Five Points

The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood

Tyler Anbinder

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2012
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781439137741
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The very letters of the two words seem, as they are written, to redden with the blood-stains 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." So wrote a reporter about Five Points, the most infamous neighborhood in nineteenth-century America, the place where "slumming" was invented.

All but forgotten today, Five Points was once renowned the world over. Its handful of streets in lower Manhattan featured America's most wretched poverty, shared by Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, Chinese, and African Americans. It was the scene of more riots, scams, saloons, brothels, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in the new world. Yet it was also a font of creative energy, crammed full of cheap theaters and dance halls, prizefighters and machine politicians, and meeting halls for the political clubs that would come to dominate not just the city but an entire era in American politics. From Jacob Riis to Abraham Lincoln, Davy Crockett to Charles Dickens, Five Points both horrified and inspired everyone who saw it. The story that Anbinder tells is the classic tale of America's 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 offers the first-ever history of this now forgotten neighborhood, drawing on a wealth of research among letters and diaries, newspapers and bank records, police reports and archaeological digs. Beginning with the Irish potato-famine influx in the 1840s, and ending with the rise of Chinatown in the early twentieth century, he weaves unforgettable individual stories into a tapestry of tenements, work crews, leisure pursuits both licit and otherwise, and riots and political brawls that never seemed to let up.

Although the intimate stories that fill Anbinder's narrative are heart-wrenching, they are perhaps not so shocking as they first appear. Almost all of us trace our roots to once humble stock. Five Points is, in short, a microcosm of America.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• About Tyler Anbinder
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue 1: The Five Points Race Riot of 1834
• Chapter One: The Making of Five Points
• Prologue 2: Nelly Holland Comes to Five Points
• Chapter Two: Why They Came
• Prologue 3: “The Wickedest House on the Wickedest Street That Ever Existed”
• Chapter Three: How They Lived
• Prologue 4: The Saga of Johnny Morrow, The Street Peddler
• Chapter Four: How They Worked
• Prologue 5: “We Will Dirk Every Mother’s Son of You!”
• Chapter Five: Politics
• Prologue 6: “This Phenomenon, ‘Juba’”
• Chapter Six: Play
• Prologue 7: The Bare-Knuckle Prizefight Between Yankee Sullivan and Tom Hyer
• Chapter Seven: Vice and Crime
• Prologue 8: “I Shall Never Forget This as Long as I Live”: Abraham Lincoln Visits Five Points
• Chapter Eight: Religion and Reform
• Prologue 9: “HE NEVER KNEW WHEN HE WAS BEATEN”
• Chapter Nine: Riot
• Prologue 10: “The Boy Who Commands That Pretty Lot Recruited Them for the Seceshes”
• Chapter Ten: The Civil War and the End of an Era
• Prologue 11: “So It Was Settled That I Should go to America”
• Chapter Eleven: The Remaking of a Slum
• Prologue 12: “These ‘Slaves of the Harp’”
• Chapter Twelve: Italians
• Prologue 13: “The Chinese Devil Man”
• Chapter Thirteen: Chinatown
• Chapter 14: The End of Five Points
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Endnotes