Racial segregation in Five Points was even more pronounced than ethnic clustering. Those African Americans who remained in Five Points tended to live in all-black tenements. Park Street between Baxter and Mott contained the largest proportion of such buildings, as several of the small houses on each of these blocks were boardinghouses that catered to blacks. African Americans also concentrated in Cow Bay, as well as in scattered houses on Baxter, Mulberry, and Pell Streets. If the census taker is to be believed, racial segregation in Five Points was almost absolute.55
Although ethnic and racial residential patterns are easiest to document, intraethnic housing patterns developed as well. The dominant Irish contingents in the neighborhood—those from Sligo, Cork, and Kerry—often concentrated in mini-enclaves. The Kerry immigrants were the most clannish, with 84 percent of them living in just two of the neighborhood’s twenty blocks. These two blocks, Baxter from Worth to Leonard and Worth from Centre to Baxter (including Cow Bay), were two of the five blocks whose confluence formed the Five Points intersection. Kerry immigrants dominated those streets. Sixty-four percent of the Irish Catholic residents identified on these two blocks were Kerry natives; and 79 percent of these Kerry natives had emigrated from the Lansdowne estate. Callaghan McCarthy, a Catholic priest in the isolated Lansdowne parish of Tuosist, told a visitor to Kerry that “there existed considerable remains of clanship among these mountaineers” and “strong family attachments.” These bonds remained potent in New York.56
Ethnicity of Five Points Tenement Dwellers
East Side of Mott Street from Canal Street to Bayard Street, 1855 Street Address
The number at the bottom of each column represents a street address. The columns above each number represent tenements. Each row in a given column represents one apartment. The left-hand column of each address represents the male head of household; the right column, the female head of household. If there was only one household head, the entire row represents the ethnicity of that one person. Boarders are not represented. Blank space within a column represents the yard between front and rear tenements.
West Side of Mulberry Street from Park to Bayard, 1855.
The number at the bottom of each column represents a street address. The columns above each number represent tenements. Each row in a given column represents one apartment. The left-hand column of each address represents the male head of household; the right column, the female head of household. If there was only one household head, the entire row represents the ethnicity of that one person. Boarders are not represented. Blank space within a column represents the yard between front and rear tenements.
East Side of Baxter Street from Bayard to Park, 1855.
The number at the bottom of each column represents a street address. The columns above each number represent tenements. Each row in a given column represents one apartment. The left-hand column of each address represents the male head of household; the right column, the female head of household. If there was only one household head, the entire row represents the ethnicity of that one person. Boarders are not represented. Blank space within a column represents the yard between front and rear tenements.
East Side of Mulberry Street from Bayard to Canal Street, 1860.
The number at the bottom of each column represents a street address. The columns above each number represent tenements. Each row in a given column represents one apartment. The left-hand column of each address represents the male head of household; the right column, the female head of household. If there was only one household head, the entire row represents the ethnicity of that one person. Boarders are not represented. Blank space within a column represents the yard between front and rear tenements.
Source: 1855 New York State manuscript census; 1860 U.S. manuscript census; 1855 and 1860 New York City directories.
Sligo natives, in contrast, did not concentrate as compactly as did the Kerry immigrants. They settled primarily in the northern half of Five Points, but spread themselves out over a twelve-block area. The neighborhood’s final large Irish contingent, that from Cork, was the least clannish of the three. Thirty percent of Five Points’ Cork natives lived in the block bounded by Mulberry, Park, Baxter, and Chatham Streets, but otherwise emigrants from Cork spread out evenly across the neighborhood.
The smaller Irish subgroups clustered to some extent, but usually in single tenements rather than in specific blocks. Natives of Limerick concentrated in the connected buildings at 47 and 49 Mulberry Street, and at 7 and 9 Mulberry, 15 Baxter, and 64 Bayard Street. Mayo natives congregated at 84 Mulberry, Tipperary immigrants at 77 Mulberry, those from Waterford at 10, 11, and 12 Mulberry, and those from Cavan at 498 Pearl Street. But these cases were the exception. In most buildings, no single Irish county dominated.57
“THE PESTILENTIAL NUISANCE OF THE FIVE POINTS”
Newspaper editors, reformers, and government investigators were shocked not merely by conditions in Five Points tenements but also by how much tenants had to pay to rent them. Two-room apartments in the worst buildings generally rented for four to five dollars per month in the mid-1850s. Three rooms cost $5 to $6.50. In the rear wooden tenement at 371/2 Baxter, a three-room apartment (two of which were windowless bedrooms) in the back of the building rented for five dollars per month. A front apartment that faced the yard, also with two tiny windowless bedrooms, cost $6.50. A two-room flat on the fifth floor of the infamous rear tenement at 9 Mulberry Street rented for $4.50. Some notorious addresses commanded surprisingly high rents. One three-room apartment in Cow Bay rented for ten dollars a month in the late 1850s, apparently because only one of the three rooms was a small windowless “sleeping closet.” A single fifteen-by-fourteen-foot room with a seven-foot ceiling at 39 Baxter cost six dollars a month. Basements, in contrast, were the least-expensive dwellings. A cellar apartment in the rear of 9 Mulberry rented for three dollars per month. For that price one could also rent a shed in the backyard at 17 Baxter. But apartments in better buildings cost more. A two-room apartment in the new “model tenement” at 34 Baxter cost seven dollars per month. Figures compiled by the House of Industry also suggest that seven dollars was the typical rent for an average Five Points apartment.58
Because a three-room apartment in a decent working-class neighborhood only cost $8.50, reformers thought it unconscionable that Five Pointers were forced to pay nearly that much in a filthy, run-down district. “The old story of greedy capital,” said the Tribune, motivated property owners to gouge even the most destitute tenants. Newspapers charged that Five Points landlords reaped huge returns on their investments, ranging anywhere from 17 to 26 percent per year, according to one estimate.59
Others insisted that “the merciless inflictions and extortions of the sublandlord,” rather than the actual property owner, were most responsible for the outrageous rents the immigrants paid. City Inspector John Griscom, author of the first detailed study of New York tenement conditions, noted that building owners often had no direct interaction with renters. They frequently leased an entire building to someone else, who then sublet the apartments on his own and took responsibility for maintenance of the property. These “sub-landlords” were often immigrants, sometimes proprietors of the saloon or grocery on the building’s ground floor. Charles Loring Brace, who later founded the Children’s Aid Society, described in 1853 a case in which the sub-landlord, rather than the property owner, reaped huge profits. According to Brace, a “notorious rum-seller” rented eight Five Points houses for $125 each per year from the property owner. “These he lets out to the prostitutes and negroes. They are filthy, broken-down, miserable, beyond any houses in the City.” One of the buildings, in Cow Bay, brought in thirty dollars rent in one month, at which rate the saloonkeeper would clear “a profit of nearly 300 per cent” for the year. If landlords and sub-landlords would accept “a rational profit,” argued Brace and other reformers, much of the suffering in New York’s slums could be alleviated.60
Landlords and sub-landlords, of course, in
sisted that blame for the conditions and high rents in their buildings lay elsewhere. Samuel Weeks, a landlord who lived on Mott Street for almost all his life, complained that when he constructed new buildings at 47 and 49 Mott, the tenants immediately began taking in lodgers, overtaxing the buildings’ facilities and making the tenements overcrowded and filthy. Weeks testified that he lowered the rents by 25 percent to discourage his tenants from taking in boarders, but they continued to do so anyway. Only when immigrants’ wages improved, Weeks implied, would they be able to pay a reasonable rent and live in decent dwellings. Other landlords argued that high rents resulted from the city’s seemingly perpetual shortage of housing, and could not be blamed on individual property owners who merely charged the market rate. In any case, surviving Five Points rent ledgers indicate that tenements did not typically generate outrageous profits for their owners.61
These ledgers also demonstrate that even scraping together four or five dollars in rent was a challenge for poor Five Pointers. Tenants rarely paid their rent on time. The tiny front and rear wooden houses at 70 Mott Street, for example, had five apartments whose rents ranged from four dollars to nine. Only the tenant in the cheapest apartment, Irish immigrant glass peddler Andrew McDermott, consistently paid his on time. Painter Robert Hall, a New York native who lived in the nine-dollar apartment with his wife and six children, was consistently six weeks behind on his payments. Carpenter Patrick Farmer paid his rent close to the due date in the spring and summer when construction work was plentiful, but in the winter tended to fall weeks behind. Furthest in arrears was an Irish-born menial laborer, William Trainor, who lived with his wife, three children, and a boarder. He too could rarely pay in the winter, falling four months behind in both April 1849 and April 1850. The property agents did not evict Trainor despite his consistent delinquency, indicating either that the expense involved did not justify such extreme measures or that they sympathized with his plight. The agents paid $13.56 in fees to evict a tenant in another Five Points building, a cost far greater than the interest lost allowing Trainor to pay his back rent at midyear when he could find steadier employment.62
Some argued that only governmental regulation could reduce rents and improve conditions in the city’s decrepit tenements. “Tear down the rookeries,” demanded the New York Express, “and let there be proper supervision, under authority of law, over the construction of whatever buildings may be erected in the future.” But pervasive laissez-faire attitudes made tenement regulation seem radical to antebellum Americans. Supporters of regulation attempted to address this objection. “Why can the accommodations on a ship be regulated when they are only used for a few weeks,” asked the Tribune, “but not for homes where people live for months or years?” Nonetheless, the movement for tenement regulation made little headway in the prewar years.63
Others offered solutions even more radical than regulation. Anticipating by more than five decades the eventual fate of the southern and western sections of the Five Points neighborhood, the Herald suggested that city officials raze “all that nest of drunkenness, roguery, debauchery, vice and pestilence, moral and physical, which lies between Centre street and Chatham Square—that is to say, the locality known as the Five Points and its dependencies.” The city could then build a new post office as well as state and federal courts in its place. The Herald predicted that such a project would double property values in the surrounding area while allowing the city to “abolish the pestilential nuisance of the Five Points” once and for all. Yet such projects were considered too expensive and too intrusive on the rights of property owners to merit serious consideration. It would take another half century before New Yorkers would consent to use such drastic measures in the “battle with the slum.”64
Unable to effect real change, civic leaders attempted to improve the neighborhood’s image instead. At the end of 1854, city officials changed the names of the most infamous Five Points streets, in the hope that by simply expunging their notorious names from city maps they could initiate the revitalization of the district. The three streets whose confluence made up the Five Points intersection, as well a fourth nearby that ran up to Cow Bay, were all renamed. Cross Street became Park, Anthony was rechristened Worth, Orange was transformed into Baxter, and Little Water became Mission Place, named for the Five Points Mission which Methodists opened there in 1850. Yet “the shamelessness of Five Points” and the suffering of its “degraded denizens” remained all too much the same.65
Recognizing that new street names were not enough, those working in Five Points to aid the neighborhood’s many destitute residents stepped up their efforts in the early 1850s. One of the first to devote himself full time to their plight was a minister, Lewis N. Pease. The Ladies’ Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church hired Pease in 1850 to visit Five Pointers in their homes and convert them to Methodism. It was the lack of the moral compass provided by Protestant Christianity, Pease’s employers believed, that led residents to dissolute lives of drunkenness, crime, and prostitution. Only a devotion to the teachings of Christ through Bible study could fortify Five Pointers to resist these temptations. But the Five Pointers themselves repeatedly told Pease that their problem was not a lack of morals, but a lack of work. “‘Don’t talk to us of death and retribution and perdition before us,’” they implored him. “‘Tell us some way of escape! Give us work and wages!’”66
4
PROLOGUE
THE SAGA OF JOHNNY MORROW,
THE STREET PEDDLER
OF THE HUNDREDS of thousands of immigrants who passed through Five Points during the nineteenth century, precious few left written records. There are plenty of eyewitness accounts from reformers, journalists, law enforcement officials, and the like, but other than the occasional letter to the editor or affidavit describing a crime, working-class Five Pointers speak directly to us very rarely. A few have managed to narrate their own stories. Perhaps the most fascinating of these is the only one from the pre–Civil War years: a memoir, written by a teenager, of alcoholism, abuse, and life on the streets.1
His name was John Morrow, and he was born in about 1844 to Protestant parents in a village not far from Liverpool, England. He was the third of four children born to a Scottish father, an architect, and an English mother. John remembered his early years as carefree and happy, though when still a young boy he severely injured his left leg in a fall from a swing. The wound (perhaps a bad break) never properly healed, leaving his left leg lame for life. By the time he was full grown, it was three inches shorter than the right.
Far more traumatic to Johnny than his accident was the death of his mother when he was about five. His father remained single for quite some time, but finally remarried. Johnny recalled that his stepmother treated him and his three siblings quite well until she had children of her own, by which point she and his father were fighting a lot. “He would often spend the night away from home, carousing with a few companions, spending in this way much of his hard-earned money; and she would manage, while he was at his daily work, to drink a great deal of whiskey.” Soon she “entirely neglected her household duties, left the table in disorder, the cow unmilked, the children uncared-for, and indeed often entertained carousing friends against father’s will. Finally, in a fit of passion at her conduct, he declared that he would leave the homestead, and emigrate to America, in hopes that a change in circumstances would make things better.” He sold everything they owned, left Johnny’s two older brothers at a free boarding school in Dublin, and took the remainder of the family (including a servant girl whose passage they paid) to New York.2
That the Morrows could afford a servant girl indicates that they were still relatively well off. But in New York, Johnny’s father continued to drink rather than work. After two months, as their nest egg dwindled, he took Johnny out of school so the boy could scavenge firewood and coal to reduce the family’s fuel expenses. After about six months in New York, despite having left England with substantial savings, Johnn
y’s father was broke.3
Finding it impossible to work as an architect, he took a lowly seventy-five-cent-per-day job in a cabinetmaker’s shop on Chatham Street on the outskirts of Five Points. Johnny’s stepmother earned a few cents per day sewing shirts for garment manufacturers, as did his younger sister Annie. After work, his parents would drink away most of their earnings and beat the kids in frustration. After about a year in New York, Johnny’s father found relatively high-paying work as a house carpenter, but his drinking kept him from holding any job for very long. To cut their expenses, he moved the family uptown to a one-room basement apartment at the corner of Tenth Avenue and 40th Street, a run-down district that would soon become known as “Hell’s Kitchen.”
Meanwhile, Johnny continued to scavenge for fuel. At times his father ordered him to steal nails from construction sites instead, because he needed the two cents a pound they brought from the neighborhood junk dealer to pay for his brandy. “He soon became an almost helpless drunkard,” wrote Johnny, “got out of work, out of money, and, consequently, out of bread. STARVE, was the word!” Time and again Johnny’s father would take an oath of sobriety, but he always fell off the wagon. He pawned most of the family’s possessions to help pay their mounting expenses, which continued to increase as they had more children. By the time Johnny was eleven, in about 1854, he and Annie slept head to toe in a single bed with their half siblings William, Jane, and Margaret Ann. Little Jonathan slept in his parents’ bed.4
At about this point, Johnny was caught stealing lumber. Because of his lameness, he could not run fast enough to escape, and as a result was severely beaten. He came home and insisted he would steal no more, but suggested an alternative. During his days on the streets, he often came across children selling matches door to door. He had learned that the tiny peddlers would buy seventy-two boxes of matches wholesale for twenty-four cents. They took some matches out of each box and wrapped them with string into twenty-five additional bundles, selling the boxes and bundles for a penny a piece. His father consented to let Johnny try match peddling. On his first day he sold his entire stock, and returned home triumphantly with ninety-seven cents. His father spent most of the proceeds on brandy.5
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