Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  “WE WANT SOMEBODY TO DO THE DIRTY WORK;

  THE IRISH ARE NOT DOING IT ANY LONGER”

  Because they could speak no English, most Italian men turned to padroni to find them jobs. The padroni supplied manual laborers to construction sites and public works projects inside the city, and to railroad track crews and mining companies outside of it. Employers paid the padroni, who deducted a generous fee before turning over the balance to their laborers.

  The padroni who found employment for adults soon became as notorious as their predecessors who had exploited children. The initial fee they levied for finding work seemed exorbitant, often amounting to one or even two weeks’ pay. A newcomer might not receive a dime in wages for quite some time, and if he was laid off before his padrone had been paid in full, the laborer would leave the work site without a cent and still be in debt to the contractor. If the job did last, the padrone continued to deduct a portion of the worker’s salary as long as he was employed. Padroni were notorious for laying off workers without cause in order to generate a new round of up-front fees. Some padroni, especially those new to the business, actually supervised their charges at the work site. A few even brandished pistols to maintain discipline. The more established padroni hired foremen to oversee the laborers and translate the construction boss’s orders into Italian. Whether they wanted to stay in New York or journey thousands of miles for work, Italian immigrants quickly learned that Mulberry Street in Five Points was the place to find the padroni who could secure them their first jobs in America.20

  Many successful Five Points p adroni eventually branched out into “banking,” and the district soon became as renowned for its shady Italian banks as it was for its rapacious padroni. “Almost every other house in the Italian quarter is a ‘bank,’” observed the Herald in 1892. Another writer christened Mulberry Street “‘the Italian Wall Street,’ because of the many banking houses and money exchanges that line that thoroughfare.” In the late nineteenth century, there were six and sometimes even ten banks per block on Mulberry Street.21

  These banks had little in common with typical American depositories of the period. Other financial institutions built imposing offices in order to convey a sense of solid financial stability. The Mulberry Street banks, in contrast, were generally “shabby little affairs, run in connection with lodging houses, restaurants, grocery stores, macaroni factories, beer saloons, cigar shops, etc., but under imposing names, such as Banca Roma, Banca Italiana, Banca Abbruzzese, and the like.” They were neither licensed nor regulated and paid no interest whatsoever on their deposits. Anyone, it seemed, could open a Mulberry Street bank. A successful watchmaker began offering banking services in 1891. A wine shop doubled as a bank as well. Most Mulberry Street “bankers” also served as railroad and steamship company agents, and typically transacted more business wiring money to Italy than they did taking in immigrants’ hard-earned savings for deposit.22

  Despite these shortcomings, New York’s Italian newcomers were drawn to the Mulberry Street banks. With Italian unification a recent event, immigrants still thought of themselves more as Basilicatans or Neapolitans than Italians, and the bankers skillfully manipulated the newcomers’ regional loyalty to win their confidence. In addition, many believed they had no choice but to make the banks their first stop in New York. Often the bankers’ agents in Italy stamped the name and address of a particular Mulberry Street bank on their passports and instructed them to report there for work.23

  The Italian bankers insisted that their unsavory reputation was unfounded. They paid no interest, they asserted, because they did not put their depositors’ funds at risk by investing them. Their fees and commissions were not exorbitant either, they contended, because so many immigrants defaulted on their loans. That the bankers loaned money at all, however, indicates that they were investing their depositors’ funds. It is also hard to believe that the many bankers who accumulated substantial real estate holdings did not use deposits to purchase tenements or secure mortgages.24

  One of the most successful bankers in Five Points was Antonio Cuneo. Born in the Piemonte region of northwestern Italy, Cuneo immigrated to New York in 1855. Like many early Italian immigrants, Cuneo first chose self-employment, selling fruit and roasted nuts from a pushcart. Four years later, he managed to acquire a grocery, and as Italian immigrants began arriving in Five Points in greater numbers in the postwar years, he opened a bank. In 1881, he abandoned the grocery business altogether to concentrate on finance and real estate, and soon his office at the corner of Mulberry and Park Streets became one of the best known banks in the neighborhood. By the end of the 1880s, Cuneo boasted that he owned more than $400,000 in property, mostly tenements in or near Mulberry Bend. Despite his wealth and prestige, Cuneo continued to live in Five Points at 101 Park Street well into the 1890s.25

  Cuneo had chosen the location of his bank wisely, for as Harper’s Weekly commented in 1890, “the moment an Italian arrives in New York—that is, one of humble means and without friends in the city—he wends his way to Mulberry Street.” For most Italians arriving there, Five Points was merely a staging ground. On Mulberry Street the newcomer could exchange some money, locate employment through a padrone, write (or hire someone to write) a letter back to Italy reporting his safe arrival in the United States, and regain his bearings while he awaited transportation to his first American job. For most Italian immigrants, this meant an additional journey to Texas, Florida, the Rocky Mountain West, or some other far-flung corner of North America.26

  Of the Italians who took jobs outside of New York, the vast majority toiled on railroad construction crews. “The typical railroad-builder of a few years ago,” noted Frank Leslie’s in 1882, “was a newly-arrived Irish immigrant, ready to do hard work for moderate pay. [But] the representatives of the Green Isle have been largely supplanted in this work by the sons of Italy.” A prominent railroad construction contractor told the Tribune in 1887 that “on all the big railroad jobs throughout the West you will find Italians in droves. . . . On some roads they are employed almost exclusively.” Although this contractor lamented that the Italians “are not nearly as good workmen as the Irish,” they became the preferred source of labor for most railroad construction projects by the mid-1880s.27

  Many railroad crews were recruited by padrone Francesco Sabbia, a Sicilian from Catania who arrived in New York in the late 1870s. Sabbia settled in Five Points and soon opened a grocery and stale-beer dive at 92 Mulberry Street. By the 1890s, he was placing newly arrived immigrants in railroad construction gangs up and down the East Coast. He later opened a bank as well. Unlike Cuneo, who remained throughout his life a pillar of the Italian-American community, Sabbia became the personification of padrone greed and exploitation when Progressive Era muckrakers discovered in 1907 that the workers he had supplied to the Florida East Coast Railroad lived as virtual slaves. Despite such horror stories, and various governmental attempts to stamp out the padroni by establishing employment offices at Ellis Island, padroni remained the primary source of railroad employment for Italians well into the twentieth century.28

  Mining jobs were also popular among newly arriving Italians. An 1888 edition of Frank Leslie’s featured a print entitled “Arrival of Contract Laborers for the Coal Mines,” which depicted hundreds of Italians marching up Mulberry Street for transportation to a distant site. Many Italians worked the coal mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, but thousands of others entered mining in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Italians rarely dominated mining in the same manner as they did railroad construction. Employers often hired a variety of ethnic groups in order to divide the workers and prevent unionization. Mine owners also believed that Italian miners would work harder if they knew that the Slavs or Welshmen working another shaft might out-produce them.29

  Unlike mining, work on the railroads was not available all year round. In fact, outside the Deep South, most kinds of construction labor ceased each winter. As a result, many of the Italians who had pass
ed through Mulberry Bend on their way to job sites across North America returned to Five Points for the winter. “They come in from the country, the railroad and other work having stopped,” reported a labor journal in 1884. “Some of them find odd jobs, but the majority live on their scanty earnings—a piece of bread and an onion for breakfast, about the same for dinner, and maccaroni for supper.” An Italian visiting New York found that during the winter thousands of unemployed Italian railroad laborers “fill up the streets of New York, where the young polish shoes and the adults are engaged in work refused by workers of other nationalities—emptying garbage from barges into the sea, cleaning sewage—or they go around with a sack on their shoulders rummaging for bones, etc.” Never sparsely populated, Mulberry Bend seemed to burst at the seams each winter as permanent Italian residents took in out-of-work friends and relatives, while commercial boardinghouses filled to overflowing as well.30

  Many in these trying times turned to mutual aid societies for assistance. Immigrants from virtually every village and town in Italy organized self-help societies in New York whose membership was limited to natives of a particular Italian locale. The groups loaned money to indigent members, helped them find jobs, and organized social gatherings.31

  Given the cramped quarters and lack of employment opportunities in wintertime, many of the immigrants—both those who lived in New York year-round and those who did not—chose to return to Italy for the season. Italians were the first New York immigrants to partake in this “return migration.” Some laborers “go to Italy in the fall and return in the spring, so that during the months of September, October, November and December there is an exodus of over thirty thousand of them,” reported a group of Italian bankers and steamship agents. Often these returnees decided to remain in Italy permanently, lured by the prospect of marriage or the ability to purchase land with their newfound American wealth. Most, however, returned to America the following spring, anxious to earn even more money before resettling permanently in Italy. These repeat immigrants frequently brought with them friends or relatives who were drawn to New York by stories of high pay and plentiful job opportunities. Others decided to journey to the United States after seeing the remittances earlier immigrants had sent home to loved ones. To southern Italians whose families had been mired in poverty for centuries, even Five Points streets seemed to be paved with gold.32

  Although most Italian immigrants merely passed through Five Points on their way to a distant job site, some decided to make the neighborhood their home in America. Even more so than the Irish a generation earlier, these Italians were renowned for clustering in tenements with other immigrants from the same region or village. Unfortunately, the neighborhood’s Catholic church did not keep the detailed nativity records for its Italian parishioners that it had for the Irish a generation earlier, so we cannot document the Italians’ regional clustering with certainty. Nonetheless, contemporaries were sure that the Italians of Mulberry Bend lived “grouped by ‘villages.’” An Italian-American journalist agreed that “in one street there will be found peasants from one Italian village; in the next the place of origin is different and distinct, and different and distinct are manners, customs, and sympathies. Entire villages have been transplanted from Italy to one New York street.”33

  Five Points Italians also found themselves, like the Irish before them, situated initially at the bottom of the city’s economic ladder. The vast majority of unskilled Italians living in Five Points toiled as menial laborers on construction sites and public works projects. By the mid-1890s, Italians comprised three-quarters of all New York construction workers and 90 percent of laborers employed by the city. Italian laborers did the same backbreaking and dangerous hauling and excavating that the Irish had once dominated. “We can’t get along without the Italians,” commented one police officer in 1895. “We want somebody to do the dirty work; the Irish are not doing it any longer.”34

  In Five Points before the Civil War, four of five Irishmen who were not laborers worked in skilled trades. But in 1880, the majority of non-laborer Italians were peddlers or otherwise self-employed on the streets. Many were organ-grinders, but the vast majority peddled fruit. Speaking of the once ubiquitous Irish apple seller, Police Superintendent Thomas Byrnes noted that “twenty years ago you couldn’t pass a street corner without finding one; now all the fruit stands are kept by Italians.”35

  Some Italians sold a variety of fruits; others concentrated on one specialty, such as watermelon or lemons. In the winter, when fruit was not readily available, they sold hot chestnuts and peanuts. These fruit vendors actually altered New Yorkers’ eating habits. “Italians have put up fruit stands at every available corner where there is a chance of selling their wares, and have learned to arrange their fruits so tastefully as to tempt the passer-by,” commented the Times in 1895. “It is mainly due to the efforts of the Italians,” the journalist concluded, “that fruit eating has become quite universal here.” By that point there were said to be ten thousand Italian fruit vendors in New York. Their union, the Society of Italian Fruit Peddlers (Societá di Frutivendoli Ambulanti), usually held its meetings in Five Points.36

  Italian women also worked for pay. Whereas three-quarters of the neighborhood’s Irishwomen had worked either in the needle trades or as domestic servants in 1855, by 1880 only 24 percent of Italian women were employed in those fields. A variety of manufacturing jobs had become available since the Civil War, and many Italian women took jobs in these industries instead. They worked primarily in candy and tobacco factories in 1880, though they made artificial flowers as well. Italian women would eventually dominate artificial flower and paper box making, but Irish-American women (mostly the American-born daughters of immigrants) still held the bulk of these jobs in 1880. By the mid-1890s, many Italian women would move into garment work as well.37

  New Yorkers in these years especially associated Mulberry Bend women with the “rag picking” trade. “Most of the rag pickers in New York live in the Five Points, and near the Central Park,” wrote Virginia Penny in her encyclopedic study of women’s work. The term “ragpicker” was something of a misnomer, as those who followed this vocation collected not only rags, but paper, bones, and scrap metal and glass as well. “Some even carry a basket in which they gather waste vegetables or putrid meat, or the trimmings of uncooked meat,” explained Penny, “which they feed on themselves, or give to a pet pig, or trade with some neighbor.” A ragpicker’s life was a hard one. Trudging about the city rummaging through trash barrels and garbage heaps was only the beginning of her work. When she returned home, she had to sort the rags into clean and dirty, washing the latter. She also separated linens from woolens, clean paper from dirty, and white from colored. In the Civil War years, ragpickers generally got two cents per pound for rags and paper, and on a very good day might collect forty pounds. Bones sold for thirty cents a bushel. They sold fat to soapmakers or rendering plants and the metal and glass to junk dealers. Huge sacks of rags and paper are visible in most of Jacob Riis’s photos of Mulberry Bend, indicating the omnipresence of ragpickers in the neighborhood. In the 1850s and ’60s, both Irish and Italian Five Pointers followed this line of work. By the 1880s, however, four of five neighborhood ragpickers were Italian.38

  The employment rate for Italian women was held down by demographics and cultural attitudes. Thirty-five percent of married Irish-American women living in Five Points in 1880 did paid work, versus only 7 percent of married Italian-American women. Most Italian husbands would have been ashamed to let their wives work outside the home. Among unmarried women, 74 percent of Irish Americans worked for pay, versus just half of the Italians. The sample of unmarried Italian women was tiny, however, because there were very few unmarried Italian woman in Five Points. Eighty-five percent of Italian women aged eighteen or older were married, whereas only 36 percent of Irish-American women had a spouse. This huge disparity resulted primarily from the differing sex ratios in the two communities. Among adult Five Pointers, Ital
ian men outnumbered women by two to one in 1880, while Irish-American women comprised 53 percent of the neighborhood’s adult Hibernian population. Italian men sometimes went to great lengths to find wives. Padroni occasionally brought potential brides from Italy to New York, noted one reporter, “and they are disposed of at prices that pay the passage money and a good profit on the venture.”39

  With so few Italian women working outside the home, Italian boys were especially likely to choose employment over school. “Bootblacking,” once monopolized by the Irish, eventually became associated with Italian youths. Although they initially had trouble breaking into the Irish bootblacks’ close-knit ranks, by 1890 Italians controlled bootblacking completely. An 1894 survey of 484 New York bootblacks found that 473 were Italian Americans. Nonetheless, many more Italian adolescents worked as laborers than as bootblacks.40

  Irish workers often resented the Italians who displaced them. When Irish sewer diggers went on strike for higher wages during the severe depression of 1874, the contractor dismissed them and hired Italians. The Irish threw rocks at the Italians, seriously injuring two before police drove them off. “They left vowing vengeance,” reported the Times, “and threatening to murder every Italian who would dare to accept employment in the place of Irishmen.” Labor groups condemned all manner of Italian workers—from laborers to barbers—for accepting less than the prevailing American wage during the late nineteenth century.41

  Labor leaders often cursed Italians’ supposed hostility to unions, but many obstacles prevented them from becoming part of the Gilded Age labor movement. The padrone system, for example, made it virtually impossible for laborers to seek union membership. But in a few cases Italians in Five Points did aid the cause of organized labor. When New York freight handlers called a strike in 1882, employers brought in Italians to man the piers. A mass meeting was held in Five Points at which Jeremiah Murphy, president of the Freighthandlers Union, asked the Italians not to work as scabs. Consequently, two hundred Italians already hired as replacement workers for the Erie Railroad walked out as well. Many joined the union, which agreed to provide food for the Italian strikers. Yet such cases of interethnic labor cooperation were relatively rare in the late nineteenth century. Much more common were comments like those of a clothing manufacturer who stated that he preferred to hire Italians because while Jews were always striking, the Italians “work along steadily and do not complain.”42