Five Points is based overwhelmingly on the writings of those who saw the neighborhood firsthand. Because so much misinformation about the district and its inhabitants has spread over the years, I always attempted to verify stories found in historical works by consulting the contemporary record. Consequently, my notes do not reflect how much valuable material I found in the writings of other historians. What follows is a list of the works, other than newspapers, that I relied upon most heavily for recreating the Five Points story:
Archives of the Archdiocese of New York, Yonkers, NY
Most Precious Blood and Transfiguration Parish History Files
Church of the Transfiguration, 29 Mott Street, New York
Marriage Registry
Columbia University
“Autobiography of George Appo.” Society for the Prevention of Crime Papers
Five Points Archaeology Project
Artifacts currently housed in the basement of the World Trade Center. A permanent location for storage and display has not yet been determined. See http://r2.gsa.gov/fivept/fphome.htm
Library of Congress,
Jacob A. Riis Collection
National Archives
Manuscript Returns of the 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, and 1900 federal censuses.
Register of Drafted Men, Fourth Congressional District, Entry 1589, Record Group 110
New York County Clerk’s Office, Old Records Division
Manuscript Returns of the 1855 New York State Census
New-York Historical Society
William H. Bell Diary
New York Municipal Archives
1890 New York Police Census
Housing Department “Block and Lot” Folders
Manhattan Records of Real Estate Assessment
New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers
New York Public Library
Charles F. and George L. Osborn Account Books
Emigrant Savings Bank Collection
United Methodist Church Archives, Drew University, Madison, NJ
Five Points Mission Records
Alland, Alexander. Jacob A. Riis: Photographer and Citizen. New York, 1974.
Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld. New York, 1928.
Barnard, William F. Forty Years at the Five Points: A Sketch of the Five Points House of Industry. New York, 1893.
Barnes, David M. The Draft Riots in New York. New York, 1863.
Bayor, Ronald, and Timothy Meagher, eds. The New York Irish. Baltimore, 1996.
Bethel, Denise. “Mr. Halliday’s Picture Album.” Seaport (Fall 1994): 17–21.
Blackmar, Elizabeth. Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850. Ithaca, 1990.
[Bobo, William M.] Glimpses of New-York City, by a South Carolinian. Charleston, 1852.
Bonner, Arthur. Alas! What Brought Thee Hither? The Chinese in New York, 1800–1950. Cranbury, NJ, 1997.
Boris, Eileen. Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States. New York, 1994.
Boyer, Paul. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920. Cambridge, 1978.
Brace, Charles Loring. The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work Among Them. 3rd ed. New York, 1872.
Breen, Matthew P. Thirty Years of New York Politics Up-to-Date. New York, 1899.
Bremmer, Robert H. “The Big Flat: A History of a New York Tenement.” American Historical Review 64 (1958): 54–62.
Brown, Mary Elizabeth. Churches, Communities, and Children: Italian Immigrants in the Archdiocese of New York, 1880–1945. New York, 1995.
Browne, Henry J. “The ‘Italian Problem’ in the Catholic Church of the United States, 1880–1900.” United States Catholic Historical Society, Historical Records and Studies 35 (1946): 46–72.
Browne, Junius H. The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New-York. Hartford, 1869.
Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York, 1999.
Czitrom, Daniel. “Underworlds and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889–1913.” Journal of American History 78 (1991): 536–58.
Davenport, John I. Election and Naturalization Frauds in New York City, 1860–1870. 2nd ed. New York, 1894.
DeForest, Robert W., and Lawrence Veiller, eds. The Tenement House Problem. 2 vols. New York, 1903.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes. London, 1842.
DiGiovanni, Stephen M. Archbishop Corrigan and the Italian Immigrants. Huntington, IN, 1994.
Dolan, Jay P. The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865. Baltimore, 1975.
Ernst, Robert J. Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1860. New York, 1948.
Five Points House of Industry. Annual Reports.
——. Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry.
Foster, George G. New York by Gas-Light. New York, 1850.
——. New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver, Being the Original Slices Published in the N.Y. Tribune. New York, 1849.
Gilfoyle, Timothy J. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920. New York, 1992.
——. “A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Autobiography of George Appo.” Missouri Review 16 (1993): 34–77.
Gilje, Paul A. The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834. Chapel Hill, 1988.
Glanz, Rudolf. “Vanguard to the Russians: The Poseners in America.” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 18 (1983): 1–38.
Gorn, Elliott J. The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America. Ithaca, 1986.
Grinstein, Hyman B. The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654–1860. Philadelphia, 1945.
Griscom, John H. The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York. New York, 1845.
Groneman, Carol. “The ‘Bloody Ould Sixth’: A Social Analysis of a New York City Working-Class Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1973.
——. “‘She Earns as a Child; She Pays as a Man:’ Women Workers in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City Community.” In Milton Cantor and Bruce Laurie, eds., Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker. Westport, CT, 1977.
——. “Working-Class Immigrant Women in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York: The Irish Woman’s Experience.” Journal of Urban History 4 (1978): 255–73.
Hall, Bruce Edward. Tea That Burns: A Family Memoir of Chinatown. New York, 1998.
Halliday, Samuel B. The Lost and Found; or Life Among the Poor. New York, 1859.
Harlow, Alvin F. Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street. New York, 1931.
Hill, Marilynn Wood. Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830–1870. Berkeley, 1993.
Holt, Marilyn I. The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America. Lincoln, NE, 1992.
Ivins, William M. Machine Politics and Money in Elections in New York City. New York, 1887.
James, Ed. The Life and Battles of Tom Hyer. New York, n.d.
——. The Life and Battles of Yankee Sullivan. New York, n.d.
Kaplan, Michael. “The World of the B’hoys: Urban Violence and the Political Culture of Antebellum New York City, 1825–1860.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1996.
Kernan, J. Frank. Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies. New York, 1885.
Langsam, Miriam Z. Children West: A History of the Placing-Out System of the New York Children’s Aid Society, 1853–1890. Madison, 1964.
Lubitz, Edward. “The Tenement Problem in New York City and the Movement for Its Reform, 1856–1867.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1970.
Lubove, Roy. The Progressive and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890–1917. Pittsburgh, 1962.
Lynch, Bernard J. “The Italians in New York.” Catholic World 47 (April 1888): 67–73.
Lyne, Gerard J. “William Steuart Trench and the Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare to America, 1850–1855.” Journal of the Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society 25 (1992): 51–137.
Manson, George J. “The Foreign Element in New York City. V: The Italians.” Harper’s Weekly 34 (October 18, 1890): 817–20.
Mathews, Cornelius. A Pen-and-Ink-Panorama of New-York City. New York, 1853.
McLoughlin, Peter P. Father Tom: The Life and Lectures of Rev. Thomas P. McLoughlin. New York, 1919.
McTernan, John C., Memory Harbour, The Port of Sligo: An Outline of Its Growth and Decline and Its Role as an Emigration Port. Sligo, 1992.
Morrow, John. A Voice from the Newsboys. New York, 1860.
Nelli, Numbert. “The Italian Padrone System in the United States.” Labor History 5 (1964): 153–67.
New York Election Frauds. House Report No. 31, 3rd Session, 40th Congress. Washington, DC, 1869.
The Old Brewery and the New Mission House at the Five Points, By Ladies of the Mission. New York, 1854.
Peck, Gunther. Reinventing Free Labor: Padrone and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930. New York, 2000.
Penny, Virginia. The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman’s Work. Boston, 1863.
Perris, William. Maps of the City of New York, Surveyed Under the Direction of the Insurance Companies of Said City. New York, 1853–75.
Plunz, Richard. A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis. New York, 1990.
Pozzetta, George E. “The Italians of New York City, 1890–1914.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1971.
——. “The Mulberry District of New York City: The Years Before World War One.” In Robert F. Harney and J. Vincenza Scarpaci, eds., Little Italies in North America. Toronto, 1981.
“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. Document 205. Albany, 1857.
Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. New York, 1995.
Richards, Leonard L. Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America. New York, 1970.
Ridge, John T. Sligo in New York: The Irish from County Sligo, 1849–1991. New York, 1991.
Riis, Jacob A. The Battle with the Slum. New York, 1902.
——. The Children of the Poor. New York, 1892.
——. “The Clearing of Mulberry Bend: The Story of the Rise and Fall of a Typical New York Slum.” American Review of Reviews 12 (August 1895): 172–78.
——. “Feast-Days in Little Italy.” Century Magazine 58 (August 1899): 491–99.
——. “How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements.” Scribner’s Magazine 6 (December 1889): 643–62.
——. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. New York, 1890.
——. The Making of an American. New York, 1901.
——. Out of Mulberry Street: Stories of Tenement Life in New York City. New York, 1898.
Robinson, Solon. Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated. New York, 1854.
Roseboro, Viola. “The Italians of New York.” Cosmopolitan 4 (January 1888): 396–406.
Rosenberg, Carroll Smith. Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement, 1812–1870. Ithaca, 1971.
Sanger, William. The History of Prostitution. New York, 1859.
Sante, Luc. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. New York, 1991.
Shugg, Wallace. “‘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.
Spann, Edward K. The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857. New York, 1981.
Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860. Urbana, 1982.
Stokes, Isaac N. P. Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909. New York, 1915–28.
Stott, Richard B. Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York. Ithaca, 1990.
Tchen, John Kuo Wei. New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882. Baltimore, 1999.
Ward, David. Cities and Immigrants: A Geography of Change in Nineteenth Century America. New York, 1971.
——. Poverty, Ethnicity and the American City, 1840–1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and the Ghetto. New York, 1989.
Wilder, Craig S. “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.
Wilentz, Sean. “Crime, Poverty, and the Streets of New York City: The Diary of William H. Bell, 1850–1851.” History Workshop 7 (1979): 126–55.
Winter, Marian Hannah. “Juba and American Minstrelsy.” In Paul Magriel, ed., Chronicles of the American Dance. New York, 1948.
Wong Ching Foo. “The Chinese in New York.” Cosmopolitan 5 (October 1888): 297–311.
Yamin, Rebecca. “Lurid Tales and Homely Stories of New York’s Notorious Five Points.” Historical Archaeology 32 (1998): 74–85.
——. “New York’s Mythic Slum.” Archaeology 50 (March–April 1997): 44–53.
Zucchi, John E. The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York. Montreal, 1992.
Zuille, John J. Historical Sketch of the New York African Society for Mutual Relief. New York, [1892?].