This book might never have been written were it not for beef lo mein. As a teenager, I used to travel with my friends from my home in the suburbs north of New York City down to Chinatown to have lunch. There I fell in love with the lo mein served at Hop Shing at 9 Chatham Square. We sometimes saw the managers of our suburban Chinese restaurant eating there, confirming our belief that we had found the best and most authentic Chinese eatery in New York. After leaving New York for college, I returned to the city for graduate school in the mid-1980s and again often found myself on the downtown express headed to Chinatown for my fix of lo mein and steamed shrimp dumplings.
After graduate school, I moved west to teach at the University of Wyoming and published my first book, a study of the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know Nothing party of the 1850s. Although I had planned to continue writing about Civil War–era politics, the Know Nothings sparked my fascination with immigrants. Having spent years studying the newcomers from the nativist point of view, I now wanted to hear the immigrants tell their own story. The infectious enthusiasm that my students in Wyoming brought to the study of their immigrant heritage inspired me as well.
But I still needed a focus for my new book. I did not want to write another narrow monograph on a single ethnic group, so many of which told the same story: We came, we suffered, we were discriminated against, we persevered, we triumphed. I mentioned my dilemma to reference librarian extraordinaire Beth Juhl on a visit to New York, and she suggested that I trace the history of a single block in an immigrant enclave. A block was too small, I decided, but a single neighborhood seemed to fit my requirements perfectly.
How I decided upon Five Points as that neighborhood I do not remember. My Wyoming colleague Ron Schultz may have suggested it. We had plenty of time to discuss such things during our 136-mile-a-day round-trip commute from Fort Collins, Colorado, to Laramie. That no modern historian had published anything substantial about the district despite its notoriety in the nineteenth century made it an attractive topic. When I discovered that my beloved Hop Shing was in the neighborhood, my mouth began to water and my mind was quickly made up. I would write the history of Five Points.
In the eight years since, many friends, colleagues, and institutions have provided the guidance and assistance that made this book possible. Grants from George Washington University and the Irish American Cultural Institute, as well as a Fellowship for University Teachers from the National Endowment for the Humanities, funded my research and helped me extend my 1998 sabbatical to a full year. Ken Cobb at the New York Municipal Archives led me to a number of important sources, as did the head of the Five Points archaeology project, Rebecca Yamin, and Marion Casey of New York University. When I decided to trace the stories of the neighborhood’s Kerry and Sligo immigrants back to their native land, Peter Gray of the University of Southampton; Cormac O’Grada and Desmond Norton of University College, Dublin; and Gerard Lyne of the National Library of Ireland helped me identify the appropriate Irish sources and critiqued drafts of that once-colossal chapter.
As the manuscript began to take shape, other historians offered important suggestions, including Kevin Kenny of Boston College; Kerby Miller of the University of Missouri; Elliott Gorn at Purdue University; Patrick Williams at the University of Arkansas; Tony Kaye of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project; Howard Gillette at Rutgers University, Camden; Josh Brown of the American Social History Project; and independent scholar Mary Elizabeth Brown. Countless others offered research advice or answered e-mail queries. Mark Santangelo and Anne McLeer were indefatigable research assistants. Tim Gilfoyle of Loyola University of Chicago generously shared with me his prodigious research on prostitution, Tom Lee, and Quimbo and George Appo. His reading of Chapters Seven and Thirteen saved me from dozens of errors. My George Washington University colleague Richard Stott read the entire manuscript and offered valuable advice at every stage of this project. His wide-ranging knowledge of working-class history in general, and New York City history in particular, has helped improve my understanding of Five Points in countless ways. I am very lucky to have him as a colleague and friend.
Once I began to seek a publisher, I got superb advice from my agent Jill Grinberg. Long before I found Jill, I met my editor, Bruce Nichols. When I first described the Five Points project to Bruce in 1993, he told me he was not interested. But because of his interest in my next project, a history of immigrant life in New York City from the first Dutch settlers to the present, he took me to lunch anyway and stayed in touch. When I met him at a conference six years later and told him he really ought to read the first eight chapters, he agreed, and finally did become interested. In the two years since, he has improved the manuscript in numerous ways, making me a better writer and Five Points a much better book. I am also indebted to the terrific production team at The Free Press, especially Ann Adelman, Juanita Seidel, Maria Massey, Steve Friedeman, and David Frost.
In the end, though, it was my dear friends and family members who made Five Points possible. Jordana Pomeroy was there from the beginning of the project and forced me to visit even the most remote portions of the Lansdowne immigrants’ homelands in County Kerry. Marianne SzegedyMaszak, Matt and Anne Canzonetti, and Katy Bohlmann helped me in countless ways, and all read the book’s early chapters. Katy was an especially valuable companion when I decided to visit the native villages of my young Italian street musicians in Basilicata. I owe a great deal to my parents, Madeline and Stephen Anbinder; my father gave the manuscript his typically thorough stylistic critique. Lisa Rein read most of the manuscript in its final stages and worked particularly hard at helping me craft the chapter prologues. I am extraordinarily grateful for her contributions and don’t know how I would have completed the book without her.
But more than anything else, I have looked forward to completing Five Points so I could dedicate it to my children, Jacob and Dina. They bring me more joy than I could have ever imagined possible, and it is with my unbounded love that I dedicate this book to them.