* Defining the borders of a neighborhood is not easy. In 1873, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper asserted that “Five Points is bounded by Canal Street, the Bowery, Chatham, Pearl and Centre Streets, forming a truncated triangle about one mile square.” Others conceived of the district as slightly larger or smaller. I came to my own conclusions about how Five Pointers would have demarcated their territory both by reading their own accounts of the enclave and by walking the neighborhood’s streets to determine how the layout of the thoroughfares and buildings would have shaped their perception of their turf. In the end, my own sense of Five Points’ boundaries matched that of Frank Leslie’s, and those boundaries are the ones I have used throughout this book. See Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August 16, 1873): 363.

^* The British Parliament conducted hearings all across Ireland in 1836 in order to determine the extent of poverty there for use in amending the British “Poor Laws.” The testimony recorded in these hearings provides the most complete record of life for the rural Irish laborer and small farmer in the years before the Great Famine began in 1845.

^* For reasons that will be discussed at the end of this chapter, city lawmakers in 1854 decided to change the names of Five Points’ four most notorious streets. Orange became Baxter, Anthony become Worth, Cross became Park, and Little Water became Mission Place. Because most of the tenement descriptions in this chapter date from just after 1854, I will for the sake of consistency use the new street names throughout this chapter.

^* The most important issues in the campaign were whether or not the United States should annex Texas, and how the country should conduct its negotiations with Great Britain regarding the disputed Oregon Territory, which both nations claimed. The Democrats’ slogan “Fifty-four-forty-or-fight” referred to their promise to insist upon all of Oregon, up to the 54° 40’ latitudinal line (at what is now central British Columbia) that marked its northern boundary. The Whigs were less bellicose in their demands.

^* A round in the mid-nineteenth century did not last three minutes, as it does today, but instead ended when either combatant fell to the ground. In the bare-knuckle fights of this period, rounds rarely lasted more than a minute.

^* It is impossible to verify Riis’s claims concerning the fate of those displaced by the razing of the Bend. One also wonders what happened to other Five Pointers once they left the neighborhood, for the vast majority did not live there for even a decade. Most Irish Five Pointers had names that were too common to allow them to be traced in city directories or census indexes once they left the district. Italian and Chinese names were too often mangled by the census takers and too often left out of city directories to allow them to be tracked down. I was able to identify with certainty in the 1860 city directory only about one in ten Five Pointers who had opened accounts at the Emigrant Savings Bank in the early 1850s. About half still lived in Five Points. Most of the remainder had relocated to immigrant neighborhoods on either the Lower or Upper East Side, but there were a few scattered in nearly every part of the city.