Such expeditions soon became a standard part of visiting tourists’ itineraries. A Scandinavian writer, Fredrika Bremer, inspected the infamous district carefully, recognizing that conditions varied immensely within Five Points, sometimes even within a single tenement. Nonetheless, she concluded that “lower than to the Five Points it is not possible for human nature to sink.”47
By the late 1840s, such descriptions had convinced Americans that Five Points was the nation’s worst neighborhood. New York Tribune contributor George G. Foster wrote in 1849 that Five Points was to New York “the great central ulcer of wretchedness—the very rotting Skeleton of Civilization, whence emanates an inexhaustible pestilence that spreads its poisonous influence through every vein and artery of the whole social system, and supplies every heart-throb of metropolitan life with a pulse of despair.” Others asserted that no slum in the world could rival its filth and misery. “We know of no place on the earth where there are more wretched beings congregated together than at the Five Points,” contended the New York Evening Post in 1846. Minister Lyman Abbott concurred, writing in 1857 that Five Points “contains more squalid poverty and abominable wickedness than any area of equal size in the world.”
Five Points had become so notorious that its very name became an adjective, a term used to describe something scandalously raunchy. The Herald jibed in 1842 that “if you desire to revel in the midst of Five Points literature, read the Courier and Enquirer, and the New York American,” which daily “contain columns of the lowest, most vulgar, most blackguard, most ferocious libels against the President.” The Methodist missionaries who attempted to reform the area likewise found that Five Points had become “the synonym for ignorance the most entire, for misery the most abject, for crime of the darkest dye, for degradation so deep that human nature cannot sink below it.”48
Five Points became so infamous that reference to it even became a staple of the southern defense of slavery. Northern abolitionists were hypocrites to complain about slavery, insisted slaveholders, when they tacitly condoned such abject suffering in their own midst. A Kentucky doctor who had treated Five Points cholera victims in 1832 argued that its residents “are far more filthy, degraded, and wretched than any slave I have ever beheld, under the most cruel and tyrannical master. . . . They are in the lowest depths of human degradation and misery.” Two decades later, a South Carolinian who visited Five Points contended that it contained more vice, poverty, and wretchedness than the entire South. Only “when the Abolitionists have cleared their own skirts,” could they “hold up their hands in holy horror at the slave-holder, and the enormity of his sins.” Even southerners who had not seen the slum firsthand began to cite it as proof of the superiority of their way of life. The Southern Quarterly Review asked “whether there is any negro quarter, from Mason and Dixon’s line to the Rio del Norte, which could furnish a picture of vice, brutality, and degradation comparable to that drawn from the heart of London” or “the Five Points of New York?” Southerners also cited Five Points as proof that the anti-slavery Republican party was in favor of the “social equality of the negro.” A slave state congressman described to the House of Representatives “a ball held at Five Points in the city of New York, where white women and negroes mingled ‘in sweet confusion in the mazy dance.’” Southerners felt certain that the life of a free person in Five Points, whether black or white, was infinitely worse than that of any slave.49
Opponents of slavery and its expansion also alluded to Five Points to justify their political organization, the Republican party. In reply to the previously quoted speech to the House of Representatives, Michigan congressman Francis W. Kellogg asserted that while his colleague’s depiction of Five Points might be accurate, the ward in which the neighborhood was located “is the strongest Democratic ward in the city, and I doubt if a Republican vote was ever polled there.” Those who endorsed or participated in the depravity described by Kellogg’s colleague were in fact Democrats, and could in no way be linked to the Republican party or the anti-slavery cause. North Carolina Republican Hinton Helper elaborated upon this theme in his famous Impending Crisis of the South. Helper noted that at the “Five Points Precinct” in the 1856 presidential election, Democrat James Buchanan received 574 votes to only 16 for Republican John Frémont and 9 for Know Nothing Millard Fillmore. He then pointed out that Five Points, “with the exception of the slave-pens in Southern cities, is, perhaps, the most vile and heart-sickening locality in the United States. . . . The votes polled at the Five Points precinct, which is almost exclusively inhabited by low Irish Catholics,” proved that the Democratic party appealed most to degraded slum dwellers and those too ignorant to resist the “Jesuitical” influence of the Catholic Church. Northerner and southerner, slaveholder and abolitionist, could all use Five Points to justify their political views.50
The reputation of Five Points, the “Five Points of the mind,” one might say, was firmly and irreversibly established. But was the neighborhood really as bad as these writers claimed? After all, each of the groups that shaped its reputation had some incentive to make it look as horrible as possible. In fact, not too long after Dickens had published his description, New York journalists admitted that as bad as Five Points was, it was “not one half the pestilential hole he has represented.”51
The truth is horrifying and yet simultaneously inspiring as well. There were many irredeemable individuals, yet the immigrants who dominated Five Points survived and eventually thrived in their new homeland. Five Points had more fighting, drinking, and vice than almost anywhere else; but also more dancing and nightlife, more dense networks of clubs and charities, and opportunities both small and large for those who seized them. With its energy, brutality, enterprise, hardship, and constant dramas, Five Points was an extreme case, yet still a deeply American place.
2
PROLOGUE
NELLY HOLLAND COMES TO FIVE POINTS
IF FIVE POINTS was so famously wretched, why did so many immigrants settle there? Ellen Holland’s tale provides one answer: it was far better than staying home. “Nelly” had been born and raised in southwestern Ireland in the County Kerry parish of Kenmare. There she grew up surrounded by jagged mountain peaks and lush green hills that sloped dramatically to the wide, majestic Kenmare River. Nelly and her family lived on the estate of the third marquis of Lansdowne—an English nobleman whose property was home to thirteen thousand of the most impoverished residents of nineteenth-century Ireland. Visitors to the huge estate commonly chose adjectives such as “wretched,” “miserable,” “filthy,” “half naked,” and “half fed” to describe the poor farmers and laborers who comprised the vast majority of its population.
Observers invoked such descriptions of Nelly’s birthplace even before a mysterious potato blight began to wreak havoc with the staple of her diet in 1845. By late 1846, Kenmare residents began to succumb to starvation and malnutrition-related diseases that spread in the blight’s wake. In early 1847, the death toll multiplied. An Englishman who visited Kenmare village wrote that “the sounds of woe and wailing resounded in the streets throughout the night.” The following morning, nine of those sufferers lay dead. “The poor people came in from the rural districts [of the Lansdowne estate] in such numbers, in the hopes of getting some relief, that it was utterly impossible to meet their most urgent exigencies, and therefore they came in literally to die.” Tens of thousands fled Ireland in 1847, hoping to start new and more prosperous lives in England or America. But almost none of the Lansdowne tenants could afford to leave Kerry. Few had emigrated from this isolated estate in the pre-famine years, so Kenmare residents were not receiving the remittances from abroad that enabled many famine victims to leave Ireland.1
When the fungus subsided in 1848, British officials in charge of famine relief declared the emergency at an end. But such decrees meant nothing to Holland and others suffering in Kenmare. Most of Lansdowne’s tenants were by that point too weak to work or plant and too destitute to buy seed pot
atoes. And what few tubers they did cultivate in 1849 were again ravaged by the dreaded fungus. Kenmare once more became the center of suffering in the region, with people “dying by the dozens in the streets.” Those on the brink of death crowded into the village workhouse, where, in return for giving up all of their worldly possessions, the starving received just barely enough food to keep them alive. By April 1849, the institution held 1,800 souls “in a house built for 500—without shoes, without clothes, in filth, rags and misery,” wrote Kenmare’s Roman Catholic archdeacon, John O’Sullivan. “The women squatted on the ground, on the bare cold clay floor and [were] so imprisoned for months . . . without as much as a stool to sit on.” One of these poor souls was Ellen Holland. She and her three sons, thirteen-year-old James, nine-year-old Thomas, and four-year-old George, were almost certainly among the institution’s inmates. Her husband Richard was probably one of the many men who remained outside the workhouse hoping to find work. Or he may have been one of the hundreds authorities turned away for want of space.2
Securing one of the coveted spaces in the Kenmare workhouse did not ensure survival. Hundreds died there during the famine from diseases such as dysentery and cholera that spread rapidly in the crowded, unsanitary conditions. The food supply was so meager that some inmates died of starvation just hours after being released from the facility. Nelly Holland probably remained at the workhouse throughout 1849 and 1850, wondering how her life might ever return to normal, or if she and her sons would also fall victim to the seemingly unending cycle of disease and death.3
Nelly must have been elated when Lansdowne’s estate agent announced in December 1850 that the marquis would finance the emigration to America of all his workhouse tenants who wished to go. Holland and her sons were among the first to take advantage of the program. Yet transAtlantic voyages were challenging even for hearty souls, and Lansdowne’s tenants were emaciated and totally ill-equipped for the crossing. Sailors were horrified when they first encountered the Lansdowne emigrants, reporting that in the half decade since the onset of the famine they had never laid eyes on such wretched beings. The emigrants continued to suffer as they made their way across the Atlantic. The rags they wore provided woefully inadequate protection from the elements aboard a North Atlantic sailing ship in the dead of winter. Nelly Holland’s vessel, the Montezuma, had to detour around an iceberg and huge swaths of “field ice” during its voyage, giving some indication of the frigid conditions she and her shipmates endured. And although Lansdowne’s agent had paid for the emigrants’ tickets, he did not supply his charges with the foodstuffs that the typical Irish immigrant brought aboard a trans-Atlantic vessel. Holland was forced to subsist on the “ship’s allowance,” just one pound of flour or meal and thirteen ounces of water each day, during her thirty-nine days at sea.4
By the time Nelly arrived in New York in mid-March, hundreds of thousands of Irish men, women, and children fleeing the famine had arrived in the United States through this bustling port. Yet even jaded New Yorkers considered the condition of the Lansdowne immigrants shocking. A New York Tribune reporter found many of the Montezuma’s passengers dazed, disoriented, homeless, and starving in the streets near the waterfront days after their arrival. The Herald also singled out the Lansdowne immigrants for comment, characterizing their treatment as “inhuman.” With three children in tow and no husband (he came on a later vessel), Nelly must have found those first weeks in New York extraordinarily difficult.5
Like most of the Lansdowne immigrants, Nelly and her family eventually settled in Five Points. Unable to afford anything else, the Hollands rented an apartment at 39 Orange Street, where they were surrounded by drunks, notorious saloons and brothels, and other Lansdowne immigrants. The Hollands’ two-and-a-half-story frame building was set within one of the most notoriously squalid blocks of tenements in the world. A journalist visiting the building less than two years before the Hollands’ arrival in New York had found 106 hogs residing on the premises.6
Despite these hardships, Ellen Holland and her family set to work rebuilding their lives. After years of unemployment, they must have been eager and delighted to take even the lowly jobs available to them. Ellen became a washerwoman. Richard found work as a menial day laborer. Their son James, fifteen years old when he arrived in New York in 1851, probably began doing day labor as well. But a laborer’s life was a hard one, full of long hours and backbreaking work in all kinds of weather. Such strenuous exertion could take its toll on even the heartiest constitutions, especially those weakened by years of famine. Ellen Holland discovered this all too well. By July 1855, Richard and James were both dead. Still living in squalor at 39 Orange, Nelly now had to pay the rent and support two children on the few dollars a week she could scrape together by taking in laundry. But Nelly Holland was not a quitter. As bad as life in Five Points was, Kenmare had been far worse. Holland would live at least to age fifty-two. Not only would she survive in America—she would eventually thrive.7
CHAPTER TWO
Why They Came
BY THE EARLY 1850s, the drama of life in Five Points so captivated Americans that tales of the famous neighborhood found their way into nearly every form of literary endeavor. Barnum’s Museum featured a play about its most infamous tenement. A best-selling novel depicted dissolute immigrants engaged in lives of crime and orgies of incest in overcrowded, squalid tenement buildings. A poet lamented the struggles of its inhabitants for dignity. The new pictorial newspapers published exposés of tenement life there, featuring lurid portraits of gruesome, thieving thugs and wizened, pipe-smoking old hags as typical Five Points residents. When an entirely new form of literature—the book-length, nonfiction account of urban crime and debauchery—made its way from Europe to the United States, the “sins” of Five Points served as a featured attraction. Yet many of the stories in these publications were obviously fictitious, or exaggerated, or simply recycled versions of a few shockingly lurid tales. Not every Five Pointer could have been a thief, a prostitute, or a drunk. What kinds of people really lived in Five Points? And how did they end up there?8
“EVERY NATIONALITY OF THE GLOBE”
In order to answer these questions, it is important to understand how dramatically the population of both Five Points and the city as a whole had changed since 1830, when the neighborhood had first become notorious. Immigration increased enormously after 1830, with most of the newcomers who settled in New York coming from Ireland and the German states. The foreign-born population expanded from 9 percent of the city’s total in 1830 to 36 percent in 1845. With the onset of the potato blight in Ireland, the pace of immigration accelerated further. By 1855, when the flood of immigrants had finally begun to subside, 51 percent of New Yorkers had been born abroad. The population of the city swelled tremendously in these years, more than doubling from 1825 to 1845 (from 166,000 to 371,000), and then increasing 70 percent more during the famine decade, to nearly 630,000 by 1855.9
Five Points became home to many of these newcomers. From 1830 to 1855, the population of the ward virtually doubled, from 13,570 to 25,562. The most dramatic increase came during the peak Irish famine years from 1845 to 1850, when it increased from 19,343 to 24,698. With immigrants pouring into the neighborhood and many natives leaving, the foreign-born accounted for 72 percent of Five Points’ population by 1855. Even this figure understates the immigrant presence in the neighborhood, however, because the vast majority of “natives” were the young children of recent immigrants. If only adults (those eighteen years of age or older) are considered, the foreign-born constituted a full 89 percent of Five Points residents. No New York neighborhood could boast a higher concentration.10
Observers believed that immigrants from all over the world settled in Five Points. “All the nations of the earth are represented,” stated the Five Points Monthly, a Methodist journal. A minister working there on the eve of the Civil War likewise found “a population that . . . represents every nationality of the globe.” Yet this perception was somewha
t exaggerated.
In comparison to some modern New York neighborhoods, antebellum Five Points seems relatively homogeneous, as 91 percent of its residents were born in Ireland, the United States, or the German states. Of the other groups, only Italians and Poles lived there in significantly greater numbers than in the rest of the city. Five Points was far from the Tower of Babel many perceived.11
Most Five Pointers did not arrive in New York alone, but instead made the journey to America with at least one other family member. Among married couples who had had children in Europe, about three-quarters emigrated together (though, like Nelly Holland, they may not have all come on the same ship). It is impossible to determine how many of those who arrived in Five Points before marriage came to the United States alone. But a sampling of all Irish immigrants disembarking at New York during the famine years indicates that 56 percent traveled with at least one family member.12
Whether one arrived in New York alone or with family members, the immigrant was usually expected to send money back to his or her native land to finance the passage of others—a process known as “chain migration.” In cases in which a family with small children was divided, the husband typically went to America first and then brought the rest of his family over to Five Points. Laborer William Higgins, for example, emigrated from Ireland to New York in 1851. Only after two years of saving could he afford to bring over his wife Mary and four-year-old son James. Levi Abraham, a tailor, left his wife Amelia with their newborn son Abraham for four and a half years before they were reunited at the beginning of 1855. Sometimes, the emigrating husband brought a child with him and left his wife with the rest of their children.
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