Alcohol abuse by adults forced their offspring to take on responsibilities no child should have had to bear. An eight-year-old Five Points boy once went as long as three days with only a bit of bread to eat as his alcoholic mother became increasingly ill. Each day, she sent him to pawn another piece of furniture or clothing so he could buy her more brandy. By the time she died, she was completely nude. The House of Industry magazine reported in 1857 that two youngsters living next door to Crown’s Grocery “came crying to the school—for mother was dead.” The two adult boarders sharing the apartment with them ought to have summoned the authorities, but one lay on the floor in a drunken stupor, while the other had recently been sent to prison for habitual public drunkenness. As to the deceased woman, she had died “from the effects of long-continued intoxication.” Some children paid the ultimate price for their parents’ alcoholism. One little girl was forced to steal to pay for her mother’s drinking habit. Police caught her one day, and while awaiting trial in the Tombs, where prisoners often had to build their own fires to keep themselves warm, the helpless girl apparently froze to death.55
Even children drank to excess in Five Points. The House of Industry discovered children drinking liquor to such an extent that it organized a temperance club exclusively for youngsters. “Little boys of eight have been found intoxicated in the infant class,” reported mission workers a decade later. Many children got their introduction to alcohol when asked to “rush the growler” for their mothers or fathers. This chore involved bringing a pail (the “growler”) downstairs to the nearest saloon and returning it filled with beer. Youngsters growing up in Five Points (especially in Irish families) were constantly surrounded by the sights, sounds, and smells of drinking and drunkenness.56
When a health official asked an inebriated rear tenement dweller why she drank, she replied that “if you lived in this place you would ask for whiskey instead of milk.” But such a response tells only part of the story. The Germans, Polish Jews, and Italians who lived in Five Points in equally squalid conditions did not suffer from alcoholism to the extent that the Irish did. Citywide statistics from later in the nineteenth century suggest that Irishmen in New York were 75 percent more likely to die of alcohol-related illnesses than their English and Welsh counterparts, while for women the ratio was three to one. There must have been cultural or genetic factors at work. The Irish were certainly aware of their propensity to alcoholism before they arrived in America, even though many had been too poor in Europe to afford liquor except on rare occasions. Recall that Palmerston immigrant Pat McGowan had warned in one of his first letters back home to County Sligo that because liquor was so cheap and plentiful in America, his countrymen who could not resist the temptation to drink should not join him in New York. The Irish journalist John F. Maguire likewise attributed the Irish propensity to drunkenness to the omnipresence of liquor in the United States.57
But circumstances other than Five Points’ concentration of Irish immigrants also account for the high rate of alcoholism there. Many alcoholics probably chose to live in Five Points. Its seedy saloons and groceries undoubtedly sold some of the most inexpensive liquor in town. Cheap rents in its run-down tenements allowed drinkers to devote every possible cent to buying liquor. Indigent inebriates could also probably find quiet, out-of-the-way alleys to sleep off binges more easily in Five Points than in other neighborhoods, where police would be more likely to awaken or arrest sleeping drunks. In addition, while newcomers without a propensity to drink could save money and move to better neighborhoods, alcoholic immigrants who could not work regularly were doomed to remain in Five Points indefinitely.
Five Points’ reputation as a hotbed of vice and crime gradually changed over time. In 1828, the city’s grand jury singled out the neighborhood as “a rendezvous for thieves and prostitutes.” A generation later, New Yorkers had begun to reconsider their perceptions of the notorious district. George Foster wrote in 1850 that Five Points was much safer than it had been ten or twenty years earlier. Many of his contemporaries agreed. When South Carolinian William H. Bobo toured the Points with a police escort a year or two later, the guide told him that there was no danger visiting the neighborhood anymore and that “the larger lights, in the way of stealing and other concomitant evils, have generally gone out [of the district], and are now hanging about Water-street.” Yet in the same year, the district attorney complained that more muggings occurred in Five Points than in any other portion of the city.58
It appears certain that in the 1820s and ’30s, lawlessness plagued Five Points as virtually no other section of the city. Fighting, prostitution, and violent assaults were rampant. By the 1850s, however, public demands that the police suppress blatant lawbreakers, combined with an increased neighborhood presence by religious groups, helped reduce the crime rate significantly. Five Points probably continued to outpace most other portions of the city in what would today be termed “quality-of-life crimes,” such as public drunkenness, public solicitation of prostitution, and petty theft. But in the category of violent crime—such as assault, rape, and murder—Five Points by the eve of the Civil War was no better or worse than other working-class New York neighborhoods.
Religious groups deserve much of the credit for the reduction in crime and suffering. Ever since the 1820s, religious activists had attempted to convert Five Points’ worst “sinners,” passing out tracts in saloons and tenements and even conducting Bible readings in front of the neighborhood’s most notorious brothels. Yet few Five Pointers had responded. Beginning in 1850, however, Protestant reformers tried a new approach. In addition to religious counseling, they would offer struggling Five Pointers job training and placement, hot meals and clothing, instruction in hygiene and disease prevention, and even a place to stay when the money ran out or an abusive spouse became too much to bear. The institutions these reformers created could not eliminate poverty in Five Points, and some of their methods—such as taking hundreds of indigent Five Points children from their parents to be placed in adoptive homes in the Midwest—seem heartless and cruel by today’s standards. Nonetheless, these innovative Protestant efforts, as well as the Catholic countermeasures they precipitated, significantly reduced suffering and crime in Five Points and played the key role in ending the neighborhood’s long reign as the city’s leading center of vice and lawlessness.
8
PROLOGUE
“I SHALL NEVER FORGET THIS AS LONG AS I LIVE”:
ABRAHAM LINCOLN VISITS FIVE POINTS
IN FEBRUARY 1860, Abraham Lincoln was invited to visit to New York. The Young Men’s Central Republican Union, a group organized to expose prominent New Yorkers to the views of leading Republicans from around the nation, had asked him to deliver an address to its members, and Lincoln jumped at the chance. He was already well known in the Midwest, but if he was going to satisfy his steadily growing presidential ambitions, he would need to win support in the East as well. Lincoln spent weeks preparing the speech, working harder on it than on any he gave before or after.1
Lincoln was scheduled to appear at the Cooper Union auditorium on Monday evening, the twenty-seventh, and he arrived in New York on Saturday. The wide-eyed tourist strolled down Broadway, had his portrait taken at Mathew Brady’s photography studio, and on Sunday morning attended services at the Brooklyn church of Henry Ward Beecher, renowned as “the greatest orator since St. Paul.” But that afternoon, Lincoln chose to pass the time at a more unusual tourist attraction—the charitable institution known as the Five Points House of Industry.2
Living conditions in Five Points had improved markedly by the eve of the Civil War, but Lincoln nonetheless found the neighborhood’s abject poverty shocking. When he arrived at the House of Industry, Lincoln was undoubtedly given a full tour of the organization’s new six-story brick headquarters, which towered over the surrounding wooden hovels on the north side of Paradise Square just west of the Five Points intersection. It had spacious dormitories where dozens of abused, neglected, or homeles
s boys and girls lived until they found adoptive parents. His hosts would also have shown him the large chapel where religious services were held and the workshops where neighborhood teens and adults learned a variety of trades.
As Lincoln peeked in on one of the Sunday school classes, a teacher asked the tall, skinny lawyer to say a few words to his students. Lincoln at first declined, insisting that he could offer no words of advice to such destitute children. But his companion, Illinois congressman Elihu B. Washburne, insisted that Lincoln speak, suggesting that he describe the hard times of his own youth. Lincoln reluctantly consented, telling the students, as Washburne later recalled, that “I had been poor; that I remembered when my toes stuck out through my broken shoes in winter; when my arms were out at the elbows; when I shivered with the cold. And I told them there was only one rule. That was, always do the very best you can. I told them that I had always tried to do the very best I could; and that, if they would follow that rule, they would get along somehow.” By now, Lincoln’s eyes had filled with tears and he could not continue. When Washburne later told Lincoln that his little speech had inspired the children, Lincoln replied, “No, they are the ones who have inspired me—given me courage. . . . I am glad we came—I shall never forget this as long as I live.”3
It is tempting to attribute Washburne’s moving description of this poignant scene to the reverence for Lincoln that developed after his assassination. Yet even before Lincoln’s death, a House of Industry teacher reported that his words were “strikingly beautiful, and his tones musical with intensest feeling.” The children’s faces “would droop into sad conviction as he uttered sentences of warning, and would brighten into sunshine as he spoke cheerful words of promise.”4
That Lincoln chose to visit Five Points reflects the neighborhood’s continuing notoriety on the eve of the Civil War. But his decision to tour the House of Industry, rather than the dives and dance halls as Dickens had done two decades earlier, shows that Americans’ perception of the district had begun to change. The innovative efforts of the House of Industry to improve the lives of Five Pointers had become, by the end of the 1850s, as well known as the neighborhood itself.
The story of Lincoln’s visit to the Five Points House of Industry also speaks volumes about how the institution had achieved its fame. One of Lincoln’s guides that morning was Rev. Samuel B. Halliday, who had worked with the poor in Five Points for more than two decades. By the late 1850s, Halliday headed the American Female Guardian Society and Home for the Friendless, an uptown charity that sought to prevent destitute girls and women from becoming prostitutes, but he also continued to work closely with the House of Industry. Before Lincoln left Five Points, Halliday presented him with a copy of his recently published book The Lost and Found; or Life Among the Poor. Many of the work’s heartrending accounts of poverty in Five Points and the House of Industry’s efforts to alleviate it had already appeared in the Times and other city newspapers, as well as in the charity’s own magazine. In fact, reporters often turned to Halliday for guided tours of the famous slum. He was known far and wide as “a gentleman having a speciality for the exploration, night and day, of the purlieus of city life.”5
Of all the moving stories Halliday had collected during these explorations, the one that most touched New Yorkers’ hearts was that of nine-year-old Mary Mullen. After her parents died, Mary was taken in by a Five Points couple who operated a small saloon. Their circumstances were relatively comfortable, especially by Five Points standards, yet they did not allow Mary to attend school. Instead, they forced her to work as a street sweeper at the intersection of Park Row and Beekman Street, clearing the mud and puddles from the crosswalks in exchange for tips from pedestrians. The worse the weather, the more Mary’s guardians insisted that she must sweep, because on days of driving rain or windblown snow, passersby would especially pity the inadequately clothed girl and more readily reward her with their pocket change. Alerted to Mary’s pitiful plight, Halliday found her at her intersection, with her dress “fastened up about the waist, after the fashion of the ‘Emerald Isle’; short petticoat; legs, feet, face, and arms spattered with mud.” Though it was late in the afternoon, all she had eaten that day was “hard bread and buttermilk.” Mary informed Halliday that she had already collected “six shillings” (seventy-five cents) in tips that day, and that her income could vary from two shillings to as much as two dollars daily depending on the weather and the pedestrian traffic.
When Halliday told Mary that he would take her off the streets and find her a new home, she resisted on the grounds that her guardians would beat her if she did not return with her earnings. Despite her protests, Halliday dragged her to City Hall, where the mayor gave him official custody of the young girl. Mary’s guardians attempted to win her return, but according to Halliday, the mayor “was inexorable.” After Mary had stayed at Halliday’s uptown institution for a few months, the minister found her a “country home” with a new set of adoptive parents. By the time of Lincoln’s visit, charitable organizations such as the House of Industry wielded virtually unchecked power over the fate of Five Points children.6
Halliday was a true innovator in his field. He made extensive use of the relatively new medium of photography, recording the appearance of children he found begging on the street and then using these images to persuade judges that he should be awarded custody of the kids. Halliday also gave copies of these photos to wealthy New Yorkers to inspire donations to organizations such as the House of Industry. In fact, historians of photography cite Halliday’s photos as the first known use of the medium for charitable fund-raising. Halliday reported in 1859 that as a result of such efforts, his photograph of Mary Mullen was “becoming distributed somewhat extensively. Entering the parlor of a wealthy family a few days since, in a conspicuous place among most elegant paintings and engravings was the form in photograph of my little street-sweeper.” Another of his most heart-wrenching photos was that of a girl he called “Tattered Maggie.” Halliday had found this six-year-old barefoot orphan wandering the streets after her mother, an alcoholic, had died in jail following her arrest for public drunkenness.7
Mary Mullen, the street sweeper, c. 1859. Thomas Walther Collection, New York (original image rephotographed by D. James Dee).
Tattered Maggie, the orphan, c. 1859. Thomas Walther Collection, New York (original image rephotographed by D. James Dee).
Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech helped his campaign enormously. He did not initially make a good impression with his high-pitched voice and ill-fitting suit, but he soon won over his audience with his careful arguments, homespun humor, and elegant prose. At the conclusion of the address, he received a thunderous standing ovation. “Mr. Lincoln is one of Nature’s orators,” said the Tribune approvingly the next day. Reprinted in newspapers across the nation, the Cooper Union speech helped make Lincoln a legitimate presidential contender. At the Republican National Convention in Chicago three months later, Tom Hyer led the cheering in the gallery for Lincoln’s principal rival, New York senator William H. Seward, but the Illinois rail-splitter prevailed, and was soon headed for the White House.8
After Lincoln’s victory in the general election, Halliday sent the first family an album filled with “before” and “after” photographs of children aided by the House of Industry. The president’s album contains the only extant set of these arresting images.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Religion and Reform
BY 1850, the most common explanation for the widely perceived “moral corruption” in Five Points was the lack of religious influence in the neighborhood. “No church edifice lured the besotted denizens of the Points from their reeking, . . . filth-streaming rookeries,” commented one journalist as he looked back at the antebellum years. A minister in 1853 labeled Five Points an “idolatrous, Church-forsaken district.” The number of religious institutions that had abandoned Five Points in the years before 1853 was indeed shocking. As recently as 1846, the neighborhood had served as h
ome to a Baptist church on lower Mulberry Street, an Episcopal house of worship on Mott Street, a Swedenborgian church on Pearl Street, as well as an African-American congregation on Orange Street and a Welsh Baptist chapel on upper Mott. By 1855, each had abandoned Five Points. Neighborhood inhabitants “have already, by their peculiar repulsiveness, driven several of our most respectable Christian churches out of their borders,” commented one minister in explaining the exodus. They “have never read or heard the Bible read, and know as little of its teachings as the most degraded heathen.”9
“NO MAN CAN BECOME A MEMBER
HEREAFTER WHAT WAS A RUSSIAN SUBJECT”
Of course, “Church-forsaken” was in the eyes of the beholder. If the Protestant churches abandoned ship, at least for a while, their Jewish and Catholic counterparts jumped aboard. For a time in the pre–Civil War period, more Jewish congregations met in the vicinity of Five Points than in the entire remainder of the city. The second, third, fourth, and fifth synagogues established in New York operated in the Sixth Ward during the 1820s, ’30s, and ’40s. The early history of the fourth, Shaarey Zedek, sheds light both on the tensions within New York’s early Jewish community and the difficult choices Eastern European Jews faced as they wavered between loyalty to their religious traditions and assimilation in a predominantly Christian nation.10
Shaarey Zedek was founded in 1839 by Polish Jews who felt uncomfortable in the city’s other synagogues, which were dominated by Jews of Western European origin. The congregation initially held services in an apartment on the top floor of the tenement at 472 Pearl Street, but within a year moved to a more spacious room above the New York Dispensary, a free medical clinic at the corner of Centre and White Streets.11
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