Anbinder - Five Points: the Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood

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A ll but forgotten today, the Five Points neighborhood in Lower Manhattan was once renowned the world over. From Jacob Riis to Abraham Lincoln, Davy Crockett to Charles Dickens, Five Points both horrified and inspired everyone who saw it. While it comprised only a handful of streets, many of Americas most impoverished African Americans and Irish, Jewish, German, and Italian immigrants sweated out their existence there. Located in todays Chinatown, Five Points witnessed more riots, scams, prostitution, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in America. But at the same time it was a font of creative energy, crammed full of cheap theaters, dance halls, and boxing matches. It was also the home of meeting halls for the political clubs and the machine politicians who would come to dominate not just the city but an entire era in American politics.

Drawing from letters, diaries, newspapers, bank records, police reports, and archaeological digs, Anbinder has written the first-ever history of Five Points, the neighborhood that was a microcosm of the American immigrant experience. The story that Anbinder tells is the classic tale of Americas immigrant past, as successive waves of new arrivals fought for survival in a land that was as exciting as it was dangerous, as riotous as it was culturally rich.

TYLER ANBINDER is a professor of history at George Washington University. His first book, Nativism and Slavery, was also a New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the Avery Craven Prize of the Organization of American Historians. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

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Praise for Five Points

A careful, intelligent, and sympathetic history.

The New York Times Book Review

Tyler Anbinder has so thoroughly re-created Five Points that the stench of life there all but rises from the page.

New York Daily News

Fascinating... a lively history.

New York Newsday

Five Points has been brought back to life by Tyler Anbinder.

New York Observer

The author has performed a prodigious... feat of research, leaving no original or secondary source untouched... a solid work of scholarship that deserves a permanent place in any top shelf of urban history.

The Washington Times

A colorful and useful look at a neighborhood which captures the melting pot at its best and worst.

Irish America

[A] fascinating book... Five Points provides absorbing material for anyone interested in our collective past or who loves a good human interest story.

Sun-Sentinel

Once upon a time, the Five Points was New Yorks most infamous neighborhood, singled out by generations of reformers and journalists as a hive of nightmarish squalor, violence, disease and crime. But as Tyler Anbinder shows in this compelling challenge to the conventional wisdom, the Five Points slumbad as it waswas never quite so bad as outsiders wanted it to be. A first-rate history, meticulously researched and populated by an amazing cast of characters.

Edwin G. Burrows, coauthor of
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898,
winner of the Pulitzer Prize

New York City is the capital of the world right now, and much of its greatness traces back to certain very old neighborhoods, which trace back to an even older neighborhood, whose name, nearly forgotten today, was Five Points. Here is the history of that neighborhood.

Paul Berman, author of A Tale of Two Utopias:
The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 .

Also by Tyler Anbinder

N ATIVISM AND S LAVERY
The Northern Know Nothings and
the Politics of the 1850s

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To Jacob and Dina, with all my love

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Copyright 2001 by Tyler Anbinder

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Free Press trade paperback edition September 2010

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points : the 19th-century New York City neighborhood that invented tap dance, stole elections, and became the worlds most notorious slum / Tyler Anbinder.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

1. Five Points (New York, N.Y.)History. 2. Five Points (New York, N.Y.)social conditions. 3. New York (N.Y.)History. 4. New York (N.Y.)Social conditions. 5. SlumsNew York (State)New YorkHistory19th century. 6. Ethnic neighborhoodsNew York (State)New YorkHistory19th century. 7. City and town lifeNew York (State)New YorkHistory19th century.

F128.68.F56 A53 2001 2001033296

974.71dc21

ISBN 978-0-684-85995-8

ISBN13: 978-1-4391-3774-1 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-4391-4155-7 (pbk)

FIVE POINTS!... The very letters of the two words, which mean so much, seem, as they are written, to redden with the bloodstains of unavenged crime. There is Murder in every syllable, and Want, Misery and Pestilence take startling form and crowd upon the imagination as the pen traces the words. What a world of wretchedness has been concentrated in this narrow district!

Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, August 16, 1873.

F IVE P OINTS was the most notorious neighborhood in nineteenth-century America. Beginning in about 1820, overlapping waves of Irish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants flooded this district in what is now New Yorks Chinatown. Significant numbers of Germans, African Americans, and Eastern European Jews settled there as well. All but forgotten today, the densely populated enclave was once renowned for jam-packed, filthy tenements, garbage-covered streets, prostitution, gambling, violence, drunkenness, and abject poverty. No decent person walked through it; all shunned the locality; all walked blocks out of their way rather than pass through it, recalled a tough New York fireman. A religious journal called Five Points the most notorious precinct of moral leprosy in the city,... a perfect hot-bed of physical and moral pestilence,... a hell-mouth of infamy and woe.