herald, October 7, 1851 (“caprice”), June 11, 1853; Tribune, March 27, 1851, March 22, 1853.

40. Tribune, September 3, 1845, June 8, 1853; Herald, June 11, 1853 (“Song of the Shirt”).

41. [George G. Foster], New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver (New York, 1849), 53; Tribune, June 8, 1853 (quotation); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana, 1982), 118. Many Five Points women became seamstresses because the work could be done at home while caring for one’s children.

42. Tribune, November 6, 1845; account 2405, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books and Account Ledgers. Naylan listed her address as 32 Orange Street when she opened her account, but it is very unlikely that she worked at that address. She was probably one of the domestics who commuted to work.

44. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (March 13, 1880): 27; John F. Maguire, The Irish in America (London, 1868), 315, 317–18.

45. Tribune, November 6, 1845; statement of Ann Kelly, April 10, 1859, reel 75, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers, New York Municipal Archives.

46. Carl N. Degler, “Labor in the Economy and Politics of New York City, 1850–1860: A Study of the Impact of Early Industrialism” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1952), 124–25; Tribune, September 16–17, 1845; Times, March 2, 1859.

47. Irish-American, May 28, 1853 (including quotation from Sun), May 16, 1857; Herald, May 13, 1853; Degler, “Labor in the Economy,” 137–38; Ernst, Immigrant Life, 67.

48. Account 2320, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books; dwellings 87 and 92, fourth election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census; Doggett’s New York City Street Directory for 1851 (New York, 1851), which lists, alphabetically by street, the proprietors of many Five Points businesses; Bell Diary, October 9, 1850.

49. William Burns, Life in New York, In Doors and Out of Doors (New York, 1851), unpaginated; Irish-American, February 24, 1850; accounts 1017, 1049, 2579, 3035, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books; family 467, fifth election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census.

50. Solon Robinson, Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated (New York, 1854), 44; The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins, 5 vols. (New York, 1952), 2: 149; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 176.

51. Robinson, Hot Corn, 44–47, 104–11; Tribune, October 10, 1853; Diary of George Templeton Strong, 2: 148.

52. George Ellington [pseud.], The Women of New York; Or, The Under-World of the Great City (New York, 1869), 605–6 (“brisk business”); Samuel Halliday, The Lost and Found; or Life Among the Poor (New York, 1859), 118–23; The Old Brewery and the New Mission House at the Five Points, By Ladies of the Mission (New York, 1854), 168–69.

53. “C.L.B.” (Charles Loring Brace) in Times, March 12, 1853; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 115–19; Irish-American, February 17, 1850.

54. Edward W. Martin [pseud. for James D. McCabe], The Secrets of the Great City (Philadelphia, 1868), 261–64; Owen Kildare, My Mamie Rose (New York, 1903), 45–51; “C.L.B.” in Times, March 12, 1853; Morrow, Voice from the Newsboys, 128–32; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (December 29, 1855): 43; Times, October 16, 1902; family 79, sixth election district, Sixth Ward, 1870 United States manuscript census (identified as Sullivan in Daniel Czitrom, “Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889–1913,” Journal of American History 78 [1991]: 539–40).

55. Sun, April 17, 1889, p. 1 (Sullivan); Martin, Secrets of the Great City, 264–65; Browne, Great Metropolis, 425–33; Charles L. Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work Among Them, 3rd ed. (New York, 1872), 205; Seventh Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1860): 15–16.

56. Third Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (New York, 1856): 26; Philip Wallys, About New York: An Account of What a Boy Saw in His Visit to the City (New York, 1857), 43–44, 51–52; Stansell, City of Women, 50–51; Morrow, Voice from the Newsboys, 37–38, 41; Browne, Great Metropolis, 95; Seventh Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (New York, 1860): 5; Groneman, “‘Bloody Ould Sixth,’” 127.

58. Tribune, February 3, 8, 16, 20, 1855; Eleventh Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society (New York, 1855), 8–9; Irish-American, December 23, 1854, January 20, 1855; Eleventh Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (New York, 1854), 37; Twelfth Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (New York, 1855), 42.

59. Fourteenth Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society (New York, 1858), 8; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (November 1857): 171 (not quoted); Herald, October 21, 1857; Fifteenth Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (New York, 1859), 30.

61. Gerard J. Lyne, “William Steuart Trench and the Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare to America, 1850–1855,” Journal of the Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society 25 (1992): 92–94; William S. Trench, Realities of Irish Life (London, 1868), 126–27.

62. Catharine Bradley to “My dear Uncle John,” October 6, 1847, Eliza Quin to her parents, January 22, 1848, in Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers, “Emigration” series (Shannon, 1969), 5: 125, 128 (hereafter cited as IUP-BPP, Emigration).

63. “Bridget Rooney to her father Pat Rooney,” January 15, 1848, BR146/10/13, Pat McGowan to his parents, December 21, 1847, BR146/10/13, Broadlands Papers.

64. Eliza Quin to her parents, January 22, 1848, in IUP-BPP, Emigration, 5: 128; Pat McGowan, to his parents, December 21, 1847, BR146/10/13, Broadlands Papers.

67. One in seven Five Pointers getting married at the neighborhood’s Catholic church was a Kerry native; more than 75 percent of them had once lived on the Lansdowne estate. Given that about two-thirds of the neighborhood’s 14,000 residents in 1855 were Irish natives or their children, and that nearly all of them were Catholics, one can estimate that roughly 1,000 Five Points inhabitants were former Lansdowne tenants. If we take the size of the average Lansdowne nuclear family to be four persons, then their 153 accounts could represent 60 percent of the 1,000 Lansdowne emigrants living in Five Points, but because a few persons opened more than one account, I put the figure at 50 percent instead.

The Lansdowne account numbers are 776, 987, 1235, 2250, 2639, 3067, 3424, 3461, 3666, 3735, 4163, 4277, 4408, 4409, 4542, 4737, 4738, 4739, 4745, 4774, 5115, 5155, 5303, 5304, 5433, 5479, 5735, 5763, 5800, 5953, 6143, 6144, 6468, 6473, 6474, 6524, 6605, 6623, 6773, 6797, 6805, 6975, 7014, 7061, 7085, 7193, 7225, 7358, 7464, 7504, 7524, 7525, 7596, 7660, 7705, 7747, 7759, 7912, 8060, 8528, 8592, 8675, 8687, 8923, 9102, 9130, 9150, 9201, 9202, 9203, 9212, 9276, 9304, 9358, 9359, 9438, 9445, 9561, 9572, 9611, 9732, 9776, 9785, 9860, 9923, 10010, 10153, 10164, 10222, 10267, 10292, 10368, 10411, 10465, 10524, 10576, 10646, 10647, 10693, 10712, 10727, 10747, 10754, 10804, 10835, 10836, 10876, 10885, 11113, 11218, 11236, 11342, 11368, 11390, 11455, 11488, 11500, 11552, 11560, 11566, 11650, 11730, 11754, 11807, 11808, 11873, 11895, 11910, 11971, 11979, 11998, 12001, 12036, 12040, 12041, 12046, 12053, 12057, 12084, 12120, 12215, 12240, 12259, 12309, 12310, 12311, 12316, 12317, 12344, 12419, and 12420.

69. Accounts 1235, 3424, 7464, 12046, and 12419, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books.

70. Accounts 5479 and 9445, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books and Account Ledgers. The highest balance achieved by the Lansdowne immigrants in their bank accounts was, on average, $200. The highest balance achieved by non-Lansdowne Five Pointers was, on average, $234.

71. [Burn], Three Years Among the Working-Classes, 14–15; Church Monthly (March 1858), in Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 2 (June 1858): 34–35; Eliza Quin to “Dear Parents,” January 22, 1848 (written from the Sixth Ward Hotel), in IUP-BPP, Emigration, 5: 128.

1. Thomas L. Nichols, Forty Years of American Life, 2 vols. (London, 1864), 2: 159; Sherlock Bristol, The Pioneer Preacher: Incidents of Interest, and Experiences in the Author’s Life (1887; Urbana, 1989), 66–67.

4. Nichols, Forty Years of American Life, 2: 159; Bristol, Pioneer Preacher, 66–67.

5. Times, January 14, 1885; Clipper, January 24, 1885; Nichols, Forty Years of American Life, 2: 159–61 (quotation); Matthew P. Breen, Thirty Years of New York Politics Up-to-Date (New York, 1899), 307–8; National Police Gazette, February 7, 1885, p. 5, and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly 59 (January 24, 1885): 380. Most biographies refer to Rynders’s customhouse post as that of “weigher,” but I have utilized the title listed in Doggetts’ New York City Directory because it was probably provided by Rynders himself—Doggetts’ New York City Directory for 1847–48 (New York, 1847), 356.

7. The Nation (November 4, 1875): 288; Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York (Ithaca, 1990), 239; Breen, Thirty Years, 233.

8. New York Board of Aldermen, Documents 25 (1858), doc. 6, pp. 53–54, 161, 171; J. Frank Kernan, Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies (New York, 1885), 23–24 (Matthew Brennan), 501 (Fitzgerald); Times, October 30, 1884, p. 5 (Owen Brennan); Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1855 (New York, 1855), 168.

9. William M. Ivins, Machine Politics and Money in Elections in New York City (1887; New York, 1970), 13–14, 25; Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1856 (New York, 1856), 225; “A Policeman” in Tribune, October 20, 1856.

12. Ibid., 47–48; John Doggett, Jr., ed., The New York City Directory for 1842 (New York, 1842), 100.

13. Kernan, Reminiscences, 50; Proceedings of the Board of Aldermen 18 (1839–40): 324, 410; 21 (1841): 269. For extra hiring at election time, see Tribune, March 13, 1846.

15. Kernan, Reminiscences, 49–50. On the influence of money and fighters in securing nominations citywide, see Herald, October 29, 30, 1850, March 10, 1855; Breen, Thirty Years, 40–43.

17. Tribune, April 12, 1848; Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1849 (New York, 1849), 319; Herald, November 6, 1850 (“free indulgence”). See also Harper’s Weekly (November 13, 1858): 724 (for an image of a Five Points polling place); People v. James H. Lally, et al., April 27, 1841, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers, New York Municipal Archives; [George G. Foster], New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver (New York, 1849), 49. Whig fighters sometimes instigated polling place brawls as well, though such cases were rare after 1845. See Tom Quick, “Old Sports of New York,” Leader, June 16, 1860.

18. Freeman’s Journal, October 27, 1849 (“grossest caricatures”); Aurora, April 11, 1842, in Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, ed. Joseph J. Rubin and Charles H. Brown (State College, PA, 1950), 68; Herald, April 11, 1842; Tribune, April 12, 1842; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 630–31.

20. Herald, April 14, 1842. The Herald’s account of this contest is not completely consistent. While its detailed story on the fourteenth implied that Shaler was the regular nominee, its election coverage the previous day stated that Ferris had won the endorsement of the primary meeting. And I have found no evidence that Donoho ever served as the ward’s collector.

22. Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, 77, 78, 80; Tribune, April 12 (“most savage”), 13, 1842; Herald, April 14, 1842.

23. Herald, April 14, 1842 (first quotation); Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, 77; Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1842–43 (New York, 1842), 74 (Donoho’s victory). Donoho later petitioned the board of aldermen for compensation “for damage done to his premises, on the evening of the 12th of April instant, by a mob”—Proceedings of the Board of Aldermen 22 (1842): 441.

24. The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851, ed. Allan Nevins (New York, 1936), 596. If true, Whitman’s statement that Mike Walsh and the Spartans attacked those speaking against the Maclay Act at a public meeting in City Hall Park further complicates an assessment of the rioters’ motivations—Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, 58.

25. Kernan, Reminiscences, 50–51; Herald, April 11, 1849. Biographical details of Kelly’s early life are not readily available, in part because his name is so common. He first appears in a city directory as a Five Points saloonkeeper in 1843 at 74 Bayard Street. He also served as a Sixth Ward school commissioner in 1847. John Doggett, Jr., ed., The New-York City and Co-Partnership Directory (New York, 1843), 189; Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1847 (New York, 1847), 231 (which lists his address as 78 Bayard).

26. Herald, September 26, 27 (letter to the editor correcting erroneous report of Foote’s victory), 1849.

27. I was able to identify the address and occupation of 52 of the 68 Foote nominees and 46 of the 62 Kelly nominees in the 1849–50 or 1850–51 New York directories.

The “Other merchants” category for Kelly includes two bakers who seem to own their own bakeries, while the Foote “Merchant” category includes an agent, a boardinghouse keeper, and a hotel proprietor. The “Unskilled” category includes a laborer, a “bill poster,” and a “carman.” The “Difficult to categorize” nominee was James “Jumps” Hogan, who according to Brennan kept a “policy [lottery] office” on Centre Street. The tickets can be found in the Herald, September 26, 1849.

28. Herald, October 17, 19, 21 (all quotations), 24, 1849. Ridaboek’s status as a coal dealer is from his testimony in a trial reported in the Times, January 20, 1853, by which point he served on the influential Tammany general committee.

29. Herald, October 17, 19, 21, 24, 1849; Irish-American, October 28 (quotation), November 4, 1849.

31. Tribune, October 31, November 1, 1849; Herald, October 31, November 1, 3, 1849.

32. Clarion, November 5, 1849; Herald, November 7, 1849; Tribune, November 8, 1849 (“uproarious”); Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1850 (New York, 1850), 409 (official returns).

34. Leader, October 6, 1860 (quotation); Times, November 18, 1869. The various obituaries and biographical sketches upon which this description of Brennan’s early life is based contradict each other in many details. In such cases, I have relied on the Leader, whose editor John Clancy was Brennan’s close friend. For Brennan’s older brother Timothy, see Times, December 4, 1881, p. 7. I have inferred that Brennan’s mother was widowed around the time of his birth because his father’s last listing in the city directory is in the 1821–22 edition, in which he is listed as living at 13 Ferry Street. After a hiatus of a few years in which the family does not appear in the directory, Hannah is listed as a “huckster” living at Old Slip—Longworth’s American Almanac (New York, 1821), 90.

35. Times, January 20, 1879; Herald, January 20, 1879 (“coffee, cakes”); Tribune, January 21, 1879 (“fleet of foot”).

36. Doggett’s New York City Directory for 1844–45 (New York, 1844), 48; Doggett’s New York City Directory for 1845–46 (New York, 1845), 50; Times, January 20, 1879.

38. Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1848 (New York, 1848), 100.

39. Herald, January 20, 1850; Tribune, May 9, 1850; [Wendell P. Garrison], William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life, 3 vols. (New York, 1885–89), 3: 285–300; Kernan, Reminiscences, 53–54.

40. Kernan, Reminiscences, 53–54; Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1851 (New York, 1851), 345–46; Herald, November 8, 1850 (election results by ward). Rynders won 967 votes in the Sixth Ward, while the two Democratic candidates for assistant alderman, the highest ward-wide office up for grabs that year, captured 1,328 votes between them. One cannot be sure that the events described by Kernan took place in 1850, though given Rynders’s appearance in that year’s race for assembly, my inference that Kernan is describing the 1850 primary is probably accurate. Alvin F. Harlow, Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street (New York, 1931), 302–3, implies that the events described by Kernan took place before 1849 and attributes the anti-Irish rhetoric used by Rynders in fomenting the Astor Place Riot to resentment against the Irish inspired by this electoral defeat, but there is no evidence I know of to substantiate Harlow’s dating.

Newspapers reported Rynders’s nomination at Tammany Hall without comment (see Herald, October 10, 1850), so my assessment of how he captured the nomination despite the opposition of Sixth Ward voters cannot be confirmed either. Evidence of growing Irish-American resentment toward Rynders’s attempts to influence Sixth Ward politics before the fall of 1850 can be found in the Irish-American, February 24, 1850. Following the lead of Breen, who asserted that Rynders “had long ruled the Sixth Ward with a rod of iron,” many historians have erroneously stated that Rynders did for a time control Sixth Ward politics. But Kernan’s account is the only one not contradicted by contemporary evidence (Breen would have been a young child in 1850). Breen, Thirty Years, 518–19; Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York (New York, 1951), 32; Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (New York, 1928), 43. Rynders attributed his defeat in the race for assembly to “money circulating somewhere in the Third ward. If our side had had it, I might, perhaps, tell you a different story”—Herald, November 6, 1850.

41. Brennan became captain on November 20, 1851—Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1852 (New York, 1852), 101. Barr’s role in Brennan’s appointment is mentioned in the Times, January 20, 1879. The statement in one of Brennan’s obituaries that he had served as ward assessor before becoming police captain appears to be untrue, as he did not serve in that capacity (according to the Manual of the Corporation) in either 1850 or 1851.

42. Ivins, Machine Politics, 13–14; Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1855, 168; Tribune, November 1, 1856 (quotations); Leader, October 9, 1858.

43. Herald, November 3, 5, 6, 8, 1854 (all advertisements except election results on the eighth). Brennan captured 2,823 votes, to 1,854 for “Captain Kissner” of the Fourteenth Ward police, 1,145 for John McGrath, and 353 for Whig David W. Clark—Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1855, 368–69, 379.

44. Leader, November 22, 1862; Herald, January 20, 1879; John Ridge, “The Hidden Gaeltacht in Old New York,” New York Irish History 6 (1991–92): 17. Brennan can be found in the 1860 federal census in the Sixth Ward, fourth district, dwelling 265, where he is listed as a thirty-nine-year-old police justice with $14,000 in real property, $1,000 in personal property, along with his thirty-three-year-old wife Margaret (also a New York native, who owned $2,000 in real estate), five children aged nine, seven, five, three, and one, and two servants. State Democrats realized that victory in 1856 was virtually impossible, and it is likely that Brennan would not have received the nomination for prison inspector had the party had a realistic chance to carry the contest.

45. Herald and Times, May 14, 1876; Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1849, 87.

47. Ibid. (first two quotations); Times, July 2, 1864 (“graceful and polished writer”); Doggett’s New York City Directory for 1850–51 (New York, 1850), 101.

2. Marian Hannah Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” Paul Magriel, ed., in Chronicles of the American Dance (New York, 1948), 42–43 (including Herald quotation); Edward LeRoy Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy (New York, 1911), 48; Michael B. Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management (New York, 1912), 33–34; Marshall and Jane Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York, 1968), 44–45; Illustrated London News, August 5, 1848.

3. Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, ed. Joseph J. Rubin and Charles H. Brown (State College, PA, 1950), 21; Mathews quoted in Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York (Ithaca, 1990), 251; Diarmund O’Muirithe, A Seat Behind the Coachman: Travellers in Ireland, 1800–1900 (Dublin, 1972), 64.

4. Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy, 40 (“greatest jig dancers”); Winter, “Juba,” 39, 47, 52 (other quotations).

6. Cornelius Mathews, A Pen-and-Ink-Panorama of New-York City (New York, 1853), 124; Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, 18; Junius H. Browne, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New-York (Hartford, 1869), 129–30; [William M. Bobo], Glimpses of New-York City, by a South Carolinian (Charleston, 1852), 162.

7. Charles H. Haswell, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian, 1816–1860 (New York, 1897), 360; Browne, Great Metropolis, 165–66; Clipper, October 21, 1860 (Worden House); Alvin F. Harlow, Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street (New York, 1931), 381, 415–16, 535.

8. Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 175; Morning Express, July 6, 1857 (“coffee and cake saloon”).

9. George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light (1850; Berkeley, 1990), 192–93; J. Frank Kernan, Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies (New York, 1885), 43–44 (all quotations).

10. Davis S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York, 1995), 103–4; Richard H. Thornton, An American Glossary, 2 vols. (London, 1912), 1: 58–60; [Bobo], Glimpses of New-York, 164 (long quotation); [George G. Foster], New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver (New York, 1849), 43–47; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 196; Haswell, Reminiscences, 270–71 (final quotation).

11. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 170, 171, 173; [Foster], New York in Slices, 45 (final quotation only); Tribune, October 4, 1848 (not quoted).

12. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 175–76. Abram C. Dayton, The Last Days of Knickerbocker Life in New York (1880; New York, 1897), 219.

13. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 169, 175; Mathews, Pen-and-Ink-Panorama, 137–38; Haswell, Reminiscences, 270–71.

14. John Ripley, “Account of the Astor Place Riot” (1897), quoted in Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984), 300; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 189, 296–97.

16. Times, January 14, 1885 (which defines the sporting man as “a combination of gambler, horseman and politician”); Owen Kildare, My Mamie Rose (New York, 1903) and My Old Bailiwick (New York, 1906).

17. Clipper, October 21, 1860 (quotations), January 24, 1885 (Arena); Kernan, Reminiscences, 42–43.

19. Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, 36; Matthew P. Breen, Thirty Years of New York Politics Up-to-Date (New York, 1899), 71; Mathews, Pen-and-Ink-Panorama, 95–96.

20. Firemen may have exaggerated their occupational status when they were surveyed. “Return of the Engine, Hose, Hook and Ladder, and Hydrant Companies” (a broadside) and Annual Report of the Chief Engineer of the Fire Department (New York, 1858), both in New York Board of Aldermen, Documents 12 (1845), doc. 16, p. 361; 25 (1858), doc. 6, pp. 53–54, 161, 171; Kernan, Reminiscences, 862–81.

21. “Return of the Engine, Hose, Hook and Ladder, and Hydrant Companies,” in New York Board of Aldermen, Documents 25 (1858), doc. 6, pp. 53–54, 161, 171.

22. Account 2378, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books and Account Ledgers, New York Public Library; family 680, second division, third electoral district, and family 375, fifth election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census, Old Records Division, New York County Clerk’s Office; Trow’s New York City Directory for 1858–59 (New York, 1858), 364, 806; marriage of James Tucker to Maria Quinn, August 7, 1860, marriage register, Church of the Transfiguration, 29 Mott Street, New York.

23. Charles Townsend Harris, Memories of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies (New York, 1928), 36; [James D. Burn], Three Years Among the Working-Classes in the United States During the War (London, 1865), 108–9; William H. Bell Diary, July 24, 1851, New-York Historical Society; report of Chief Alfred Carson in New York Board of Aldermen, Documents 17 (1850), part II, doc. 57, pp. 930–32, 945–48.

25. Mathews, Pen-and-Ink-Panorama, 99–100; John T. Ridge, Sligo in New York: The Irish from County Sligo, 1849–1991 (New York, 1991), 16, 20; Irish-American, March 20, 1852 (Brennan Guard), August 15, 1857. That the Sarsfield Guard captain, John R. Boland, operated a saloon at that address is documented in Doggett’s New York City Street Directory for 1851 (New York, [1851]), 290.

26. Edward K. Spann, “Union Green: The Irish Community and the Civil War,” in Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore, 1996), 194; Ridge, Sligo in New York, 14, 15, 18 (quotation).

27. Carol Groneman, “Working-Class Immigrant Women in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York: The Irish Woman’s Experience,” Journal of Urban History 4 (1978): 267; OUA, April 7, 28, 1849; Tyler Anbinder, “‘Boss’ Tweed: Nativist,” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (Spring 1995): 109–16; Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York, 1991), 253.

28. The group sold the tenement at some point between 1892 and 1905. Craig S. Wilder, “The Rise and Influence of the New York African Society for Mutual Relief, 1808–1865,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 22 (July 1998): 7–9; Kernan, Reminiscences, 41; John J. Zuille, Historical Sketch of the New York African Society for Mutual Relief (New York, [1892?]), 16; Samuel R. Scottron, “New York African Society for Mutual Relief—Ninety-Seventh Anniversary,” Colored American Magazine 9 (December 1905): 685–90.

29. Ridge, Sligo in New York, 13; John T. Ridge, “Irish County Societies in New York, 1880–1914,” in Bayor and Meagher, eds., New York Irish, 275–79; Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 (1949; Port Washington, NY, 1965), 122.

30. Ridge, Sligo in New York, 14 (including Irish-American quotation), 18; Irish-American, February 17, 1850.

31. Ridge, Sligo in New York, 17–20; Irish-American, August 3, 31, December 28, 1850, February 22, 1851; Ridge, “Irish County Societies,” 278.

32. Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 234–56; Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 104; Herald, August 29, 1836, in Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York, 1992), 110; Mathews, Pen-and-Ink-Panorama, 187; Browne, Great Metropolis, 430; Foster, New York Naked, quoted in Peter G. Buckley, “To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820–1860” (Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984), 161.

34. Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 260, 265–67, 385; The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851, Allan Nevins, ed. (New York, 1936), 273.

35. Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 206; Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 223–25; Herald, April 26, 1848 (on the popularity of the Mose series).

36. Richard Moody, Ned Harrigan: From Corlear’s Hook to Herald Square (Chicago, 1980), 72, 241; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (January 17, 1874): 316; Herald, February 20, 1874; Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (New York, 1928), 244; Sante, Low Life, 91. The Herald and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper placed the theater at 17 and 19 Baxter Street respectively.

37. Doggett’s New York City Street Directory for 1851. Sometimes the distinction between a saloon and a grocery was imperceptible. Some of the “grocers” listed in the directory were labeled saloonkeepers in the census, and vice versa.

38. “Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Examine into the Condition of Tenant Houses in New-York and Brooklyn,” Documents of the Assembly of the State of New-York, Eightieth Session—1857, doc. 205 (Albany, 1857), 25–26; Clipper, October 3, 1868, p. 204 (all but final quotation); Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work Among Them, 3rd ed. (New York, 1872), 207; [Foster], New York in Slices, 79, 82, 84; Tribune, August 10, 1846.

39. Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (January 1858): 224–25; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 128–29.

40. Family 128, fifth election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York state census; Times, January 22, 1853; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (January 1858): 224–25; 3 (March 1860): 249; Doggett’s New York City Directory for 1849–50 (New York, 1849), 112; Longworth’s New York City Directory for 1840–41 (New York, 1840), 185 (which describes the establishment as a “tavern” rather than a grocery). That 1,000 people per day patronized Crown’s is based on Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 3 (March 1860): 249, which reported that on Sunday, January 22, 1860, 1,054 people entered Crown’s Grocery and the saloon “directly opposite” in a five-hour stretch from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Of these, 1,054, 547 went into the “saloon” and 507 went into “Crown’s.” I suspect that the “saloon” was merely the entrance to the barroom of Crown’s itself. But even if this was not the case, if 507 went into Crown’s in five hours, it seems safe to assume that more than 1,000 would enter the grocery during the course of an entire business day.

41. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 218–19; Breen, Thirty Years, 251–52, 255. Ethnicity of saloon and grocery operators is based on an examination of surnames in Doggett’s New York City Street Directory for 1851, supplemented by information from the 1855 New York manuscript census. I found twenty-four grocers who were obviously Irish Americans, forty-four with German-American surnames, and twenty-nine whose last names did not clearly indicate a certain ethnicity. Among saloonkeepers, eighty-seven were Irish, twenty were German, and forty could not be securely identified.

42. Sun, May 29, 1834; Sante, Low Life, 105; Walsh in Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York, 1981), 348. Brace, Dangerous Classes, 64–65; William Hancock, An Emigrant’s Five Years in the Free States of America (London, 1860), 76, in Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 220; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 379; Clipper, October 3, 1868, p. 204; J. H. Green, Report on Gambling in New York (New York, 1851), 85–89.

44. Charles Stelzle, A Son of the Bowery: The Life Story of an East Side American (New York, 1926), 47–48; Carl Wittke, We Who Built America, in Edward M. Levine, The Irish and Irish Politicians (Notre Dame, 1966), 117; Breen, Thirty Years, 231.

45. Leon Beauvallet, Rachel and the New World: A Trip to the United States and Cuba (New York, 1856), 274; Tribune, October 12, 1863; Green, Report on Gambling, 93. “Rachel” was Elisa Rachel Félix, the most famous French actress of the 1840s and ’50s. Beauvallet was an actor and aspiring playwright in the troupe that toured the United States with her.

46. Dickens, American Notes, 79; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 87; Green, Report on Gambling, 73–74 (“wait upon the players”); account 5735, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books.

47. National Police Gazette, October 11, 1845, May 30, 1846 (Moses); Tribune, February 27, 1855; Green, Report on Gambling, 45–46; Clipper, October 3, 1868; Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, 1990), 136–50; F. Norton Goddard, “Policy: A Tenement House Evil,” in Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem, 2 vols. (1903; New York, 1970): 2: 27–31.

48. Kernan, Reminiscences, 41–42; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (October 1857): 146–47.

49. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 143; Kernan, Reminiscences, 42, 44; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (October 1857): 146–47; Tribune, October 12, 1863.

50. Clipper, October 21, 1860 (“Uncle Pete’s”), October 3, 1868 (“great mogul”); John Doggett, Jr., ed., The New-York City and Co-Partnership Directory (New York, 1843), 367; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 145. It is possible that Williams’s place later relocated to 51 Orange, for in 1852 “Pete Williams 51 Orange” is listed among a number of saloonkeepers operating without a license. Unlike the others on the list, however, Williams was never charged—New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers, April 22, 23, 24, 1852, New York Municipal Archives. He may have moved after a fire destroyed his previous establishment. See Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 140–41.

51. The Prose Works of N. P. Willis (1845; new ed. in one vol., Philadelphia, 1849), 582–83; Dickens, American Notes, 80–83; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 141; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (October 1857): 148; Clipper, October 21, 1860.

52. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 142–43; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (October 1857): 149. For other descriptions of Williams’s place, see Harper’s Weekly, February 21, 1857; [Bobo], Glimpses of New-York City, 96; Samuel Prime, Life in New York (New York, 1847), 175.

3. Ibid., 3–12, 21; Times, June 30, 1854; George Foster quoted in Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York (Ithaca, 1990), 234.

4. James, Life and Battles of Yankee Sullivan, 11; Times, May 14, 1876 (obituary of another Five Pointer mentioning sparring match at Monroe Hall); Tribune, April 12, 1842; Herald, September 26, 27, October 21, November 1849. For the 1842 riot, see Chapter Five.

5. James, Life and Battles of Yankee Sullivan, 13–19 (“must fight”); Clipper, November 17, 1860 (“pride of Chatham Square”), July 9, 1864.

6. Ed James, Life and Battles of Tom Hyer (New York, n.d.), 7–12; Herald, February 8 (“urchins”) and 9 (other quotations), 1849; Wallace Shugg, “‘This Great Test of Man’s Brutality’: The Sullivan-Hyer Prizefight at Still Pond Heights, Maryland, in 1849,” Maryland Historical Magazine 95 (2000): 47–63.

7. James, Life and Battles of Tom Hyer, 12–14; Clipper, July 9, 1864 (“native boys”).

8. James, Life and Battles of Tom Hyer, 14–18 (quotations); James, Life and Battles of Yankee Sullivan, 18–20.

9. Clipper, July 9, 1864; William L. Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, ed. Terrence J. McDonald (Boston, 1994), 95.

10. James, Life and Battles of Tom Hyer, 20–24; Doggett’s New York City Street Directory for 1848–49 (New York, 1848), 393; Doggett’s New York City Directory for 1849–50 (New York, 1849), 220; Times, June 30, 1856 (Sullivan), June 27, 1864 (Hyer); Tribune, March 10, 1855. James places the Branch Hotel at 40 Bowery, but the city directories show that it was located at no. 36.

11. William F. Barnard, Forty Years at the Five Points: A Sketch of the Five Points House of Industry (New York, 1893), 2; Herald, February 17, 1858; “The Five Points,” National Magazine 2 (1853): 169.

12. John Francis Richmond, New York and Its Institutions, 1609–1872 (New York, 1872), 477–78; [Foster], New York in Slices, 23; letter of L. M. Pease in Times, November 19, 1852; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 122; Evening Post, January 30, 1846.

13. Locations of brothels based on a list compiled by Professor Timothy Gilfoyle, Loyola University of Chicago, in the possession of the author. Gilfoyle’s inventory is based primarily on criminal indictments. See, for example, indictments of September 21, 1841 (charging inhabitants of 139 Anthony Street), April 15, 1850 (142 Anthony and 34 Orange), February 21, 1851 (50, 62, 67, and 71 Cross), May 23, 1851 (151 Anthony and 6 Little Water), January 23, 1852 (145 Anthony and 89 Cross), April 22, 1852 (163 Anthony and 33, 35, 36¹/₂, 40, and 41 Orange), April 23, 1852 (143, 149, and 157 Anthony, and 92 Cross)—New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers, New York Municipal Archives.

These records must be used with some caution. Not every person indicted was necessarily guilty, though notations on the indictment papers indicate that most were convicted, pled guilty, or promised to abandon the premises (thus implying guilt). In addition, it was possible to be charged with conducting a “disorderly house” that was merely a raucous saloon rather than a brothel. I accept Gilfoyle’s contention, however, that the vast majority of those charged with this offense promoted prostitution. That most of those indicted for “keeping a disorderly house” responded by vacating the premises also implies that these were brothels. If those under indictment were only operating loud saloons, they could have merely asked their customers to be quieter. One might also argue that prosecution for prostitution over the course of two decades does not prove that these buildings housed brothels simultaneously. But brothel keepers were generally only prosecuted for keeping a “disorderly” house of prostitution. As a result, indictments were relatively rare, and were only handed up when neighbors repeatedly complained about persistent disturbances in the bordellos. So indictments probably underestimate the pervasiveness of prostitution in Five Points.

14. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana, 1982), 183; Marilynn Wood Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830–1870 (Berkeley, 1993), 49 (eleven-year-old); deposition of Mary O’Daniel, December 19, 1851, in indictment of Bridget McCarty, January 20, 1852, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers; Herald, October 6, 1853 (Hoffman); case of Elizabeth Dayton in Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 66; Pease v. Mangin, August 1, 1855, Box 7953, Police Court Cases, New York Municipal Archives; William W. Sanger, The History of Prostitution (1859; New York, 1937), 452.

15. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 39; Sanger, History of Prostitution, 475–77; Annual Report of the Trustees of the Five Points House of Industry (1855): 20–24. Sanger found that 947 of the 2,000 prostitutes surveyed had children. Of these, 357 (38%) were single, 357 were married (though the majority of these were separated or had been abandoned), and 233 (25%) were widows.

17. Depositions of Mary O’Daniel, Ellen Cable, and Bridget McCarty, in indictment of Bridget McCarty, January 20, 1852, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers; Herald, February 7, 1852.

18. Clipper, October 3, 1868; Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 164–65, 352; Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 1998), 98. A brothel still operated at 3 Franklin as late as 1851. See William H. Bell Diary, February 21, 1851, New-York Historical Society.

19. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 173; William H. Bell Diary, February 6, 1851; Herald, April 10, 1841; Matthew H. Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York (Hartford, 1868), 490–93; George Ellington, The Women of New York (New York, 1869), 203–5.

20. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 122; The Prose Works of N. P. Willis (1845; new ed. in one vol., Philadelphia, 1849), 582–83; Robert F. Lucid, ed., The Journal of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1968), 1: 232–33; Walt Whitman, New York Dissected, ed. Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari (New York, 1936), 6, 217–18, in Reynolds, Whitman, 228; [Foster], New York in Slices, 23.

21. Lucid, ed., Journal of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., 1: 119–21, 232–33. The question of how many prostitutes worked in Five Points is impossible to answer with any certainty. In 1860, by which point religious institutions had managed to chase a significant number of brothels from the neighborhood, a careful survey found 180 prostitutes living in the area bounded by Centre, Leonard, Orange, Bayard, Mulberry, Chatham, and Pearl Streets. One imagines that a decade earlier, as destitute and rootless immigrants flooded the neighborhood, double that number could have worked in Five Points, while prostitutes residing elsewhere would have brought their customers to houses of assignation in the district as well—Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 4 (April 1860): 16.

22. Foster in Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 59; Sanger, History of Prostitution, 491, 600–601; Stansell, City of Women, 122–23; letter of Henry R. Remsen, et al., in Times, October 15, 1853.

25. Sanger, History of Prostitution, 484, 523; Ellington, Women of New York, 183–84; Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 55–56, 60–61.

28. Indictments of March 14, 1842, September 14 and October 9, 1843, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers.

29. Advocate of Moral Reform 9 (August 15, 1843): 127; Herald, April 7, September 14, 1849, October 6, 1853; indictments of May 16, 23, 1851, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers; Times, May 23, 24, 1855.

30. Evening Post, September 21, 1826 (“CORNELIUS” to the Editor), March 19, 1829.

31. Times, July 4 (White), 13 (McCasken), 1857; William Tracy v. Maria Gorman alias Carey, indictment of March 26, 1853, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers.

32. Herald, February 25, 1850; William H. Bell Diary, October 10, 1850, May 2, 1851.

33. William H. Bell Diary, February 7, April 2–3, 1851; Sante, Low Life, 310; “Autobiography of George Appo,” typescript, pp. 1–3, Society for the Prevention of Crime Papers, Columbia University; Stansell, City of Women, 50. For the stories of children forced to steal by alcoholic parents in order to finance their liquor habits, see John Morrow, A Voice from the Newsboys (New York, 1860), 27–36, and Edward W. Martin [James D. McCabe], The Secrets of the Great City (Philadelphia, 1868), 192–96.

34. National Police Gazette in Edward Van Every, Sins of New York as “Exposed” by the Police Gazette (1930; New York, 1972), 285; Herald, August 19, 1849; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 2 (September 1858): 97–99.

35. Herald, February 22, 25, 1850; Times, February 1, 1853; account 3347, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books, New York Public Library (Dowdican).

36. William H. Bell Diary, November 28, 1850, May 3, 1851; indictment of January 23, 1852, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers.

37. Herald, July 12, 1849 (Peterson), February 12, 1852 (Wilson); National Police Gazette in Van Every, Sins of New York, 284 (Rice and Moran); Times, February 11, 1852 (Wilson), July 13, 1857 (Gannon).

39. Times, July 1, 1859 (“banging his wife”); Tribune, August 6, 1850; The Old Brewery and the New Mission House at the Five Points, By Ladies of the Mission (New York, 1854), 154–55.

40. People v. George Holberton, et al., February 11, 1852, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers; Herald, January 27, February 12, 19, 1852. For the other rape case, see National Police Gazette in Van Every, Sins of New York, 284.

41. Herald, January 12, 1841, October 27, 29, 1849. The press did not report any resolution to the Rafferty case, and there is no indication of an indictment in the District Attorney’s Papers.

42. Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society (1867): 27–28, (1870): 12; entries of September 26, 1856 and June 13, 1860, Adoption Case Histories, Five Points Mission Papers, United Methodist Church Archives, Drew University.

43. Graham Hodges, “‘Desirable Companions and Lovers’: Irish and African Americans in the Sixth Ward, 1830–1870,” in Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore, 1996), 114.

44. Times, June 14, November 23, 24, 1853, November 28, 1863 (another liquor-related murder). For a previous case of “skylarking,” see Tribune, October 18, 1849.

45. Evening Post, September 14, 1846; Herald, January 6, 1868; Times, January 6, February 18–21, March 10–11, 1868.

47. Herald, January 17–19, April 20, May 5–8, 11, June 16–17, 1859; Times, February 12, 1863; Nelson J. Waterbury to Horatio Seymour, December 26, 1864 (on Matthew Brennan’s use of political pressure to get the Glasses pardoned), Seymour Papers, New-York Historical Society; Manual of the Corporation of the City of New-York for 1858 (New York, 1858), 102 (Glass as foreman).

49. Annual Report of Fire Chief Alfred Carson in New York Board of Aldermen, Documents 17, part II, no. 57 (September 3, 1850): 930–32; Tom Quick, “Old Sports of New York,” in Leader, September 1, 1860.

50. Denis T. Lynch, The Wild Seventies, 2 vols. (1941; Port Washington, NY, 1971), 1: 9–13. See also Irish-American, August 19, 1849; Tribune, March 18, 1854; Herald, November 3, 1849, February 25, 1852.

51. Board of Aldermen, Documents 23 (1856), doc. 16, pp. 4–11; Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1870 (New York, 1870), 96–97.

52. Old Brewery, 94; “Autobiography of George Appo,” 1–3; Tribune, June 13, 1850 (alcoholics living in cellar boarding establishments); Herald, June 10, 1863.

53. Entries of September 20 (Bertram), October 18, 20, 1856, Adoption Case Histories, Five Points Mission Papers; Ellington, Women of New York, 604–5.

54. Entry of August 7, 1856, Adoption Case Histories, Five Points Mission Papers; Samuel B. Halliday, The Lost and Found; or Life Among the Poor (New York, 1859), 126–29; Chas. J. Wood to “Dear Friend,” April 8, 1877, in Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1876): 65.

55. Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (June 1857): 66–67 (“mother was dead”); 2 (April 1859): 277–81; Martin, Secrets of the Great City, 192–96.

56. Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (February 1858): 255–56; Twenty-third Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society (1867): 7; Kildare, My Mamie Rose (New York, 1903), 24. Also see Browne, Great Metropolis, 277.

57. Annual Report of the Metropolitan Board of Health [for] 1866 (New York, 1867), 135 (quotation); Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 1983), 113; Pat McGowan to his parents, December 21, 1847, BR146/10/13, Broadlands Papers, University of Southampton; John F. Maguire, The Irish in America (London, 1868), 282–85.

58. Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784–1831, 19 vols. (New York, 1917), 17: 421; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 121; [Bobo], Glimpses of New-York City, 95, 97; Herald, February 19, 1852.

NOTES