Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  14. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana, 1982), 183; Marilynn Wood Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830–1870 (Berkeley, 1993), 49 (eleven-year-old); deposition of Mary O’Daniel, December 19, 1851, in indictment of Bridget McCarty, January 20, 1852, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers; Herald, October 6, 1853 (Hoffman); case of Elizabeth Dayton in Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 66; Pease v. Mangin, August 1, 1855, Box 7953, Police Court Cases, New York Municipal Archives; William W. Sanger, The History of Prostitution (1859; New York, 1937), 452.

  15. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 39; Sanger, History of Prostitution, 475–77; Annual Report of the Trustees of the Five Points House of Industry (1855): 20–24. Sanger found that 947 of the 2,000 prostitutes surveyed had children. Of these, 357 (38%) were single, 357 were married (though the majority of these were separated or had been abandoned), and 233 (25%) were widows.

  16. Times, March 2, 1859.

  17. Depositions of Mary O’Daniel, Ellen Cable, and Bridget McCarty, in indictment of Bridget McCarty, January 20, 1852, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers; Herald, February 7, 1852.

  18. Clipper, October 3, 1868; Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 164–65, 352; Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 1998), 98. A brothel still operated at 3 Franklin as late as 1851. See William H. Bell Diary, February 21, 1851, New-York Historical Society.

  19. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 173; William H. Bell Diary, February 6, 1851; Herald, April 10, 1841; Matthew H. Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York (Hartford, 1868), 490–93; George Ellington, The Women of New York (New York, 1869), 203–5.

  20. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 122; The Prose Works of N. P. Willis (1845; new ed. in one vol., Philadelphia, 1849), 582–83; Robert F. Lucid, ed., The Journal of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1968), 1: 232–33; Walt Whitman, New York Dissected, ed. Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari (New York, 1936), 6, 217–18, in Reynolds, Whitman, 228; [Foster], New York in Slices, 23.

  21. Lucid, ed., Journal of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., 1: 119–21, 232–33. The question of how many prostitutes worked in Five Points is impossible to answer with any certainty. In 1860, by which point religious institutions had managed to chase a significant number of brothels from the neighborhood, a careful survey found 180 prostitutes living in the area bounded by Centre, Leonard, Orange, Bayard, Mulberry, Chatham, and Pearl Streets. One imagines that a decade earlier, as destitute and rootless immigrants flooded the neighborhood, double that number could have worked in Five Points, while prostitutes residing elsewhere would have brought their customers to houses of assignation in the district as well—Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 4 (April 1860): 16.

  22. Foster in Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 59; Sanger, History of Prostitution, 491, 600–601; Stansell, City of Women, 122–23; letter of Henry R. Remsen, et al., in Times, October 15, 1853.

  23. Sanger, History of Prostitution, 488–89.

  24. Ibid.; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 130.

  25. Sanger, History of Prostitution, 484, 523; Ellington, Women of New York, 183–84; Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 55–56, 60–61.

  26. Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers, 102, 104, 183.

  27. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 71–73, 351–52.

  28. Indictments of March 14, 1842, September 14 and October 9, 1843, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers.

  29. Advocate of Moral Reform 9 (August 15, 1843): 127; Herald, April 7, September 14, 1849, October 6, 1853; indictments of May 16, 23, 1851, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers; Times, May 23, 24, 1855.

  30. Evening Post, September 21, 1826 (“CORNELIUS” to the Editor), March 19, 1829.

  31. Times, July 4 (White), 13 (McCasken), 1857; William Tracy v. Maria Gorman alias Carey, indictment of March 26, 1853, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers.

  32. Herald, February 25, 1850; William H. Bell Diary, October 10, 1850, May 2, 1851.

  33. William H. Bell Diary, February 7, April 2–3, 1851; Sante, Low Life, 310; “Autobiography of George Appo,” typescript, pp. 1–3, Society for the Prevention of Crime Papers, Columbia University; Stansell, City of Women, 50. For the stories of children forced to steal by alcoholic parents in order to finance their liquor habits, see John Morrow, A Voice from the Newsboys (New York, 1860), 27–36, and Edward W. Martin [James D. McCabe], The Secrets of the Great City (Philadelphia, 1868), 192–96.

  34. National Police Gazette in Edward Van Every, Sins of New York as “Exposed” by the Police Gazette (1930; New York, 1972), 285; Herald, August 19, 1849; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 2 (September 1858): 97–99.

  35. Herald, February 22, 25, 1850; Times, February 1, 1853; account 3347, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books, New York Public Library (Dowdican).

  36. William H. Bell Diary, November 28, 1850, May 3, 1851; indictment of January 23, 1852, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers.

  37. Herald, July 12, 1849 (Peterson), February 12, 1852 (Wilson); National Police Gazette in Van Every, Sins of New York, 284 (Rice and Moran); Times, February 11, 1852 (Wilson), July 13, 1857 (Gannon).

  38. Times, January 22, 1853 (Adams and Tucker), December 14, 1872.

  39. Times, July 1, 1859 (“banging his wife”); Tribune, August 6, 1850; The Old Brewery and the New Mission House at the Five Points, By Ladies of the Mission (New York, 1854), 154–55.

  40. People v. George Holberton, et al., February 11, 1852, New York County District Attorney’s Indictment Papers; Herald, January 27, February 12, 19, 1852. For the other rape case, see National Police Gazette in Van Every, Sins of New York, 284.

  41. Herald, January 12, 1841, October 27, 29, 1849. The press did not report any resolution to the Rafferty case, and there is no indication of an indictment in the District Attorney’s Papers.

  42. Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society (1867): 27–28, (1870): 12; entries of September 26, 1856 and June 13, 1860, Adoption Case Histories, Five Points Mission Papers, United Methodist Church Archives, Drew University.

  43. Graham Hodges, “‘Desirable Companions and Lovers’: Irish and African Americans in the Sixth Ward, 1830–1870,” in Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore, 1996), 114.

  44. Times, June 14, November 23, 24, 1853, November 28, 1863 (another liquor-related murder). For a previous case of “skylarking,” see Tribune, October 18, 1849.

  45. Evening Post, September 14, 1846; Herald, January 6, 1868; Times, January 6, February 18–21, March 10–11, 1868.

  46. Herald, April 19, May 2, 1851; William H. Bell Diary, May 1–2, 1851.

  47. Herald, January 17–19, April 20, May 5–8, 11, June 16–17, 1859; Times, February 12, 1863; Nelson J. Waterbury to Horatio Seymour, December 26, 1864 (on Matthew Brennan’s use of political pressure to get the Glasses pardoned), Seymour Papers, New-York Historical Society; Manual of the Corporation of the City of New-York for 1858 (New York, 1858), 102 (Glass as foreman).

  48. Tribune, March 16, 22, 1855, January 30, 1857.

  49. Annual Report of Fire Chief Alfred Carson in New York Board of Aldermen, Documents 17, part II, no. 57 (September 3, 1850): 930–32; Tom Quick, “Old Sports of New York,” in Leader, September 1, 1860.

  50. Denis T. Lynch, The Wild Seventies, 2 vols. (1941; Port Washington, NY, 1971), 1: 9–13. See also Irish-American, August 19, 1849; Tribune, March 18, 1854; Herald, November 3, 1849, February 25, 1852.

  51. Board of Aldermen, Documents 23 (1856), doc. 16, pp. 4–11; Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1870 (New York, 1870), 96–97.

  52. Old Brewery, 94; “Autobiography of George Appo,” 1–3; Tribune, June 13, 1850 (alcoholics living in cellar boarding establishments); Herald, June 10, 1863.

  53. Entries of September 20 (Bertram), October 18, 20, 1856, Adoptio
n Case Histories, Five Points Mission Papers; Ellington, Women of New York, 604–5.

  54. Entry of August 7, 1856, Adoption Case Histories, Five Points Mission Papers; Samuel B. Halliday, The Lost and Found; or Life Among the Poor (New York, 1859), 126–29; Chas. J. Wood to “Dear Friend,” April 8, 1877, in Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (1876): 65.

  55. Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (June 1857): 66–67 (“mother was dead”); 2 (April 1859): 277–81; Martin, Secrets of the Great City, 192–96.

  56. Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (February 1858): 255–56; Twenty-third Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society (1867): 7; Kildare, My Mamie Rose (New York, 1903), 24. Also see Browne, Great Metropolis, 277.

  57. Annual Report of the Metropolitan Board of Health [for] 1866 (New York, 1867), 135 (quotation); Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 1983), 113; Pat McGowan to his parents, December 21, 1847, BR146/10/13, Broadlands Papers, University of Southampton; John F. Maguire, The Irish in America (London, 1868), 282–85.

  58. Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784–1831, 19 vols. (New York, 1917), 17: 421; Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 121; [Bobo], Glimpses of New-York City, 95, 97; Herald, February 19, 1852.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1. David H. Donald, Lincoln (New York, 1995), 237–38.

  2. Andrew A. Freeman, Abraham Lincoln Goes to New York (New York, 1960), 1–21, 58–66 (quotation p. 17).

  3. Francis F. Browne, The Every-Day Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York, 1886), 323; William F. Barnard, Forty Years at the Five Points: A Sketch of the Five Points House of Industry (New York, 1893), 69.

  4. Henry J. Raymond, History of the Administration of President Lincoln (New York, 1864), 42–43.

  5. Times, July 10, 1897, p. 12; Denise Bethel, “Mr. Halliday’s Album,” Seaport 28 (Fall 1994): 16–21; Massachusetts Commission on Hours of Labor, Reports of the Commissioners on the Hours of Labor (Boston, 1867), 102 (quotation).

  6. Samuel B. Halliday, The Lost and Found; or Life Among the Poor (New York, 1859), 118–23. When Halliday’s book was reprinted in 1861 the title was changed to The Little Street Sweeper, a decision that reflected the appeal of Mullen’s story.

  7. Halliday, Lost and Found, 53–55, 123 (quotation); Bethel, “Mr. Halliday’s Album,” 16–21.

  8. Donald, Lincoln, 238–40; Tribune, February 28, 1860. For Hyer’s presence in Chicago, see Murat Halstead, The Caucuses of 1860: A History of the National Political Conventions of the Current Presidential Campaign (Columbus, OH, 1860), 141.

  9. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (August 16, 1873): 363 (“no church”); David Clarkson, History of the Church of Zion and St. Timothy, 1797–1894 (New York, 1894), 60 (“idolatrous”); Tribune, February 19, 1855; Graham Hodges, “‘Desirable Companions and Lovers’: Irish and African Americans in the Sixth Ward, 1830–1870,” in Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore, 1996), 111–12; Times, April 11, 1860 (“peculiar repulsiveness”).

  10. Hyman B. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654–1860 (Philadelphia, 1945), 472–74.

  11. Ibid., 50–52, 54–55, 295.

  12. Ibid., 50–52, 295.

  13. Ibid., 62–64, 172, 341, 345. A “seatholder” was allowed to attend services but could not vote for the officers of the congregation.

  14. Ibid., 50, 472–77; J. D. Eisenstein, “The History of the First Russian-American Jewish Congregation,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 9 (1901): 63–65; Barnard, Forty Years at the Five Points, 8.

  15. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana, 1982), 69; Advocate of Moral Reform 5 (September 9, 1839): 130; Carroll Smith Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement, 1812–1870 (Ithaca, 1971), 206–7.

  16. Rosenberg, Religion, 206–7, 247–48, 251, 255; Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor 3 (1846): 15–20.

  17. Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (1857): 114; Times, April 11, 1860; Tribune, January 16, 1855.

  18. Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church 1 (1845): 13; The Old Brewery, and the New Mission House at the Five Points, By Ladies of the Mission (New York, 1854), 36 (quoting their annual report of 1848).

  19. Old Brewery, 36, 38; entry of July 1,1851, New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church Board Minute Book (hereafter cited as Board Minute Book), Five Points Mission Records, United Methodist Church Archives, Drew University.

  20. Letter of Henry R. Remsen, et al., in Times, October 15, 1853 (“gin shop”); Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society 32 (1876): 6–8; family 1069, fifth election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York State manuscript census, Old Records Division, New York County Clerk’s Office; Five Points Monthly (March 1854): 4, in Isaac J. Quillen, “A History of the Five Points to 1890: The Evolution of a Slum” (M.A. thesis, Yale University, 1932), 49 (Lenox); entry of April 1,1851, Board Minute Book, Five Points Mission Records.

  21. Letter of L. M. Pease in Times, November 19, 1852.

  22. Times, December 15, 1853.

  23. Times, November 19, 1852.

  24. Times, November 19, 1852 (quotation), October 15, 1853; Barnard, Forty Years at the Five Points, 14–15; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 2 (1858): 77–78. The dates Pease gives for the commencement of these activities differ in his various accounts. Those used here seem most consistent with other contemporary evidence.

  25. Times, November 19, December 21 (Pease to the editor), 1852; entry of September 3, 1850, Board Minute Book, Five Points Mission Records.

  26. Entries of March 4 (quotation) and June 6, 1851, Board Minute Book, Five Points Mission Records; Times, November 19, 1852, October 15, 1853; Rosenberg, Religion, 232–33; Old Brewery, 40–41; Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society 7 (1851): 9–10. Although Carroll Smith Rosenberg states in Religion and the Rise of the American City, 233, that she used the “Five Points House [of Industry] Archives” for her work, I was not able to track down the current location of these papers.

  27. Entry of February 3, 1852, Board Minute Book, Five Points Mission Records; Old Brewery, 42, 64, 80, 214–22; John Francis Richmond, New York and Its Institutions, 1609–1872 (New York, 1872), 480; Times, January 28, 1853; Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion 4 (January 15, 1853): 40.

  28. Times, October 11, 16, 1852; Freeman’s Journal, October 16, 1852. Old Brewery, 63, states that the city did contribute $1,000 toward the project, but I could find no record of any such expenditure in the Common Council records.

  29. Old Brewery, 64; Tribune, June 18, 1853; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 2 (1859): 210; 8 [really 9] (April 1866): 185; Barnard, Forty Years at the Five Points, 19–22; Times, February 7, 1870.

  30. Freeman’s Journal, October 15, 1853; Tribune, June 18, 1853; Old Brewery, 77; Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society 12 (1856): 8–9; 23 (1867): 30–31.

  31. Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 2 (May 1858): 8; Times, November 19, 1852, October 4, 1853.

  32. Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York, 1981), 78; Tribune, December 15, 1848 (Tyng and Griscom’s House of Industry); Freeman’s Journal, February 5, March 4, 1848; Brace, Short Sermons to News Boys (New York, 1866), 9–10; [New York] Christian Advocate and Journal (December 8, 1853): 194, (February 22, 1855): 30 (quotation). Charles Fourier was an early nineteenth-century French critic of capitalism who advocated the establishment of agricultural communes.

  33. Rosenberg, Religion, 229–30, 234; Benson J. Lossing, History of New York City (New York, 1884), 632; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Indust
ry 1 (1857): 37; 2 (1858): 116–17; Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society 24 (1868): 7; 26 (1870): 11; 28 (1872): 10–11; 35 (1879): 8.

  34. Times, December 21, 1852 (“soup-room”), October 15, 1853 (“the room so stank”); Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work Among Them, 3rd ed. (New York, 1872), 132, 143; [New York] Christian Advocate and Journal (December 8, 1853): 194.

  35. Entries of May 6, July 1, 1851, November 14, 1854, December 2, 1856, Board Minute Book, Five Points Mission Records; Pease to the Editor, October 3, 1853, in Times, October 4, 1853.

  36. Freeman’s Journal, October 15, 1853; Times, October 4, 13, 1853.

  37. Herald, October 10, 1853 (story written by Pease); A. Stonelake to the Editor, Tribune, October 24, 1853; Freeman’s Journal, October 15, 1853.

  38. Times, October 13, 1853; Benjamin M. Adams to the Editor, Tribune, October 13, 1853; entry of October 7, 1856, Board Minute Book, Five Points Mission Records; Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society 20 (1864): 7; Rev. Thomas P. McLoughlin, “The Passing Away of Tony Gimp,” Catholic Youth (1899), in Peter P. McLoughlin, Father Tom: Life and Lectures of Rev. Thomas P. McLoughlin (New York, 1919), 85.

  39. Old Brewery, 80; Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry 1 (1857): 179; 2 (1859): 250; Rosenberg, Religion, 237; Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society 12 (1856): 8–9.

  40. Times, May 9, 1866; Annual Report of the New-York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society 24 (1868): 7; Lossing, History of New York City, 631.