Hidden Histories: Black Stories of the Lower East Side NYC

Lurid Tale #4

The effect of that storied neighborhood has always been difficult to describe to the uninitiated. Even on a pleasant spring night like the one we moved through that Thursday, the place exuded a deep sense of mortal threat, yet that threat was not always or even usually exhibited on loud or aggressive ways, such as was the case in some other shady parts of the city…Five Points was an entirely different breed of neighborhood. Oh, there were shouts and screams to be heard, all right; but they tended to drift out of buildings, or, if they originate outside, to be quickly stifled. Indeed, I think the most disconcerting thing about the area around Mulberry Bend… was the surprisingly low level of outward activity. The residents of the neighborhood spend most of their time crammed into the miserable shanties and tenements that lined the street, or, more often, packed into the dives that occupied the ground and first floor of a remarkably large number of those squalid buildings. Death and despair did their work without fanfare in the Bend, and they did a lot of it: just walking down those lonely, decrepit streets was enough to make the sunniest of souls wonder about the ultimate value of human life.

Caleb Carr, p. 516

The Five Points is usually described as the most notorious “slum” in New York City and from the 19th century on it became the symbol of everything dark and degraded. It was also known as the most notorious neighborhood in Manhattan in the 1800s. Robert McNamara, a history writer states: “The reputation of the Five Points was so widespread that when the famous author Charles Dickens visited New York on his first trip to America in 1842, the chronicler of London's underside wanted to see it for himself.” Charles Dicken’s wrote about the Five Points:

What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies beyond this tottering flight of steps, that creak beneath our tread? – A miserable room, lighted by one dim candle, and destitute of all comfort, save that which may be hidden in a wretched bed. Beside it sits a man: his elbows in his knees: his forehead hidden in his hands.” What ails that man? Asks the foremost officer. “Fever,” he sullenly replies, without looking up. Conceive the fancies of a fevered brain in such place as this! Ascend these pitch-dark stairs, heedful of a false footing on the trembling boards, and grope your way with me into the wolfish den, where neither ray of light nor breath of air appears to come.

Charles Dickens quote in Rebecca Yamin’s, Lurid Tales and

Homely Stories of New York’s Notorious Five Points.

Before the Five Points as nychinatown.org website indicates there was a Collect Pond, which was one of the main sources of water for people in New York. At the end of the 1700s when that area became overpopulated, the pond was very polluted and started to create unsanitary conditions for people in the area and so, in 1802 the pond was drained by the city.

This map representing the Collect near the turn of the 18th century was drawn by John Hutchins, 1846.

http://www.nychinatown.org/history/1800s.html

The neighborhood of Five Points took form in 1820, next to the site of the former Collect Pond. The name Five Points comes from the intersection of four streets that converged in an intersection that created five corners. Over the years, this intersection disappeared. The streets have been redirected, and the names have changed as well. Nowadays, we can see in this neighborhood, office buildings and courthouses that leave no trace of the place that it once was.

With the transformation of social relations of productions and the development of capitalism in the early 19th century employees separated their homes from their workplace and established households of their own. This population included: the enslaved African Americans, servants, apprentices, and journeymen. The enslaved African American’s once they were granted freedom moved into the Five Points as it was the only affordable place as it was a poor White working class neighborhood. This area was originally developed outside the boundaries of the city, a district reserved primarily for industry, however the growing housing needs at the beginning of the 19th century led this district to become residential and commercial.

Unlike other neighborhoods that were equally poor, the Five Points was called the worst slum in New York City due to its complex demographic that was composed of African Americans and other immigrant groups who were considered an ‘inferior race.’ Meredith Lin describes the demographics of Five Points: “Throughout the 19th century, the five points neighborhood, located in Lower Manhattan around the intersections of what are now Worth, Baxter, and Park streets, was a multicultural neighborhood composed of people who had originated in the U.S. and western and southern Europe.” Although the emphasis of the Five Points has been on its slumlike conditions, the Five Points has also been home to many abolitionist groups and was part of the underground railroad network. According to the history writer Robert McNamara there is a legend that says that tap dancing originated in the Five Points and it is due to the cultural exchange of dancing moves between the African American Community and the Irish immigrant community.

"Poverty, wretchedness, and vice, are rife enough where we are going now. This is the place: these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth…

"Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays…

Charles Dickens, American Notes, 1842

Illustration, by G. Gibson, depicts west Canal Street in the 1800s, and is found in the book, "History of the City of New York: Its Origin, Rise and Progress, vol III", 1877 http://www.nychinatown.org/history/1800s.html

Lurid Tale #3 from Rebecca Yam’s book

One summer night I started out to gather in my audience. The streets were full. Men, women, and children, of “all nations, kindred, and tongues,” lined the sidewalks, sat on the doorstep, or stood in the middle of the street talking… A “mud-gutter” band in the front of one of the dance-halls was making discordant music, while children of all ages, from the babe just out of the mother’s arms to the young girl in her teens, jostled each other in a rude attempt at dancing. Bare-headed colored women, in soiled calico dresses, with sleeves rolled up, stopped, before entering the brothels, to join with rough-looking sailors in a “break-down.” From a cellar-away leading to filthy underground apartments came the noise of a piano, drummed by unskilled hands, while the painted women at the door tried to induce victims to enter. Crowding my way through, I entered a saloon. The place was filled with the fumes of rum and tobacco, the ceiling was low and dingy, the floor waxed for dancing… White and black mingled indiscriminately in the dance. A huge negro swung, with great force, a young white girl who was puffing clouds of smoke from a short pipe.

Helen Campbell

Illustration, by Meeder, and Bonwill, of the Collect Pond from the book, "History of the City of New York: Its Origin, Rise and Progress."

http://www.nychinatown.org/history/1800s.html

Aerial map of the "Five Points", 1879, Drawn by Will L. Taylor. http://www.nychinatown.org/history/1800s.html

In 1991 near the current courthouse district, near Foley Square due to major plans for development in lower Manhattan, an archeological study was requested for this area. The archeological study found the first African Burial Ground, which had been there since the 18th century and also remnants of the Five Points, the city’s notorious slum of the 19th century.

According to New York legend, The Old Brewery, an overcrowded tenement housing 1,000 poor, is said to have averaged a murder a night for fifteen years, until its demolition in 1852. During this period, the Five Points neighborhood is said to have averaged fifteen murders a night.

History of the Five Points

The Old Brewery

http://www.nychinatown.org/history/1800s.html

Map from http://www.nychinatown.org/history/1800s.html

Map of the Five Points in the 1800s

*The Five Points intersection.

1) The Old Brewery. It was torn down in 1852, and replaced by the Five Points Mission in 1853. The triangle across the street is Paradise Square.

2) St. Philips African Episcopal Church, destroyed in the riots of 1834.

3) African Society for Mutual Relief.

4) 65 Mott St, location of the first NYC tenement in 1827.

5) Chatham Square. Used as a huge open air market up until 1820.

6) The Tombs prison, erected 1838.

7) Five Points House of Industry, built 1856.

8) The Bowery Theatre.

9) Cow Bay.

10) Mulberry Bend. It was considered one of the worst slums in NYC. The entire block was demolished in 1896 and turned into a park.

11) Bottle Alley, and (12) Bandit's Roost were two of the many alleyways inside the Mulberry Bend.

13) The Tea Water Pump was a natural spring fed well that supplied much of Manhattan with water up until the end of the 18th century. NYC would be without a reliable water supply until 1842 with the opening of the Croton Aqueduct. Actual construction began immediately after the Great fire of 1835 hit the city.

Five Points, 1865 illustration in Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. http://www.nychinatown.org/history/1800s.htm

Timeline of the Five Points in the 19th Century

From the website - http://webpage.pace.edu/mc43096n/5%20Points/history.htm

1800 - NYC population: 60,000

1825 - Erie Canal completed

1830 - Lowell textile mills flourish

1845 - 1847 Great Famine in Ireland

1846 - 1853 Irish immigration swells

1855 - NYC population: 800,000

1857 - Five Points Draft Riot

1861 - 1865 Civil War

1877 - The Great Railroad strike

1880s - Irish-Americans help build the first national labor union in the US, the Knights of Labor

1890s - New immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe begin arriving in large numbers

Map from http://www.nychinatown.org/history/1800s.html

The current map of what was the Five Point Area

Chatham Square/Kimlau Square.
Columbus Park, built 1897
Confucius Plaza Apt. complex, built in 1976.
Criminal Courts Building (NYC)
NYC Civil, and Municipal Courthouse
Criminal Courts Jailhouse
NYC Family Court
NY State Office Building
Jacob Javits Federal Building
NY County Courthouse (NY State Supreme Court)
US Courthouse (US Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit)
Metropolitan Correctional Center (Federal prison)
New Police Headquarters
US District Court
African Burial Ground memorial site
US Court of International Trade

References

Carr, C. (1994). The Alienist. New York: Bantam

Yamin, R. (1998). Lurid Tales and Homely Stories of New York’s Notorious Five Points. Historical Archaeology, Vol.32, No.1, Archaeologists as Storytellers

Chin RK. A Journey through Chinatown. Historical Photos. The Neighborhood that was the Five Points (19th century), Web Gallery. nychinatown.org. http://www.nychinatown.org/history/1800s.html

McNamara, R. (2021). The Five Points: New York's Most Notorious Neighborhood, ThoughtCo., https://www.thoughtco.com/five-points-ny-notorious-neighborhood-1774064

Dickens, C. (1842). American Notes. London, UK: John Longman's

Meredith B. Lin (2010) Elixir of Emigration: Soda Water and the Making of the Irish Americans in Nineteenth Century New York City. Historical Archaeology, 44, (4), 69-109.

Campbell, H. (1896). Darkness and Daylight, A.D. Worthington, Hartford, CT

diZerega, D. (2001). Afterword: Becoming New York: Five Point Neighborhood. Historical Archaeology, 35 (3)

History of the Five Points, http://webpage.pace.edu/mc43096n/5%20Points/history.htm