Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  In the old days, artisans had speculated in real estate by obtaining long-term leases on their houses, which served as both workplace and home, for themselves and their employees. If they decided to relocate their businesses before the lease expired, they might sublet or sell the rights to the lease. By the 1830s, however, most did not feel economically self-confident enough to continue such speculation. Instead, they leased houses for a few years at most. They were also less likely to rent enough living space for their employees, for in an economic slowdown they might need to lay off their workers and did not want to be stuck paying rent for unoccupied rooms. Because of these changes and the general decline of the home workshop, neighborhoods organized by trade began to disappear, and New York began for the first time to divide into commercial and residential districts. Five Points became one such residential neighborhood.16

  As these changes took place in the 1820s and 1830s, immigration and migration swelled the city’s population, and as a result housing prices rose dramatically. Landlords discovered that it was significantly more profitable to subdivide their two-and-a-half-story houses into small apartments and rent each to a single family. Some tore down the small houses on their lots and put up taller brick buildings that could accommodate many more tenants. Most simply converted existing buildings. The owners of old decrepit buildings paid less in taxes than owners of sparkling new structures, providing landlords with additional incentive to subdivide old buildings into many small apartments and spend little or nothing to maintain them. Because so many unrelated tenants lived in these structures, they became known as “tenant houses,” and by the 1840s as “tenement houses.” Thus was born one of America’s signature immigrant environments. Most Five Points landlords happily converted their small buildings into tenements and rented apartments in them to increasingly less well-to-do workers and their families, while employers and other prosperous citizens moved to neighborhoods populated by their peers.17

  The proliferation of residential neighborhoods provided advantages for tenants as well as landlords. Under the old system, employers had closely monitored their workers’ after-hours behavior. If the worker lived with his boss, the employer would know if the employee came home late, or drunk, or with a woman of ill-repute. Even if a worker merely lived in the same neighborhood as his boss, his after-work behavior was likely to be observed by his employer. This became an especially sensitive issue in the twenties and thirties, as evangelical ministers began to prod their employer parishioners to hold their workers to the same high moral standards to which they themselves aspired. New Yorkers who resented others dictating how they should spend their leisure time took offense at this meddling, and their animosity contributed to violence directed against Baptist and Methodist churches in New York. The Baptist church on lower Mulberry Street in the heart of the Five Points neighborhood was the target of attacks on a number of occasions in the 1820s.18

  The new residential districts were more homogeneous than earlier New York neighborhoods. Five Points’ prosperous merchants moved west to homes near Broadway. Successful artisans relocated to the Fourteenth Ward north of present-day Canal Street, where the quality of housing was superior. Some wealthier residents remained, but these were primarily grocers and saloonkeepers, who even though they could afford to live elsewhere found it more convenient to live where they worked or in buildings that they owned. Because the journeymen and laborers who came to dominate Five Points tended to have fluctuating incomes, the quality of the homes that they could afford varied from year to year, so they moved especially frequently, creating an impression of instability that made the neighborhood unattractive to better-off New Yorkers.

  The very ground under Five Points was also a problem. Although civil engineers had succeeded in erasing all obvious traces of the Collect, the ground remained damp and unsettled, causing houses to shift and tilt dramatically just a few years after construction. The slightest rain or snowfall created basement floods throughout the neighborhood, especially in its western portion along Anthony and Orange Streets where the lake had once stood. Because so many diseases of the period were attributed to dampness and “vapours,” few New Yorkers wanted to live in such a locale.19

  The increasing association of the area with immigrants and blacks also played a role in its decline. Discrimination forced African Americans into certain occupations—especially those of chimney sweep, barber, and sailor—whose status and pay kept them in constant poverty. Many whites shunned such “degraded” workers. Immigrants sometimes faced similar bigotry. By 1830, an increasing proportion of newcomers settling in New York were Irish and Catholic. They usually arrived with less savings than other immigrants and sought the cheapest housing available, much of which was in Five Points. As Catholic immigrants became more numerous, native-born Protestants increasingly moved away.

  Finally, it was Five Points’ development into a center of prostitution that sealed its disreputable fate. Until 1820, the waterfront district around Water Street had housed the city’s largest concentration of prostitutes and brothels. But by 1830, Five Points had become the center of New York’s commercial sex industry, with more bordellos located on Anthony Street between Centre and Orange than on any other block in the city. It is difficult to determine why Five Points became the city’s most popular red-light district. Perhaps it was the large population of rootless immigrant men. Prostitutes may have also selected the district because its central location, just a few blocks from Broadway and City Hall, made it convenient for customers from all over the city.20

  There were other parts of New York that were just as impoverished. Both Corlear’s Hook and the waterfront area around Water Street struggled with crime and poverty. Yet because Five Points was so central (no more than a twenty-five-minute walk from any significantly populated portion of New York), residents continued to cram into its houses well after the tenements had reached a point that most would have considered full. Crowding grew worse and worse, apartments got smaller and smaller, until finally Five Points became something new in America: a slum in the very center of a city.

  “I WOULD RATHER RISQUE MYSELF IN AN INDIAN FIGHT THAN VENTURE AMONG THESE CREATURES”

  Five Points’ speedy decline can be traced in the newspapers of the 1820s and 1830s. Business publications such as the Journal of Commerce, party organs such as the conservative Courier and Enquirer (the voice of the Whigs), the more moderate Evening Post (Democratic), and even tabloids such as the Sun all began to mention Five Points with increasing frequency. The first known press comment about the alarming conditions in Five Points dates from 1826. In that year, a letter to the editor of the New York Evening Post demanded that the city address the neighborhood’s increasingly shameful conditions. “CORNELIUS,” as he signed himself, claimed inaccurately that “the Collect” acquired its name because of “the vast collection of houses of ill fame, tippling shops, drunken persons and other kinds of filth in which it abounds.” His account nonetheless indicates a close familiarity with the area: “The houses generally are of wood from one to two and a half stories high and of no very attractive appearance; every fourth or fifth one, upon an average,” sells liquor and “sundry” other goods

  without particularly enquiring how they were obtained, a fact which our police records will fully substantiate. In and about these rum holes [live] both sexes, and almost every variety of age and colour, drinking, swearing and fighting. . . . I saw no less than four fights in as many minutes, conducted in the Kentucky style of rough and tumble, accompanied with a grand chorus of shouts and the most profane language. The different combatants, black and white, men and women, displayed admirable proficiency in the art of boxing and afforded amusement to the crowd, who formed rings for the purpose of betting on the victor. In short, the wretched appearance of the place, the immorality of the inhabitants, &c. would hardly be believed if not witnessed. Something ought to be done for the honour of the city, if for no other reason than to render the place less disgusting and
pernicious, it being the resort of thieves and rogues of the lowest degree, and by its filthy state and “villanous smells” keeps respectable people from residing near it.21

  In 1829, the press for the first time referred to the neighborhood as “Five Points.” An editorial in the Evening Post directed police “to put an end to the crimes and outrages almost daily committed in this neighborhood, which has become the most dangerous place in our city.” Even prominent citizens were not safe there, noted the Post, which reported that Assistant Alderman George D. Strong had been slashed in the nose with a knife.22

  The same Post editorial also demanded that a small group of Five Points tenements be razed—one of the first recorded efforts at slum clearance in American history. In January 1829, a group of New Yorkers petitioned the Common Council to tear down a tiny triangular block of tenements created when city officials had demolished the surrounding buildings in order to extend Anthony Street eastward to the Five Points intersection. Most of the houses remaining in the 7,500-square-foot triangle had been sheared in half, lending them a tumbledown quality that frightened away most potential tenants. As a result, stated a committee of councilmen, the triangle’s buildings were “occupied by the lowest description and most degraded and abandoned of the human Species.”23

  A year later, a letter writer to the Post complained about the lack of progress. New buildings were under construction all over town, but “in that place only which stands in most need of improvement—I mean the Five Points—nothing is done.” The Post’s correspondent condemned the whole area as a “nuisance” and asked for “the removal of Five Points,” though by this comment he may have meant merely the triangular plot of buildings rather than the entire neighborhood. A subsequent petition to the Common Council suggested that the city build a new jail on the triangular site and widen some of the streets leading to the intersection by tearing down portions of other existing buildings. Supporters justified the plan on the grounds that the conditions in Five Points adversely affected businesses in other parts of the city. Citizens who might venture from the East Side to shop on Broadway were disinclined to do so because they feared having to pass through Five Points, while businesses on Pearl Street to the south and east of Five Points suffered similarly.24

  But the Common Council balked at tearing down the triangle of tenements. It would be dangerous to locate a prison near the former site of the Collect, noted some of the lawmakers, because disease would spread uncontrollably in a prison built on such low, damp ground. The potential expense of the plan also worried them. Those proposing demolition had assumed that acquiring the property would cost the city little, because the wretched tenements on the triangle of land were almost worthless. Yet the land below the rotting buildings was actually quite valuable, the council discovered, because it produced “a great rent on account of its being a good location for small retailers of Liquor. . . . What may be considered as the Nuisance has in reality increased the Value of the property.” Consequently, the Common Council refused to endorse any changes in Five Points. Continued pressure from the press and business owners in surrounding neighborhoods, however, resulted in the enactment of compromise legislation in January 1832. The city would acquire the triangle of tenements and tear them down, but rather than constructing the prison there would instead build a tiny park. It became known as Paradise Park. The legislation also provided for the widening of some of the streets (Cross, Little Water, and Anthony) leading to Five Points, in the hope that wider thoroughfares would seem less dark and forbidding. “The decent inhabitants in the vicinity of the Five Points,” applauded the Mirror, “ought to give ‘nine cheers’ at the breaking up of that loathsome den of murderers, thieves, abandoned women, ruined children, filth, misery, drunkenness, and broils.”25

  The decision not to build a prison in Five Points because of the fear of contagious disease proved a wise one, for just a few months later, the cholera outbreak of 1832 ravaged the neighborhood. Cholera is a bacterial infection that spreads primarily through water contaminated by human feces. Symptoms include high fever and a ricelike diarrhea in which the “rice” is actually pieces of a victim’s colon flaking away. Thousands of New Yorkers died during the 1832 epidemic, and the disease spread especially rapidly in tenement districts such as Five Points where outhouses and wells were located too close together. The tendency of cholera to run rampant in impoverished tenement districts led to the belief that it was the dissolute habits of the poor, rather than an inadequate sanitation system, which made one susceptible to the contagion. “The disease is now, more than before, rioting in the haunts of infamy and pollution,” reported the Mercury. In Five Points, “a prostitute at 62 Mott Street, who was decking herself before the glass at 1 o’clock yesterday, was carried away in a hearse at half past three o’clock. The broken down constitutions of these miserable creatures, perish almost instantly on the attack.” What worried more fortunate New Yorkers most about cholera in Five Points was the neighborhood’s proximity to their own homes. In the past, the poor had lived on the periphery of town or were too widely dispersed to create a concentration of contagion. Yet with Five Points’ “race of beings of all colours, ages, sexes and nations . . . inhabiting the most populous and central part of the city,” complained a Post correspondent, “when may we be considered secure from pestilence? Be the air pure from Heaven, their breath would contaminate it, and infect it with disease.”26

  By 1834, the press began to publish lengthy exposés about the neighborhood. The first appeared in the Sun that spring. The reporter found that apartments in the worst parts of Five Points did not have “a table, chair or any other article of furniture, save a cooking utensil, a few plates, and knives, and bottles, with which to carry on the business of living. Few beds were found in any of these apartments, the inmates sleeping or lying on heaps of filthy rags, straw and shavings, the stench from which was almost insupportable.” He described “white women, and black and yellow men, and black and yellow women, with white men, all in a state of gross intoxication, and exhibiting indecencies revolting to virtue and humanity. . . . The drunkards of both sexes, intermingled with scarcely any thing to hide their nakedness,” lay “in a state of misery almost indescribable.”27

  Although the conditions inside Five Points apartments were bad, the Sun’s reporter was also horrified at how Five Pointers made public spectacles of themselves: “In the afternoon of each day, when drunkenness is at its height, the most disgusting objects, of both sexes, are exhibited to the eyes of the examiner. Indecency, squalid poverty, intemperance and crime, riot and revel in continued orgies, and sober humanity is shocked and horrified, at the loathsome spectacles incessantly presented.” Evenings were no better: “At night the streets and sidewalks are literally blocked by swarms of sturdy vagabonds of both sexes; the grog shops are filled . . . horrid oaths and execrations burst upon the ear from every tipling house, and brothel, and the most abominable indecencies of every kind, by word and deed, are perpetrated and heard.”28

  According to the Sun, the drinking and carousing that took place inside was worse than that on the streets. Here neighborhood criminals hatched their larcenous plans, divvied up the loot after each heist, celebrated by drinking, dancing, and gambling, and procured prostitutes. The favorite haunts of the “rogues and vagabonds of the Five Points are the Diving Bell, Swimming Bath, and the Arcade, at Nos. 39, 40, and 33, in Orange street.” The reporter also mentioned “the Archway” on Orange at the corner of Leonard (either 46 or 48 Orange) and “the Yankee Kitchen” on Cross Street just above Orange. The entire two-block length of Little Water Street was a gathering place for criminals. Both the portion north of Anthony, known according to the Sun as “Cow bay,” and the block south of Anthony, which the reporter labeled “Squeeze Gut Alley,” were described as “principally the resort and residence of white, black, and mulatto prostitutes, and the bullies and blackguards who keep and visit them, and are seats of vice, hotbeds of debauchery, wretchedness, and poverty, s
uch as few eyes have witnessed.”29

  The reporter concluded that “if ever wretchedness was exhibited in a more perfect garb, if ever destitution and degradation were more complete, if ever immorality and licentiousness were presented in more disgusting forms, we confess we have never yet beheld them.” He assured his readers that he had seen on the “frontiers . . . squatters . . . without any visible means of support,” as well as “untutored Indians” in “the howling wilderness . . . and examined minutely the situation of the slaves, held to labor, in their most deplorable conditions; after seeing all these, we hesitate not to say, that the colored, and some of the white tenants of the Five Points, are infinitely more degraded and debased, than these others we have named; and the border settler in his hut, the Indian in his wigwam, and the Southern slave in his cabin, is each a monarch in comfort, respectability, happiness and virtue, when compared to the wretched vagabonds, who inherit, as it were, poverty, vice and crime, in and near the Five Points. They endure literally, a hell of horrors, arising from their poverty and wickedness, such as few others on earth can suffer.”30

  Five Points, by George Catlin, probably from 1827. Collection of Mrs. Screven Lorillard, Far Hills, New Jersey.

  One of the most fascinating documents available for the analysis of Five Points’ early history is a painting of the intersection by George Catlin from about 1827. All the elements of Five Points’ reputation are in evidence. Fights are breaking out everywhere; people are drunk; pigs roam the streets; whites and blacks are mixing; and prostitutes brazenly solicit customers (see the second-story window on the upper right). Even the abundance of groceries portrayed would have been significant to 1820s New Yorkers, as antebellum groceries were often little more than liquor stores, generating most of their profits selling beer, ale, rum, and gin. That an accomplished artist such as Catlin would bother to paint an impoverished working-class neighborhood indicates that—by that early date—Five Points was truly renowned.31